An authoritative, not sycophantic, narration
The biography outlines the career of this lean, 6ft 4in man from the backwoods who became one of America’s greatest statesmen and brought an end to slavery. The eloquence of his speeches and the humanity of his letters are palpable. An authoritative, not sycophantic, narration.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
Afghanistan, with its poppies, forbidding geography, earthquakes and internecine clashes
Afghanistan, with its poppies, forbidding geography, earthquakes and internecine clashes, has been invaded since the fourth century. This history ends with the present invasion by Nato forces and explains the tensions between Russia, USA and Britain that led to it.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
The narrators succeed in conveying the striking, vibrant reality of these worlds
The connection with the 1995 Kobe earthquake in these six unabridged stories is curiously nebulous, but it keys with their uncomfortable sense of dislocation. Junpei, like Murakami, broke away from his parents long ago and doesn’t call them after the quake; Yoshiya’s mother insists he is a son of God, but on a train, he pursues a man he believes to be his father. Relationships are intense but ultimately unfulfilling, and obsessions, like Junko’s with building beach fires, are all-absorbing but purposeless. The narrators succeed in conveying the striking, vibrant reality of these worlds and their aimless, intriguing weirdness.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
The narration does Tennyson proud
Some of the finest Victorian poetry grew out of Tennyson’s troubled personal life – he and all his eleven siblings suffered some kind of mental health problems, and his beloved friend Hallam died at 22. He succeeded in echoing deep emotions in simple words – ‘But a for the touch of a vanish’d hand, / And the sound of a voice that is still!’ – and in creating tremendous rhythmic narratives – ‘Forward the Light Brigade! / Charge for the guns!’ he said. The narration of the 24 poems here does Tennyson proud.
Rachel Redford, The Oldie
There’s no need to dip into the lesser works in a collection of Tennyson, and Naxos has made a fine selection here, mixing the best known (The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Lady of Shalott, Ulysses, The Lotus-Eaters) with others that will be less familiar to casual readers. One might quibble with some of Michael Pennington's line readings, but he has made thoughtful interpretations, and his voice is quite capable of meeting the musical demands of the poetry. There’s nothing new here for Tennyson's fans, but the presentation is a strong introduction to a master's range of style and emotion.
D.M.H., AudioFile
Jo Wyatt is utterly convincing
The unabridged Alice in Wonderland is read by David Horovitch with other voices playing the characters. Alice actresses can be twee and precocious but Jo Wyatt is utterly convincing.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
I defy anyone not to be moved by Socrates’ cool, courageous speech
What is life? How should we live it? And why are difficult books so much easier to digest on audio than in print? Ever since I heard Jim Norton reading Ulysses and John Rowe transforming Proust’s impenetrable prose into a novel I wish I’d read years ago, I now recommend everyone who has struggled unsuccessfully with Paradise Lost or A Brief History of Time to get the audio version instead. Even so, there were passages in the Griffith brothers’ admirably digestible guide to the often wacky belief systems of some of those pre-Socratic thinkers, cynics, sceptics, Epicureans et al that I had to rewind a few times. There’s Heraclitus, for instance, who advised that sexual pleasures should be confined to winter and believed that everything was composed of and reverted to fire. The eightfold division of the soul upheld by the Stoics also took a bit of unravelling, but it was worth it if only to appreciate that Stoicism originally meant a great deal more than grin and bear it. Having several readers brings the Platonic dialogues to life, and I defy anyone not to be moved by Socrates’ cool, courageous speech to the Athenian jury which has just condemned him to death for impiety. We may have über-technology, the internet, DNA and The Moral Maze, but the ethical beliefs and clear-headedness of those legendary first thinktanks – Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, Zeno’s Stoa and the Garden of Epicurus – still have a lot to teach us.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian, 29 March 2008
[the] rarest of manuals, a handbook that makes you want to go out and discover for yourself
As a committed non-twitcher, I’m eternally grateful to Simon Barnes for inspiring me to get up at daybreak this morning to listen to the dawn chorus. His latest quirky bird book, with its gloriously uplifting recordings of birdsong, is tailor-made for audio and will help you to identify the 50 British birds he writes so engagingly and enthusiastically about. Don’t worry, this isn’t a field guide full of statistics that requires you to buy binoculars, keep a diary and make endless lists. It is that rarest of manuals, a handbook that makes you want to go out and discover for yourself if all the fascinating things he has told you about robins, blackbirds, yellowhammers and buzzards are really true. If chaffinches were rare, he writes, they’d be prized above Siberian ruby-throats and red-flanked bluetails. Here he is writing about chaffinches in spring: “The cock is outrageous, admire him – a cap of more or less Wedgwood blue, conker-brown back and a breast of the tartiest pink any designer could come up with.” If you follow the precise instructions for identification at the start of each section, you can’t fail. “Wren: where to look – tangled undergrowth, low down. When to look – all year round. What to look for – tiny tawny bird, cocky tail. What to listen for – astonishing volume.” This is followed by a generous earful of wren song. I love his descriptions of, say, mistle thrushes – “big, chunky and hops in a bold, rather in-your-face way” – and song thrushes – “the jazz musicians of suburbia”. By the way, wood pigeons don’t coo. What they’re actually saying, in a cooing sort of way, is “steal two cows taffy”. Don’t believe me? Get out there and listen.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
some of Dickens’s finest writing
Barnaby, the vulnerable man-child, prompts some of Dickens’s finest writing. Overall, however, it’s not one of his best novels, although Sean Barrett’s magical voice somehow persuades you that it is.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
some of Dickens’s finest writing
Barnaby, the vulnerable man-child, prompts some of Dickens’s finest writing. Overall, however, it’s not one of his best novels, although Sean Barrett’s magical voice somehow persuades you that it is.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
Unbeatable
Juliet Stevenson is the perfect narrator for these six delicately observed stories. In one, Bertha in her white dress and jade beads presides over a dinner party, her happiness to be obliterated by seeing her husband kiss heavy-lidded Pearl; in another, ex-lovers meet again beside a Japanese vase of paper daffodils. Unbeatable.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
Brilliant, but not for the faint-hearted
It’s 1849 and the 14-year-old nameless “kid” has drifted into the violent life of an outlaw band of bloodthirsty Indian hunters on the Texas-Mexico borders. Grotesque characters play out their roles against an unforgiving landscape. The understated southern drawl is just right, suggesting the symbolic richness of McCarthy’s language.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
Having thought that no book could ever be as harrowing or as frightening as McCarthy’s apocalyptic Pulitzer prize-winning The Road (I finished it at 3am sitting up in bed with the light on), here’s an even bleaker story about man’s inhumanity to man. It’s set in the familiar Tex-Mex territory of All the Pretty Horses, his best book, and its hero, ‘the kid’, like John Grady Cole, is a 16-year-old drifter who pretty much lives in the saddle. There, alas, the resemblance ends – this is definitely not a love story. It’s an allegory about survival, lawlessness and natural justice. The kid, who’s been living, scavenging, fighting, killing, surviving on his own since he was 12, heads for the Apache wars circa 1840 in the legendary Wild West and joins a troop of mercenaries paid in gold for Indian scalps. The battle scenes are absolutely terrifying. Bullets, arrows, decapitated heads flying, the braves daubed with war paint, some naked, some wearing the looted clothing of their victims – US army jackets, whalebone corsets and ruffled shirts – the Americans by now so blood-crazed and inured to violence that they massacre Indians, Mexican peons and peaceful settlers indiscriminately. McCarthy’s prose is compelling, a potent mix of stark and lyrical: ‘The night sky lies so spread with stars that there is scarcely space for black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less. The little prairie wolves cry all night and dawn finds him in the grassy draw where he’d gone to hide from the wind. The hobbled mule stands over him and watches the east for light. The sun that rises is the colour of steel, his mounted shadow falls for miles before him.’ Brilliant, but not for the faint-hearted.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
Perfectly chilling tales
Otherworldly but this time seriously scary is Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher and other stories read by Roy McMillan. Perfectly chilling tales of graveyards and murder.
