Not only here for the geer

Buyer beware: if you think this is a history of end-of-pier gottle of geer merchants, think again. Within the first few pages, Connor has mentioned Derrida, Freud, Beckett, Melanie Klein, Dickens and MerleauPonty; alluded to Billie Holiday and Edvard Munch; cracked a very strange joke: "Stalin is just Genghis Khan with a telephone" (no, me neither) and gone into near rapture about "the shifting conditions of vocalic space". That's all very well, but I was kinda hoping for something a bit more Orville the Duck.

You soon, though, tune into Connor's unique writing style - a blithe disregard for paragraphs, abstruse academic references and use of terms such as "sternomancy", which everybody else calls "speaking from the chest". More than the book's title suggests, this is a cultural history of the voice which also doubles up as a treatise on the metaphysics of presence. As poststructuralist as they come, Connor uses the word ventriloquism to designate all of the many forms which may be taken by sourceless, dissociated or displaced voices.

Ventriloquism literally means "speaking from the belly" - but that's quite irrelevant, as Connor points out. Throughout history the location of the voice has been, at various time, the chest, the armpit or, in the case of the priestesses of the Delphic oracle, the female genitalia. Originally these dissociated voices had a divine significance, but early Christianity quickly demoted them to demonic status.

Connor explains how ventriloquism is a latinate version of the Greek term engastrimythos, which has strong connotations of the identification between the body (female in particular) and the earth, which serves as a portal into the idea of Gaia (the earth Goddess) and how the Delphic priestesses were denounced as "symbols of paganism in the convulsions of delirious hysteria". It is this very notion of "possession" which is all-important, particularly as it was used as an instrument of social control against women - most distressingly so when holy relics would be forced down the genitalia of the "possessed" female as punishment for their gender transgression.

It's not that much of a conceptual leap to the 16th century and the deeds of the "miracle working minster" John Darrell, who cast out devils, or more accurately exorcised ventriloquists. These accounts of "possession" which Connor relates in all their gory detail are strangely fascinating. We read of the 14-year-old Mary Glover, who acted out a condition in which her entire body told of the struggle to give utterance: "The heavings, plungings and liftings of her body, which required the assistance of strong men to hold her in one place, enacted the visible attempt to deliver herself of speech. We read (in the historical records) that "there would arise a swelling in her belly, where making the stay of halfe a minnute it passed into her throate". After a convulsive snapping backwards of her head, she would "beate strongly on the bed with her right leg and upon her throate with her right hand, rebounding also with her body ofentimes and roring with a hoarse and quavering voyce". In a beautifully bathetic conclusion, Connor notes "these symptoms had become essential parts of the possessed person's repertoire by 1610".

What Connor wishes to convey, and succeeds in conveying, is that until the Enlightenment, dissociated voices (ventriloquism), as in the Salem Witch Trials, were a provocation and a perceived threat to then religious mores, and he makes some neat gender distinctions along the way - woman as witch, etc. The rise of the empirical sciences eroded the idea of the "ecstatic conception of the body". Connor writes "the defeat or withering of religious and supernatural explanations for the ventriloquial voice is accompanied by a growing fascination with the phenomenon - the discrediting of the idea of a divine (or diabolical) source opened up many more possibilities for the migrant or dissociated voice".

The migrant voice threw itself into the music hall as a new but benign addition to the hall of human freakery. A distinction is drawn between the use of the "inner voice" (speaking without moving lips or mouth) and "voice throwing " - the apparent ability to make your voice emanate from a distance. Totally at variance with the tone of the first half of the book, Connor has some wonderful anecdotal stories about the star ventriloquist turns of the 19th century. Foremost of them was William Love - who grandiosely styled himself a "polyphonist" as opposed to a "ventriloquist". Love's voice-throwing abilities were such that he was once able to "get a local farmer to lower himself some 30 or 40 feet into a well to search in vain for the owner of a voice crying piteously for assistance - such was his unique power of vocal deception".

But as a professional ventriloquist of my acquaintance points out, there is no such thing as "voice throwing"; it's a deception of the ear analogous to a magician's deception of the eye. You're not supposed to give these things away, but voice throwing is all to do with how the ear relies upon the eye for information. Ventriloquism itself is the ability to speak with your tongue behind a closed mouth - and this "tongue speech " is the reason why ventriloquists avoid words beginning with letters such as "b" - hence "gottle of geer".

Connor finishes off with a chapter on the dummy, without which no self-respecting "vent act" can function. No matter how different they are styled, he notes, they always look the same: "garishly coloured, with flushed cheeks and high gloss, bright and friendly eyes". They are, though, despite this cheeky-chappie appearance, extremely frightening. Which is why, as Connor suggests, they provoke so much violence in their owner: "With the cheeky boy figure, there is an unmistakable undercurrent of violence or threat. Often the struggle of the ventriloquist to subdue the impertinent or precocious youngster will climax in some kind of physical punishment, typically the locking of the dummy away in a chest or box, accompanied by angry cries or protest . . . it seems as though, whenever there is the voice dissevered from the body, there will be violence, and it becomes necessary that there should be a boy to receive and contain it."

With that echo of ventriloquism's ignoble past, you can only admire Connor's polymath style treatment of a subject you would barely have thought would warrant a fraction of the length of this book. Extremely hard going sometimes, but ultimately fascinating, this book would have worked so much better if Connor sacrificed some of his knowledge for a more limpid writing style. Despite this sizeable flaw, it remains highly recommended, not least for its sheer breadth of scholarship. Let's hope he tightens up his syntax and drops the verbosity for his upcoming work - which has the intriguing title The Cultural Phenomenology of Skin.

Brian Boyd is an Irish Times journalist and critic