Kati Nicholl, Daily Express
non-stop action
Many older listeners will have fond childhood memories of reading Bulldog Drummond. Herman McNeile (1888–1937), a vital link between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming and rich in 1920s social colour, is ripe for revival. He used the pseudonym Sapper for his tales of the trenches because, as a serving member of the Armed Forces he was required to do so, and he kept it on for the nine Drummond novels. These are summed up by the narrator and presenter Roy McMillan as ‘James Bond written by P. G. Wodehouse’. Our hero’s adventures begin when he inserts a personal advert asking for ‘diversion, legitimate if possible, excitement essential’. He gets it in spades in the non-stop action that follows.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
William Roberts can tell a captivating yarn
In the great tradition of classic animal stories, Jack London’s Call of the Wild, read by William Roberts, is a wrenching story. From the peril Buck the sled dog faces in the Arctic to the suffering he endures under brutal masters, listening to his adventure is no tame experience. Roberts has a voice that could have belonged to one of this era’s gold panners. He sounds like a grizzled man who would never display overt emotion but who, nonetheless, can tell a captivating yarn. While Roberts doesn’t use great character range, he lets London’s writing – especially the passages about the mysterious, enchanting call of the wild – ring with its startling beauty.
R.L.G., AudioFile
Rupert Degas is pitch-perfect
When it comes to handling ghosts, the characters in Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost are far bolder than Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. When Marley’s ghost comes rattling his chains, you may remember, the old miser drops his gruffness in the face of his old associate’s awful warnings. Not Wilde’s Hiram B. Otis, an ‘American minister’ who purchases an English country house and moves in with his family despite dire warnings that it is haunted.
The ghost, Sir Simon Canterville – who’s been scaring the daylights out of the house’s inhabitants since his death in 1584 – wastes no time in mounting a haunt. In the dead of night, Otis hears chains clanking in the halls and beholds an awful sight:
Right in front of him he saw, in the wan moonlight, an old man of terrible aspect. His eyes were as red burning coals; long grey hair fell over his shoulders in matted coils; his garments, which were of antique cut, were soiled and ragged, and from his wrists and ankles hung heavy manacles and rusty gyves.
‘My dear sir,’ said Mr. Otis, ‘I really must insist on your oiling those chains, and have brought you for that purpose a small bottle of the Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator.’
Oiling those chains! Rupert Degas is pitch-perfect in the Naxos recording – quite a departure from some of his previous Naxos recordings, including Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Kafka’s The Trial. The grimness and desperation of those stories is far from the desperation Sir Simon faces with the Otises. No matter what he does, he can’t bloody well scare them! The couple’s twins boys hit him in the knees with pea-shooters, and, when Mrs. Otis hears the ghost’s terrible laugh, her reaction is: ‘I am afraid you are far from well ... and have brought you a bottle of Dr. Dobell’s tincture. If it is indigestion, you will find it a most excellent remedy.’
Degas captures the nasally voices of the Americans (for Wilde, Americans are the ones with the accents) and Sir Simon’s exasperated harrumphs – which turn, later, into sighs of relief as somebody finally pities him: the Otises’ daughter, Virginia. Degas gives listeners a hilarious performance that's an ideal antidote for the shivers if you've seen Paranormal Activity.
Nick Owchar, Los Angeles Times
British actor Degas’ gift for accents and flair for the dramatic make him an excellent choice to read Wilde’s beloved gothic ghost story set in Great Britain. A ghost has been haunting residents at Canterville Chase for centuries. But these poltergeist powers seem lost on the Otis family from America. Degas’ reading is lively, brisk, and laced with just the right amount of foreboding, and he subtly raises pitch during suspenseful moments. Degas gives Mr. Otis the deep, monotone, matter-of-fact tenor of a dull diplomat, while he portrays Mrs. Otis, a Manhattan socialite, in a much higher register, pretentious and pinched. The ghost, frustrated and world-weary over failure to frighten, is appropriately raspy and guttural. Each chapter is introduced by classical music and abundant sound effects – rattling chains, creaking floorboards, thunder and lightning – to greatly enhance the mood. Perfect for a dark and stormy night.
Allison Block, Booklist
Anyone who is only familiar with the old Margaret O'Brien and Charles Laughton movie version or one of the more recent versions of The Canterville Ghost will enjoy meeting the Otises and the ghostly Sir Simon as Wilde actually envisioned them. When the American Minister to the court of St. James purchases Canterville Chase and is warned of the ghost, he declines to believe in it and says he will ‘take the furniture and the ghost at evaluation.’ As Sir Simon proceeds to haunt (and he has fearsomely haunted before) he comes to believe in him, but he and his family will brook no nonsense. They give him something to oil his noisy chains. The twin sons bedevil him, and the daughter takes pity on him.
Rupert Degas is an excellent narrator with his fine cultured British voice as the present Lord Canterville, the past Sir Simon, and with a pretty good set of American accents for all members of the Otis family, male and female … This is such fun to hear the authentic and brilliant Wilde and it is very enjoyable family listening for all ages.
Mary Purucker, SoundCommentary.com
Timson proves that he is the equal of any of our great ‘voice men’
It’s just a regular day for Sherlock Holmes and his admiring sidekick Dr Watson – no sooner has a cipher of seemingly random numbers been rapidly revealed by the razor-sharp Baker Street sleuth to contain a dire warning, than a policeman turns up to whisk the two men off to a moated castle where someone has been murdered in baffling circumstances. Holmes sees the hand of his deadly enemy Professor Moriarty behind the deed, but the roots of the tale turn out to be in the violent gang culture of the Pennsylvania coalfields. This backstory extends Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Valley of Fear beyond the usual length for a Holmes adventure, although David Timson, who reads the story, has to work hard to keep us entertained until the great detective comes back on the scene.
Karen Robinson, The Sunday Times
With The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes Volume I David Timson has almost completed his unabridged reading of the entire Sherlock Holmes Canon – and what a triumph it is! As fine an achievement in its way as the complete BBC Radio 4 dramatisation. Once again Mr Timson proves that he is the equal of any of our great ‘voice men’, capable of creating a living character by the pitch of his voice and the rhythm of his speech. As an example, there are bellicose old autocrats in four of the six stories here (‘Thor Bridge’, ‘The Mazarin Stone’, ‘The Creeping Man’, and ‘The Blanched Soldier’) but each comes across as a unique individual. The stories themselves vary considerably in quality; Mr Timson has treated the worst as seriously as the best – and so unintentionally made me aware while listening of just how poor the writing is in ‘The Mazarin Stone!’. As usual, David Timson himself has provided perceptive and informative notes to the stories, and Sarah Butcher has chosen thoroughly appropriate music, this time by Saint-Saëns, Grieg and Borodin.
Roger Johnson, The Newsletter of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London
David Timson portrays [Holmes] brilliantly
Seven more truly ingenious criminal cases, only some of whose arch villains are the intellectual match of the legendary violin-playing, opium-smoking Baker Street sleuth, as he modestly observes to his long-suffering sidekick Dr Watson. Here’s one Baron Adelbert Gruner, “cool as ice, silky voiced, poisonous as a cobra with a superficial suggestion of afternoon tea, and all the cruelty of the grave behind it”. If Holmes’s insufferable conceitedness didn’t get under your skin (and David Timson portrays him brilliantly), you probably wouldn’t enjoy it as much.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
Wonderfully moving
Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo is set in war-torn Sarajevo in the Nineties. When 22 civilians are killed as they queue for water a cellist determines to play the piece of music that gives him the most hope, Tomaso Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor, at the same spot every day for 22 days in their memory.
Meanwhile, three other Sarajevans live their lives in constant peril. Kenan, frightened but determined to make the dangerous, daily journey to fetch water for his family; Dragan, who has to cross the city to get to the bakery where he works; and Arrow, the nom de guerre of a young sniper assigned to protect the cellist. Wonderfully moving.
Kati Nicholl, Express.co.uk
Why did the Sarajevan cross the road? To get to the other side without fatally exposing himself to sniper fire. In Sarajevo, the city that was under siege for three hellish years in the early 1990s, every excursion outside was a risk. ‘Sniper alley’ wasn’t just the road that international journalists took between the airport and the Holiday Inn, reflects Kenan, one of the three intertwined characters enduring the almost unendurable in this novel. Kenan braves the streets to collect water for his family; Dragan has to go to the bakery where he works; and Arrow is on a mission to pick off with her rifle the gunmen aiming at her area. Amid it all, a cellist emerges daily to play Albinoni’s Adagio at the spot where the enemy wiped out a bread queue – a real event around which Galloway has created this intimate chamber-piece novel. Strains of the haunting work, played by Sarah Butcher in a specially made recording, add to the book’s power to move.
Karen Robinson, Sunday Times
Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo is an elegant fictional embroidery of a true protest: that of the cellist Vedran Smailovic, who mourned the deaths of 22 people – who were queuing outside a shop when a missile struck them – by playing Albinoni’s Adagio on the same spot on 22 successive days, despite the ubiquitous snipers. The novel shows how the cellist’s protest affects other people’s struggles with their consciences. One is a sniper who finds that her task of protecting the cellist presents her with ethical problems. Gareth Armstrong narrates with impeccable pace and timing, beautifully counter-pointed by Sarah Butcher’s playing of Albinoni’s music.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
Unlike Khaled Hosseini and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, both of whom are natives of the war-torn countries in which their bestselling first novels were set, Galloway has no personal experience of the city in which this grim story of survival through the Bosnian war takes place. His main characters, however – including the cellist and Arrow, a female sniper shooting at the Serbian soldiers bombarding Sarajevo from the surrounding hills – are based on real people. The story is simple. A shell explodes in the market. The cellist witnesses the carnage from his window and, for the following 22 days, takes a stool and his cello to the marketplace and plays Albinoni’s famous adagio in memory of the 22 victims. It makes headlines around the world. The cellist represents the return of hope to a besieged city. Within a week, the Serbs have sent a sniper to kill him, but Arrow has the situation in hand. Or has she? Sarajevo’s enemies are not confined to the surrounding hills: there are hostile agents, spies and traitors in the city, the army, the government itself, exploiting the horror of war for their own ends. The style is spare, the reading remorseless, the pressure relentless. This is a book you won’t easily forget.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
In 1990s Sarajevo, war is devouring people's lives. In the midst of this vividly conveyed hell of massacre and destruction, one cellist braves the snipers to play his tribute to the dead. This is based on a true story and includes Albinoni's haunting Adagio.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
McCready’s narration skillfully illuminates the children
Set in seventeenth-century England during King Charles’s deposition, this story features four orphaned children who are adopted by a forester. He has rescued them from the “Roundhead” troops who killed their Royalist father (loyal to King Charles). As the forester’s adopted “grandchildren,” the four Beverly children must adapt to rustic life, learning to cook, hunt, and sew. Narrator Glen McCready’s details these activities with a quiet pleasure that is contagious. McCready’s dignified British voice is well suited to this old-fashioned adventure story filled with the classic themes of resourcefulness, self-reliance, and courage. As McCready’s narration skillfully illuminates the children’s growing maturity and wisdom, the story becomes all the more satisfying.
J.C.G., AudioFile
readers [will] feel pleasantly uncomfortable
The narrators in this brief anthology of spooky tales by Charles Dickens and M. R. James are men of learning and reason – sceptical if not scornful of paranormal phenomena. Which makes their accounts of inexplicable, terrifying goings-on all the more haunting, especially as both writers are masters of the telling detail and the build-up of suspense. Dickens contributes two stories: a spectral harbinger of railway disaster and the ghostly presence of the victim at a murder trial. The offerings from James, the doyen of the English spinechiller, involve a haunted engraving, a very nasty piece on rats, and ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, in which an academic has a hair-raising visitation on the East Anglian coast. With its suitably unsettling music – the viola is ideal for creating a spooky atmosphere – they succeed in James’s aim of “causing readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable”.
Karen Robinson, The Sunday Times
Jane Austen on true love is the lick
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa for not bringing this gem to your attention sooner. A little of the blame must rest with the nice young man who helped me to sort out my audio library last summer and put this between Classic FM’s Top 100 All-Time Favourites and Cradle Songs from the Caucasus. It does have music, but only to introduce some of the most famous declarations of love ever made. They’re all here: Shakespeare’s Henry V wooing Princess Katharine in pigeon franglais; Jane Eyre still managing to sound straitlaced sitting on Mr Rochester’s lap; Molly Bloom’s voluptuous recollections in tranquility of an amorous tryst on Howth Head; the Owl on guitar (small) serenading his beautiful Pussycat. Alas, love being both a many-splendoured thing and merely a madness, not all these legendary lovers live happily ever after. Spare a sobering thought for Adam and Eve (yes, of course they’re here, starting the whole show rolling), Guinevere and Lancelot (that other loitering knight who fell foul of La Belle Dame Sans Merci), Heathcliff and Cathy, Vronsky and Anna, Frankie and Johnny. Why is it that the potency of passion is directly commensurate with the level of restraint employed to describe it? Barbara Cartland’s testosteroned Romeos and swooning, décolletée heroines had nothing on Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, buttoned up to the neck and probably wearing gloves, exchanging mutual assurances of undying devotion. ‘Elizabeth... immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand that her sentiments had undergone so material a change... as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present assurances. The happiness which this reply produced was such as he had probably never felt before, and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do.’ Jane Austen on true love is the lick.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
you can hardly believe that the reading is being done by a cast of one
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has been given a fitting tribute in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, 150 years after his birth. I’ve enjoyed David Timson’s spirited readings of the stories ever since The Speckled Band appeared in 1999. He is one of those narrators who sinks himself so convincingly into character, so subtly differentiating timbre, dialect and accent, that you can hardly believe that the reading is being done by a cast of one – this requires extraordinary versatility given the 228 disguises in the four novels and 56 stories starring Holmes that Conan Doyle penned. Timson told me that he elected to go back to the original Strand Magazine version of the tales, warts and all. Conan Doyle never proofread his work, believing that the sweeping energy of the telling was more important than accuracy of detail: “What matter if I can hold my readers?” he said. Hold them he and Timson certainly do.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
David Timson must have had difficulty returning to his real self after this recording tour de force – every nuance in his voice is Holmes. All 56 stories and four novels are here: 60 CDs with a chunky booklet. Years of top listening.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
Who knows how the art of fictional detection might have fared had a certain military surgeon attached to the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers in the second Afghan war not run into a former colleague from Barts hospital one day in Piccadilly circa 1880. Dr John H Watson had been invalided out of the army on a pension of 11s 6d a day and was now, he told his old acquaintance, searching for somewhere to live. How strange, said Dr Stamford, Watson was the second person he’d met that day looking for lodgings, or at least someone to share his comfortable rooms at 221b Baker Street. After lunch they’d take a hansom to the hospital and he’d introduce him to a Mr Sherlock Holmes, who would almost certainly be conducting some outlandish scientific experiment, such as beating corpses with a stick in the dissection room to verify how far bruises may be produced after death. You know the rest. Actually, you don’t – probably not even the half of it. This is the first time the entire Holmes canon – four novels, umpteen adventures and scores of stories with such titles as “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb” and “The Man With the Twisted Lip” – has been published in a single package. Here’s where I eat my hat and confess that, far from being lukewarm as I’ve claimed more than once about the legendary sleuth, I am now as addicted to the delights of elementary deduction as Holmes was to opium. What prompted the U-turn? It’s hard to pinpoint. The unhurried build-up of the Holmes/Watson buddy relationship, maybe, described so endearingly by the latter, those fireside evenings with the doctor deep in a surgical treatise while his flatmate deciphers the inscriptions on a 15th-century palimpsest with a magnifying glass. Then there’s Holmes’s unpredictable character: Stamford thinks he’s cold-blooded, but Watson has heard him play the violin. He has published learned papers on ciphers, cigar ash, bicycle tyre impressions, chemistry; but has never heard of Carlyle. He can be bumptious, charming, cruel, but he’s never boring. And finally there’s David Timson’s wonderful voice, bringing Conan Doyle’s vast and extraordinary cast from every level of Victorian society to life. What a marathon, what a result.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
You might say that David Timson is to Sherlock Holmes audio what Jeremy Brett was to Sherlock TV – except the actor who embodied the legendary detective so memorably (and melancholically) for Granada managed only 41 outings before his death in 1995. In ‘The Complete Sherlock Holmes’, a smart, unabridged box set celebrating Arthur Conan Doyle’s 150th birthday, Timson reads all 56 short stories and four novellas and even contributes one of his own. Timson’s ‘The Adventure of the Wonderful Toy’ is a fond pastiche; but it is more than that. Cleverly, and rather sweetly, it offers a fictional justification for the whole audio project, as Holmes encounters that futuristic new invention, the phonograph, and a man who wants to record the detective’s reedy tones for posterity. Listening to the existing stories en masse certainly highlights some lampoonable linguistic tics (one client ‘ejaculates’ four times in a single meeting) and a few careless inconsistencies (medical papers have apparently been written about how one bullet could have caused a war wound in both Dr Watson’s shoulder and his leg). But it also confirms Conan Doyle as the greatest escapist in British literature. Ten years in the recording, this is the sort of labour of love that doesn’t usually make it out of the garden shed. Should you spot Timson in the street, please offer him a Persian slipper full of tobacco from us.
Bella Todd, TimeOut
I have always avoided purchasing any of David Timson’s audiobooks for Naxos, reasoning that I would rather hear a full-cast dramatisation of any story than one man reading all of them aloud. Now that Naxos has released a beautiful box set of all Timson’s recordings, I realise just how mistaken I have been. Over a period of several years, Timson has achieved a feat comparable with the BBC’s dramatisations starring Clive Merrison and Michael Williams. As far as I am aware, he is the only reader to have tackled the entire Canon. And he has proved himself equal to the task. All of Conan Doyle’s stories are represented in this 60 disc-set, providing nearly 73 hours of listening pleasure – which is an entirely accurate description of the set’s contents. I’m happy to report that Timson’s work is among the best currently available, not simply of Holmes readings, but of audiobooks in general. His unfussy delivery puts the stories first – and while this may seem like a redundant observation, consider how our appreciation or otherwise of the Canon has been coloured by over a century’s-worth of literary criticism, much of it bloody-mindedly determined to strip away the sheer fun of the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes through an unhealthy and unhelpful obsession with dates, weather reports and the legibility of Watson’s handwriting. Timson has no hidden agenda: he is content to give us the stories as they were meant to be enjoyed, and we can bask in the elegant simplicity of Conan Doyle’s effortless prose, which has dated hardly at all in the last hundred and twenty years. As a performer, Timson is remarkably free of ego. He’s not out to show off his undoubted abilities by giving every character an outlandish accent or over-ripe delivery (although his sharp, incisive Holmes puts me in mind of Robert Hardy, who played the Master in a series of albums recorded in the early 1970s). Nor, as is the case with far too many audiobooks on the market nowadays, is he simply a disinterested reader, relaying each line with the minimum interest and enthusiasm possible. David Timson may not be a household name – in fact, I was surprised to discover that he played Horace Blatt in the Poirot episode Evil Under the Sun – but his relative anonymity is a blessing rather than a hindrance, since we are not distracted by considerations of how “so-and-so” tackles the Canon. The Canon itself is, quite rightly, the star. As an additional treat, the final disc contains Timson’s own tale, The Adventure of the Wonderful Toy. Having delivered every word of every tale, he is in an excellent position to know what makes a good Sherlock Holmes story. In the accompanying 200-page booklet, the he modestly suggests that the story might be treated as a parody, but he is hardly being fair on himself: this is a perfectly legitimate pastiche, with a highly appropriate theme – that of the recording of famous voices, Holmes’s included. Any quibbles concerning the set are minor indeed, but given that this is a complete collection of Holmes tales, it might have been nice to see the Apocrypha represented – at the very least, The Field Bazaar and How Watson Learned the Trick. Also, the CDs appear in the box set in the order they were originally released, rather than in publication order. But considering the difficulty of finding the story of one’s choice in W.S. Baring-Gould’s annotated collection, this is the mildest of inconveniences, and certainly not one that should dissuade you from making this the centrepiece of your audio collection.
M.J. Elliott, The Sherlock Holmes Society of London
pirates, cannibals and how to survive on a Pacific island
And if Lord of the Flies is one of their A-level texts, they may just be interested to know that this 1857 Boys’ Own adventure story about pirates, cannibals and how to survive on a Pacific island with a broken telescope and a rusty penknife was what inspired William Golding’s novel. He even pinched Ballantyne’s names, Ralph and Jack, for his leading characters – though there the resemblance ends. Here the boys are shining stiff-upper-lip products of empire who risk all to help each other and their friend Peterkin, who may or may not be the piggy in the middle. He sounds as if he went to a better school. This is Peterkin telling his chums what he thinks of being shipwrecked on a desert island: ‘I have made up my mind that it’s capital, first-rate, the best thing that ever happened to us. We’ve got an island all to ourselves. We’ll take possession in the name of the King, then we’ll build a charming villa and plant a lovely garden round it, stuck all full of the most splendiferous tropical flowers, and we’ll farm the land . . . and be merry.’ That’s how small boys wearing round black straw hats, worsted socks and pocket handkerchiefs with 16 portraits of Lord Nelson printed on them and a union flag in the middle used to talk in the mid 19th century.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
the perfect antidote to gloom-and-doom on any day of the year
I own all of Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances – and Naxos’ delicious recording of Cotillion, wonderfully read by Claire Wille, has joined them on my Heyer shelf. Here lively Kitty Charing, whose extremely rich adopted uncle, wants her to marry one of his nephews, invites them all to his estate. Only the handsome rake, Jack Westruther, doesn’t put in an appearance – and, of course, it’s Jack that Kitty wants. Intent on making him jealous – and enjoying the delights of London, Kitty persuades another of the nephews, the Honourable Freddy Stanton, a dandy of some wit and kindness, to pretend to be engaged to her. Characters charming and comic, romance fervent and frowned upon – the perfect antidote to gloom-and-doom on any day of the year.
Kati Nicholl, Daily Express
I am so encouraged that Naxos Audiobooks is venturing into Heyerland with their first audio recording of one of Georgette Heyer’s most beloved novels Cotillion, considered one of the greatest Regency romances of all time. Up until this new recording, Heyer audios could only be obtained through sources in England, at astronomical prices. This abridged audio is read by Clare Willie and contains four CDs. Hopefully, if it sells well, they will in future bring us additional unabridged versions. Publisher’s description: Young Kitty Charing stands to inherit a vast fortune from her irascible great-uncle Matthew – provided she marries one of her cousins. Kitty is not wholly adverse to the plan, if the right nephew proposes. Unfortunately, Kitty has set her heart on Jack Westruther, a confirmed rake, who seems to have no inclination to marry her anytime soon. In an effort to make Jack jealous, and to see a little more of the world than her isolated life on her great-uncle’s estate has afforded her, Kitty devises a plan. She convinces yet another of her cousins, the honorable Freddy Standen, to pretend to be engaged to her. Her plan would bring her to London on a visit to Freddy’s family and (hopefully) render the elusive Mr Westruther madly jealous. Thus begins Cotillion, arguably the funniest, most charming of Georgette Heyer’s many delightful Regency romances.
Georgette Heyer deserves the recognition implicit in her inclusion in the Naxos Classic Fiction list, and Cotillion is an excellent first choice. Her funniest book, it is a plucky-innocent-reforms-rake parody, written in her prime in 1953. It features the orphaned Kitty Charing, who is piqued by the “devilish handsome” Jack Westrother’s failure to turn up when her guardian tells his great-nephews that his fortune goes with her hand. Kitty pretends to be engaged to her cousin Freddy to do a London season. Cue dress-shop scenes, but also social realities as she discovers the expediency of the marriage market. Heyer immersed herself in 18th-century literature, and listening to Clare Wille’s reading you appreciate her gift for the right phrase.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
Uncle Matthew decrees that adopted Kitty will inherit if she marries one of her cousins. Kitty fancies Jack the cad and coaxes gentle Freddy into a mock engagement so she can pursue him in London. But of course, amidst a flutter of meticulously detailed bonnets and dresses, it all gets horribly complicated – is Jack just after the old man’s ‘roll of soft’ rather than Kitty? And does she really love Freddy after all? The deft narration captures the spirit of this Regency romance which is set, with historical accuracy, in 1816.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
For both period feel and satisfying plot, Georgette Heyer is hard to beat. Cotillion is her funniest book, a tongue-in-cheek parody of what starts as a predictable “plucky innocent reforms a rake” tale. The orphaned Kitty Charing is enamoured of her cousin Jack Westrother, a “devilish handsome out-and-outer of a Corinthian”, but piqued by his failure to turn up when her guardian tells his great-nephews that his fortune goes with her hand. She persuades her dandyish cousin Freddy (a “veritable tulip and a pink of the ton”) to pretend to be engaged to her so that she can do a London season. Cue sumptuous dress-shop and drapery scenes, but also sharp social realities as Kitty discovers that most girls on the marriage market have to put expediency before love. Excellent and hilarious twists of fortune ensue, and I defy you to guess the outcome. Clare Wille’s spirited reading makes you appreciate Heyer’s gift for finding the right colourful phrase for every occasion.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
Clare Wille’s performance may be the wittiest I’ve ever heard
Welcome to the quiet backwater of Cranford. The women are in charge, because the men mostly have business elsewhere. So the desperate gentlewomen keep busy sublimating more basic urges into a passion for Victorian social niceties. Clare Wille is delightfully warm and compassionate as the young narrator Mary Smith, fondly recounting the “elegant economies” of her Cranford circle of spinsters and widows. Yet neither Mary’s narrow field of focus nor the delicacy of her humour preclude sharp observations about the frailties of human nature or warnings of the disruption that events in the wider world are about to visit on her unsuspecting friends. The plotlines – a mésalliance between a titled lady and one of the town’s few virile men, a financial scandal, a beturbanned magician, a prodigal’s return – were probably pretty sensational when the novel was first published, but are most important as the frame on which Gaskell constructs a beguiling picture of a dying society. The BBC 1 costume-drama version shouldn’t put Wille’s telling of the original in the shade.
Karen Robinson, The Sunday Times
Done that, been there, seen the TV serial, got the T-shirt (Miss Matty is the lick), but have you read the book? The problem with screen adaptations of period pieces is that they inevitably fall into the same trap. Put a theatrical dame into a bonnet and willy-nilly, no matter how many Baftas she’s bagged, she becomes a pantomime dame. Cranford wasn’t inhabited exclusively by daft old biddies wearing bonnets, shawls and frozen expressions of scandalised incredulity; Mrs Gaskell wrote about real people – some, admittedly, with eccentric ways, but nonetheless genuine. What makes her best-known book, a quintessentially English take on the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie, so beguiling is the gently ironic tone of the young narrator, Mary Smith. This is the fourth Cranford I’ve heard – Prunella Scales did the last – and for once, in Clare Wille, they’ve got the right-aged reader. Mary (unlike Prunella) doesn’t judge. She observes. Her cool, clear gaze misses nothing in this mid-Victorian provincial backwater. You can hear her smiling at its preoccupations with thrift, etiquette, class, crochet, ribbons, gossip and the growing coolness between Miss Jenkins, doyenne of the tea table, and Captain Brown, who finds Boz more entertaining than Samuel Johnson. ‘It was the only difference of opinion they had ever had, but that difference was enough. Miss Jenkins could not refrain from talking at Captain Brown, and though he did not reply, he drummed with his fingers, which action she felt and resented as very disparaging to Dr Johnson.’ Oh, if only life were still as simple.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
Clare Wille’s performance of this gently satirical look at a genteel English village in the first half of the nineteenth century may be the wittiest I’ve ever heard. Like a kinder version of E. F. Benson’s Mapp v. Lucia novels, Gaskell’s ladies of Cranford have their jealousies and their vanities. They also have moments of quiet tragedy (a lost brother, a suitor rejected to please the family but never forgotten) and of high drama. Wille made me laugh aloud at the pompous trumpeting of the late Reverend Jenkins. When Miss Poe comes in out of breath, you could swear Wille was running up stairs while delivering her lines. Her performance is always fully engaged, at one with the story, which is itself a small gem.
B. B., AudioFile Magazine
To prime myself for Return to Cranford, the new Masterpiece Classic sequel to last year’s award-winning mini-series Cranford on PBS, I wanted to read Mrs Gaskell’s original novel that it was adapted from. Since I am always short of reading time, I chose instead to listen to an audio recording, my favorite pastime during my commute to work. After a bit of research on Cranford audio book recordings, I settled on the Naxos AudioBooks edition. From my experience with their recording of Jane Austen’s novels I knew the quality would be superior. I was not disappointed.
A witty and poignant portrait of small town life in an early Victorian-era English village, Cranford was first published in 1851 as a serial in the magazine Household Words edited by Charles Dickens. Inspired by author Elizabeth Gaskell’s (1810–1865) early life in Knutsford in Cheshire where she was raised by an aunt after her mother’s death and father’s subsequent re-marriage, the novel revolves around the narrator Miss Mary Smith and the Amazons of the community: the authoritative Miss Deborah Jenkyns and her kindhearted but timid younger sister Matty, the always well informed Miss Pole and the self-important aristocratic Mrs Jamieson. This gentle satire of village life does not supply much of a plot – but amazingly it does not matter. Gaskell has the incredible talent of making everyday occurrences and life events totally engrossing. Miss Matty’s conservative friends, the middle-aged spinsters and widows of Cranford, do not want their quaint life and traditions altered one bit. They like Cranford just as it has always been, therefore when the industrial revolution that swept through England in the 1840’s encroaches upon their Shangri-La, they lament and bustle about attempting to do everything in there power to stop the evil railroad’s arrival. Gaskell is a deft tactician at dry humor, not unlike her predecessor Jane Austen, and the comedy in Cranford balanced with a bit of tragedy is its most endearing quality.
This unabridged audio book recording is aptly read by Clare Wille whose sensitive and lyrical interpretation of Gaskell’s narrative enhanced my enjoyment of the story by two fold. Her rendering of the different characters with change of timbre and intonation was charmingly effective. My favorite character was of course the kindhearted Miss Matty. Even though she is of a certain age she has a child-like naïveté refreshingly seeing her friends and her world in simple terms. In opposition to our present day lives of cell-phones, blackberries and information overload, a trip to Cranford was a welcome respite. I recommend it highly.
2010 marks the 200th anniversary of author Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell nee Stevenson’s birth on 29 September 1810 in Chelsea, which was then on the outskirts of London. In celebration of her bi-centenary, Naxos Audiobooks will be releasing three additional recordings of her novels: North and South in February again read by Clare Wille, Wives and Daughters in March read by Patience Tomlinson and Cousin Phillis in May read by Joe Marsh. Happily, I will be enjoying many hours of great Gaskell listening this year.
Laurel Ann, Austenprose.com
Once Degas starts reading, it’s nearly impossible to stop listening
This is a story of searching, loss, sex and murder in a disjointed society, worked out through Murakami’s crazy collection of people. Narrator Rupert Degas gets it absolutely right. The unnamed ‘ordinary guy’ who becomes entangled in a succession of way-out experiences is rooted in a Japan drenched in American culture, not just Dunkin’ Donuts and rock music, but the corruption of corporate money. Degas’s subtle American narration sustains this duality. He also creates diverse voices brilliantly, such as the disenchantment of teenage Yuki in her monosyllabic ‘huh’, the other-world automaton pronouncements of the Sheep Man and the seductive tones of the call girls. Bewitching.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
The unnamed hero of Haruki Murakami’s sixth novel is a somber, lonely writer whose dreams call him back to a run-down Sapporo hotel where he once lived. But when he tracks down the hotel, he finds a newly refurbished luxury high-rise. He falls for the receptionist, becomes guardian to a clairvoyant teen, and is transported to a haunted hallway, all while trying to solve a mystery of dead or missing prostitutes. British actor Rupert Degas is masterful in his reading of Dance Dance Dance. Degas performs the entire novel in a flawless American accent, with Japanese names, phrases, and place names read with a believable Japanese accent. Once Degas starts reading, it’s nearly impossible to stop listening to this oddly brilliant psychological thriller.
S. E. S., AudioFile Magazine
This is an hour well spent
Peter Whitfield’s In a Nutshell: Darwin is exactly what it claims to be. In a little over an hour, Whitfield presents a biography of Charles Darwin and an overview of his life’s work. The “nutshell” part of the title may suggest that the production rushes through the facts, but that’s not the case. Whitfield has a pleasant voice, and the prose is smooth and interesting. The audio is a leisurely experience that can be likened to taking a walk while discussing Darwin and his theory of evolution. This is an hour well spent; listeners will learn much, after which they can decide whether or not to delve into the subject in more detail. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award
S.D.D., AudioFile
A useful instant bicentenary guide, which gives you exactly what it says on the tin: family history, biography, succinct synopsis of what natural selection really means and what effect it had on the Victorian establishment. At the 1860 Oxford debate, Bishop Wilberforce asked Thomas Huxley, “Darwin”s bulldog”, if he was descended from apes on his father’s or his mother’s side. Vicious stuff, and it’s still raging.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
I never knew that for 20 years Darwin suffered from a mysterious and debilitating condition that caused heart palpitations, nausea and stomach cramps. Was it chagas disease, picked up from South American beetles during his five-year Beagle voyage? Or purely psychosomatic, due to stress and dread of the negative reception his book would receive? Even his wife Emma was giving him stick about it. So he kept his head down and confined his theories to finches, turtles and moles, leaving humans out of the picture until his next bestseller, The Descent of Man, in 1871.
Author, poet, and historian Whitfield (Landmarks in Western Science) celebrates the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth with this marvelous “nutshell” summary of the English naturalist’s life and his important contributions to science, reminding listeners of Darwin’s continued impact. The author himself narrates, his distinctly British reading conveying Darwin’s own British culture and his well-paced delivery helping to sustain interest. This title, one of many future “nutshell” works from this publisher to cover various other fields of study in a similarly cogent, succinct manner, serves as a useful introduction to Darwin’s life and work and nicely bookends the more comprehensive approach to audio learning offered by The Teaching Company and Recorded Books’ “Modern Scholar” series. Highly recommended.
Dale Farris, Groves
In a nutshell, this ‘nutshell’ audio production is great. Everyone can benefit from a Cliff Notes style review of what they studied in school. Whitfield provides a clear, straight-forward account of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution. He concentrates on Darwin as a personality. Raised in an academic, upper-class, family, Darwin had many advantages as a young man and he didn’t squander them. Sober and reflective, he was also sensitive to the effect his ideas would have on the conventionally faithful, including his wife. Uninterested in being a firebrand, after his famous Galapagos Island trip, he happily returned to a quiet life at his country home where he refined his thoughts and theories. Still, they did rock the world and continue to be a source of controversy. They are also largely immutable. Whitfield narrates with warmth and precision.
Nancy Chaplin, SoundCommentary.com
[a] mix of cynical satire, realism and pathos
The 1953 radio production of Arthur Miller’s masterpiece, Death of a Salesman, with Thomas Mitchell and Arthur Kennedy, gets the Broadway treatment by Elia Kazan (who premiered the play). It was a sensation to audiences in 1949 and continues to move with its mix of cynical satire, realism and pathos.
Robert Giddings, Tribune Magazine
Oliver Ford Davies makes the dying Ilyich touchingly human
Tolstoy wrote his short novel The Death of Ivan Ilyich after a dark night of the soul that led him to question his entire life, and eventually to find comfort in Christianity and peasant simplicities. The book is a coded version of his suffering and makes tough, but ultimately deeply rewarding listening. Oliver Ford Davies, the philosopher and actor fresh from a memorably gruff rendering of Diogenes Laertius for the Naxos audiobook Ancient Greek Philosophy, makes the dying Ilyich touchingly human.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
Painfully and slowly, Judge Ivan Ilyich is dying and, as he does so, he comes to recognise the truth about his impeccable life. For all his propriety and success, it has been meaningless and empty. Ilyich loathes his wife and realises his ‘concerned’ colleagues are merely waiting to step into his shoes. And he recognises the selfless devotion with which he is cared for by the peasant boy Gerasim as the only real truth in the whole of his own shallow life. Only at the end, when Ilyich breaks through the ‘black sack’ of death, is he absolved. Ford Davies’s leisurely narration and the passages of Russian music complement Tolstoy’s serious theme and his presentation of Ilyich’s anguished emotions is masterly.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
Enough of these homegrown comedies of manners. There aren’t many jokes in this relentless novella about a cold, calculating, materialistic minor member of the St Petersburg judiciary, whose only ambition is to keep up with the Ivanovs. Until, that is, he falls ill with a mysterious terminal disease that opens his eyes to the shallowness of his friends, his family and, most of all, himself. Tolstoy’s prose is majestic, his pace measured, his characters unflinchingly true to life, his message bleak. If you’ve never read any Tolstoy, best not start with this one – you might top yourself before you get round to Anna Karenina.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian, 16 February 2008
In the lovely, low tones of a fine storyteller, Oliver Fox Davies guides us through the stages of Tolstoy’s mini masterpiece. Davies’s skill with inflection, even within words, heightens the social satire of the early section and shifts with Ilyich’s slide into ever increasing pain and irritability. With the terror and anguish of approaching death, his voice grows convincingly hoarse. Until his illness, Ivan Ilyich had never reflected on his life. But he slowly comes to see his life as ‘a terrible, huge deception which had hidden life and death.’ As he lays dying, his lifelong friends think of the promotions that may come their way, and his wife ‘began to wish he would die, but she didn’t want him to die because then his salary would cease.’ He has always avoided human connection, but through the tender ministrations of a peasant he comes to recognize the ‘mesh of falsity’ in which he’s lived. Written more than a century ago, Tolstoy’s work still retains the power of a contemporary novel.
Publisher’s Weekly, January 2008
Tolstoy’s novella offers a penetrating examination of the Christian faith and the nature of life and death. Listeners will also be sure to delight in Tolstoy’s sharp and sometimes satirical eye for the very modern-sounding details of the life of a nineteenth-century Russian bureaucrat. With masterful ease, a warm tone, and conversational pacing, British actor Oliver Davies captures Ivan Ilyich’s preoccupation with interior decorating and debt and his avoidance of family weddings and home remedies. Then the shadow of death wipes away all trivialities and pretence. This work’s prose and performance are so vivid, so human, and so listenable that there’s no doubt why Tolstoy stands as one of the giants of world literature.
B. P., AudioFile Magazine
definitely a meal worth sitting down to
No need to ask what I did this summer: Edward Gibbon is not an author to be taken lightly or hastily, which is probably why Naxos got Philip Madoc to read it. His voice has that orotund, authoritative quality (I dare say Moses had it too) that makes you stop whatever you are doing to listen.
It took Gibbon twenty years to complete his famous history; the three volumes were published between 1776 and 1788. This abridgement splits the epic neatly in half, the western empire ruled from Rome and Milan in Part I and the eastern empire, from Constantinople, in Part II. Gibbon’s style, as you would expect of a product of the Enlightenment, is cool, lucid, classical and rhythmic. I urge you to savour the sweeping magnanimity of his opening sentence – ‘In the second century of the Christian era the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth and the most civilised portion of mankind’ – because from here on it’s pretty much downhill all the way to May 29 1453, when the Ottomans finally sacked Constantinople.
Ask most people what they know of the Roman empire and chances are they’ll tell you about gladiators, roads, baths, Russell Crowe and a handful of colourful emperors all pre-290 AD whom they have seen fleshed out by the RSC or BBC drama department. Gibbon deals with the post-Augustan empire, those twelve turbulent centuries when its future was constantly under threat from invading Huns, Goths, Persians, Parthians, Mongols and Turks. As fierce as the enemy without was the enemy within. ‘It is almost superfluous to enumerate the unworthy successors of Augustus. Their unparalleled vices and the splendid theatre on which they were acted have saved them from oblivion. The dark, unrelenting Tiberius, the furious Caligula, the feeble Claudius, the profligate and cruel Nero, the beastly Vitellius and the timid, inhuman Domitian are condemned to everlasting infamy.’
Other factors besides barbarians and loose living conspired against the purple: the rise of Christianity and Islam; the increasing power of the Praetorian Guard, who dispensed with emperors as carelessly as swatting flies; the insidious seepage of foreigners into the legions, diluting their fighting spirit. There are awesome descriptions of cities being sacked, palaces plundered, matrons and virgins ‘subjected to injuries more terrible than death’. Virgins had a rough ride in ancient Rome. There are also delicate vignettes of women like Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, who had a dark complexion and eyes that sparkled with an uncommon fire. ‘When speaking of a lady these trifles become important,’ says Gibbon, whose jokes are strictly limited to maybe one every 300 years. Still, you have to admire a man who can guide you with such elegant dexterity through a millennium fraught with seismic power shifts, where the sheer weight of numbers leaves you reeling: 300,000 Christians hiking through Europe to Jerusalem on the first crusade, 700,000 Mongol horsemen galloping across Asia behind Genghis Khan. Even abridged, Gibbon is no picnic, but he is definitely a meal worth sitting down to. The intermittent extracts from Schumann’s sonorous ‘Julius Caesar’ overture aren’t exactly citron frappé but they help to refresh your palate between courses.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
gently guides you through some pretty daunting theories
Cogito ergo sum notwithstanding, what else do you know about the 17th-century Frenchman regarded as the father of modern philosophy? The good thing about Naxos's series of introductions to philosophers, which includes Plato, Aristotle and Nietzsche, is the way it gently guides you through what could be some pretty daunting theories of belief or, in Descartes' case, doubt. Every excerpt from the original text is preceded by a brief explanation. Here, for example, is the intro to his Principles of Philosophy published in Latin in 1644: ‘Principles is divided into four parts covering metaphysics, physics, cosmology and geology, each with a number of titled paragraphs. In the preface Descartes describes his view of human knowledge using a tree as a metaphor. The branches are the applied sciences such as medicine, psychology, mechanics and even ethics. The trunk of physics supports these, and all are nourished by metaphysics or philosophy at the root.’ René Descartes (1596-1650) was Renaissance man epitomised – a brilliant polymath interested in so many different disciplines (the cartesian coordinates system is still used in maths) that, to give himself time and space to think, he abandoned Paris and spent nine years travelling, occasionally as a mercenary, throughout Europe. His lifelong habit of rising late began as a child, when he was sent away to a Jesuit school and managed to convince his teachers that his poor health required him to stay in bed for most of the morning. 50 years on he accepted a position at the Swedish court to teach philosophy to Queen Christina whose only free time, it turned out, was at 5am. Unused to chilly dawns, Descartes caught pneumonia and died, aged 53.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
a pleasurable retreat into Dickinson’s imaginary world
Teresa Gallagher gives Emily Dickinson a New England voice that succeeds in conveying the poet’s distinctive duality: her gentle, mystical other-worldliness underscored by a resolute strength. In these 99 poems, recurring words – sea, Heaven, sun – chime mantra-like, along with the lyrical assonance and rhyme. Dickinson is acutely sensitive to the beauty of light and nature – ‘the colour on the cruising cloud’ – while her metaphors and personification intrigue. Does the ‘door ajar’ shut her out or invite her in? Is the ‘realm of you’ Heaven or some paradise of earthly love? Even though recurrent themes are death and self-denial, the mood is airy and buoyant, like the angel’s wings Dickinson imagines she wears.
Rachel Redford, The Observer, 17 February 2008
Emily Dickinson is remembered as a nineteenth-century New England recluse, but she is reaching a wider audience than she could ever have expected via this Great Poets audio series. A wide range of the poet’s work is here and, as read by the charismatic Teresa Gallagher, the problem of how to turn dashes into pauses is managed with aplomb. To quote the great lady, ‘Beauty be not caused – it is’; and this is beautiful.
Waterstone’s Quarterly, Spring 2008
Teresa Gallagher has an agile voice and the delicate articulation necessary for interpreting the finely crafted poems of Emily Dickinson. Gallagher performs the poems with a simplicity and clarity that allow their beauty to flourish. However, Dickinson did not title her poems, so Gallagher does not have that convention as a way to mark the beginning of each work. Too often, there is not a long enough pause between poems, and without attention to the liner notes the poems can blur into each other. Nonetheless, the 99 poems selected from Dickinson’s canon of over one thousand are a choice presentation highlighted by Gallagher’s skillful performance. This production is a pleasurable retreat into Dickinson’s imaginary world.
R. F., AudioFile Magazine
A must for every serious music lover
The annus mirabilis of baroque music is 1685, the year in which its three greatest composers and performers – J.S. Bach, George Frederick Handel and Domenico Scarlatti – were all born. This comprehensive guide is packed with historical facts and riveting anecdotes (but for the silver button on his coat which deflected his opponent’s sword, Handel might have been killed in a duel aged 19). Reader Sebastian Comberti is a professional cellist and clearly knows what he’s talking about. Best of all, the text is punctuated with glorious bursts of famous and less well-known sonatas, cantatas, partitas, fugues, concertos and oratorios. Why have I never heard the wonderful aria “Leave Me to Weep” from Handel’s opera Rinaldo before? A must for every serious music lover, baroque or otherwise.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
With 40 tracks illustrating the glory of baroque music, and a narration as lively as Vivaldi’s Spring, this is a delight. As well as providing details of the composers’ lives, this 2-CD set brings home what it must have been like to hear the music when it was first performed.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
The perusal of an improving book being one of Jeeves’s customary leisure pursuits, the dignified manservant would probably have enjoyed Clive Unger-Hamilton’s Discover Music of the Baroque Era which combines 40 glorious music tracks with a lively and informative explanation of why the period (roughly 1600 to 1750, the year J.S. Bach died) can stake an unbeatable claim to be music’s golden age. The first operas were written and performed, and the concerto, sonata and cantata were developed with vitality and brilliance. It is a cultural geography lesson, too, as the Italian peninsula’s musical dominance (with Monteverdi at the pinnacle) is overtaken by superstars from the German states, with the prolific genius of Bach dominating. Enjoy the words, which mix musicology with insights into the musicians’ private lives, then sit back and revel in the music.
Karen Robinson, The Sunday Times
This account is glorious
This account of the great Romantics – Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt et al – is glorious. It traces how their music evolved from the Classical era, and how their varied backgrounds and often tragic lives produced an explosion of invention and emotion. Illustrated with more than 20 music tracks.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
Naxos began in the music business and has an excellent catalogue of recordings to draw on, making this series on the lives and works of composers a natural for them. There’s no need to settle for description when you can hear Joseph Haydn’s actual music. With Audie-winning (for his work on Chopin) author and narrator Jeremy Siepmann and a fine supporting cast, this audiobook introduces us to the life and works—and the relation between the two—of one of the greatest of all composers. The inventor of the modern symphony and the string quartet, Haydn is one of the pillars of concert music, and this original audiobook leads us to a deeper understanding of man and music.
D.M.H., AudioFile Magazine
Dickens’s descriptions ... are matched by the brilliant narration
‘Why didn’t money save me my Mama?’ asks frail little Paul of his father, made cruel by money and power. Eventually, through the saintly love of his neglected daughter, Dombey realises his faults. Dickens’s descriptions of the dark face of Progress are matched by the brilliant narration.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
Dickens’s minor characters are often the stars of his novels, and British actor David Timson gives each his or her idiosyncratic due in this wonderful, richly peopled production. Among them is a model Captain Cuttle, salty, bluff, ever constant to young ‘Wal’r’; a kindly, befuddled Mr. Toots; and Toots’s belligerent associate, the Game Chicken. The work is expensive, but Timson’s storytelling charisma assures that it will be returned to again and again.
Katherine A. Powers, The Washington Post
Charlie Simpson reads it as if he believed every word
Rosemary Sutcliffe’s gripping The Eagle of the Ninth, is about a young centurion’s search for a missing legion over Hadrian’s Wall. Read by Charlie Simpson against a background of thrilling music, and sparkling with detail about the Romans in Britain, it is perfect for boys of eight and over.
Amanda Craig, Independent on Sunday
In his chapter ‘Pax Romana’, Lacey touches on the lasting legacy of the Romans in Britain which, along with Hadrian’s wall and underfloor heating, included cabbages, apples, roses and the domestic cat. Sometime around AD117, the Ninth Legion, stationed in Eboracum, now York, marched north to put down a Caledonian rising and was never heard of again. Eighteen hundred years later archaeologists at Silchester dug up a wingless Roman eagle, the military emblem carried by the standard-bearer of every Roman legion. While it remained aloft the legion’s honour lived. Sutcliff’s novel is classed as a junior classic, but it’s no less adult than and every bit as entertaining as Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series. It follows the fate of the son of the Ninth Legion’s commander as he attempts to solve the mystery of the missing soldiers. Life beyond Hadrian’s wall and the protection of the red-crested legionaries is a dangerous place. Sutcliff evokes a dark, threatening landscape full of lonely lochs and mist-shrouded mountains, where the mystic arts are more powerful than shield walls. Charlie Simpson reads it as if he believed every word.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
Suitably macabre
This collection of 8 short stories, 23 poems, and a short biography of Poe is narrated by three readers: John Chancer, William Roberts, and Kerry Shale. Shale begins with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” He employs a high-pitched French accent to represent Dupin and affects a surprised, somewhat immature tone for the narrator. Some of Poe’s endless descriptions bog down the pacing. Listeners may want to head right to “The Pit and the Pendulum,” read by Roberts, who is a master of the verbal adrenaline rush. His tones lower as the pendulum descends and speed up to match the petrified shrieks. Shale recites the poetry selections; cue up to “Lenore” and zip over to “The Raven” to experience a perfect audible pairing of love lost and unmitigated grief. Chancer provides a simple yet engaging reading of Poe’s biography. Suitably macabre mood music marks transitions between the selections. The celebration of Poe’s 200th birthday brings renewed interest in the author’s works.
Kaite Mediatore Stover, Booklist
[a] perfect audio companion
I have already praised Juliet Stevenson’s understanding of subtle human comedy, but feel impelled to add that in her latest performance, Emma, the peerlessly snobbish, judgmental, self-regarding, manipulative heroine and her circle make perfect audio companions for a long drive, a marathon ironing session or, indeed, a nice cup of tea.
Karen Robinson, The Sunday Times
Joanna Page brings freshness and urgency to the tale
Magical tale of invisibility and a bejewelled princess still enchants.
Rachel Redford, The Guardian, 23 March 2008
Edith Nesbit crafts an adventure in which three children on summer vacation encounter an enchanted castle and a magic ring. While the story may be a hundred years old, Joanna Page brings freshness and urgency to the tale. Her children live up to their descriptors – officious Jerry, nonchalant Jimmy, and practical Kathleen – and they’re brought to life with just the right amount of a British accent. Page moves the narration briskly, letting the layers and intricacies of the story shine – from the children’s first realization of the ring’s power to the coming to life of the Ugly Wugglies. Try this over school vacation.
A. R., AudioFile Magazine
Whimsical, satirical, passionate, playful, savage
If you like long walks, slow cooking and staring out of the window at nothing in particular, this anthology is for you. The key to enjoying these essays by some of the finest exponents of the English language – Swift, Goldsmith, Johnson, Carlyle, Hazlitt, Lamb et al – on a variety of subjects – chasing loose women, building railways, eating children, lying in bed – is time: they cannot be rushed. Take them at the same leisurely, measured pace as Joseph Addison’s opening sentence: “When I am in a serious humour, I very often walk by myself in Westminster Abbey; where the gloominess of the place, and the use to which it is applied, with the solemnity of the building, and the condition of the people who lie in it, are apt to fill the mind with a kind of melancholy, or rather thoughtfulness, that is not disagreeable.” Whimsical, satirical, passionate, playful, savage – the style may vary, but the quality of the writing belongs to a golden age of literature that disappeared with the quill pen. I bet Neville Jason, whose Latin is as perfect as his English (the essays bristle with classical quotations), still writes with one.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
“He who lives everywhere lives nowhere,” wrote Montaigne 400 years ago. Another jewel in this fine collection is Richard Steele’s account of the “inexpressible pleasure” of an early-morning trip down the Thames, picking up gardeners of apricots and melons on their way to market. Neville Jason's voice is irresistible.
Rachel Redford, The Guardian
recorded with wit and clarity by Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan
Joyceans worldwide will celebrate Bloomsday on Tuesday with readings from Ulysses in honour of Leopold Bloom’s day-long odyssey through the streets of Dublin to the arms of his wife, Molly. This year, there will be a rival attraction: the launch of a Naxos recording of Finnegans Wake, the novel Joyce worked on for 17 years after Ulysses. It’s estimated that a complete recording of this eccentric masterpiece would run to about 20 CDs, but Naxos has made an attractive abridgement in four, recorded with wit and clarity by Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan. I’ve never met anyone who has actually managed to read every page of this extraordinary book, from its famous opening: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay ...” and there can be little doubt that Joyce intended his work to be listened to as much as read. This brilliant recording is the perfect short cut for slackers, poseurs and insomniacs.
Robert McCrum, The Observer
Essays were the chatty columns of their times, personal, opinionated, intended to amuse as well as to instruct. Neville Jason’s selection of Favourite Essays: An Anthology is full of contrasts, with subjects as disparate as Thackeray on ogres, Hazlitt on the joys of tramping cross-country alone and Ruskin campaigning against a Lakeland railway. It begins with Michel de Montaigne (the inventor of the form) and Francis Bacon (for me the finest of all essayists), and ends with Charles Dickens on May Day and G.K. Chesterton on lying in bed. Some are well known – Swift’s satirical A Modest Proposal, Charles Lamb’s haunting Dream Children – others, such as Richard Steele’s jaunt through London in the early eighteenth century, wonderful discoveries.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
A gripping and chillingly gothic narration
Mary Shelley’s original tale is not the horror story it has become. Both the inquisitive scientist, Frankenstein, and his terrifying creation are treated with great compassion. A gripping and chillingly gothic three-voice narration. Comes with CD-ROM study guide.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
the world’s first sci-fi thriller
Friends on holiday abroad, holed up by bad weather, pass the time by telling spooky stories by the fireside. It’s a common scenario, but when three of them are Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Shelley’s dauntingly clever fiancée, daughter of a famous feminist writer and an equally famous philosophical anarchist, they’ll probably come up with something a bit classier than the “dark and stormy night” variety. Byron’s started the vampire genre. Mary’s, published in 1818, became the world’s first sci-fi thriller. Remind your teenage children of this significant fact, or the often OTT language used in this gothic horror story of a murderous man-made monster running amok in the Arctic and sundry picturesque Swiss villages might make them lose heart.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
[a] detailed exposition
The bound captives drowned in holed boats in the Seine were just some of the thousands massacred during the years of the French Revolution. This detailed exposition shows how its ideals formed the basis of today’s liberal democracies and how its excesses were a forerunner of 20th-century repressions.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
I approached The French Revolution – In a Nutshell unwillingly: it was the last of a pile of promising but soon disappointing titles that I had put in my car for sampling; it smacked of the schoolroom. How wrong I was. At the off Roy McMillan accurately
predicted that all I knew about the French Revolution was derived from Baroness Orczy, A Tale of Two Cities and such famous images as Marat stabbed in his bath. His reading of Neil Wenborn’s canter through the financial and social causes, its violent progress and its significance for democracy is enthralling.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
A gripping narrative of quite another kind is to be found in Neil Wenborn’s The French Revolution – In a Nutshell. These cataclysmic events, beginning with the
revelations of France’s lavish national extravagance and iniquitous taxation system, the collapse of the monarchy and continuing through the eruption of political turmoil into riots, tribunals, terror, military dictatorship and war, are really the foundation of modern Europe. (What price UKIP?) The questions raised seem blindingly contemporary to us in the modern world – the relationship between citizen and state, liberty and law, idealism and the realms of the possible, political ends and means. Not very festive, you may think, but this would be a present to treasure whose value will not decline even after years of use.
Robert Giddings, Tribune Magazine
Between 1789 and 1799, 10 years of violent turmoil in France grew out of Europe’s Enlightenment. After the pillars of power – the Catholic Church, the aristocracy, and the monarchy – fell, continued intramural conflicts stained the decade. In 1799, Napoleon assumed power in a coup and declared the revolution to be over. The author condenses this complex, controversial, and critical period into ‘a nutshell,’ or 75 minutes of audio. British narrator Roy McMillan aptly fits the performance bill with his impeccable French. He chooses a pace that is appropriate to delivering great quantities of abbreviated information while still allowing listeners time to absorb it. His performance succeeds in its succinct reporting of a consequential historical period, and one hopes it will whet the curiosity of those less familiar with these events, inspiring them to further exploration of these murderous times.
J.A.H., AudioFile
The former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, the story goes, was once asked to comment on the significance of the French revolution. ‘It is too early to say,’ he replied. Happily for us Neil Wenborn is prepared not just to produce a vivid potted history of the political and social events that led to the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 and the purges that followed in Robespierre's murderous reign of terror but also, unlike Zhou, to assess its longterm influences worldwide. Succinct, entertaining, thought-provoking – everything the perfect history lesson should be.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
A must for any collection
Naxos AudioBooks and David Timson offer a collection of the best of Shakespeare’s love sonnets in celebration of the 400th anniversary of their first appearance in print. They’re perfect for audio. Director Timson lets the poems speak for themselves through the voices and interpretations of a group of diverse and talented actors. Listeners are treated to some of the Bard’s lesser-known sonnets as well as some of his most famous, including David Tenant’s reading of Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”; Juliet Stevenson’s version of Sonnet 116: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds...‘” and David Timson‘s rendering of Sonnet 29: “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes...” Each gem illustrates Shakespeare’s take on the multifaceted nature of love, from obsession and possession to longing and delight. A must for any collection. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award
S.J.H., AudioFile
Fiona Shaw’s mesmerising reading is a tour de force
When writers linger on close encounters of a genital kind it can make for tough listening. Anne Enright is undoubtedly a writer whose work, like that of James Joyce, is intensified by hearing it aloud. Fiona Shaw’s mesmerising reading of her 2007 Man Booker prize novel The Gathering is a tour de force.
But the story is a tough one to take: we are lodged in the anguished head of a frequently drunk, sexual obsessive whose too-tidy world is imperfectly papered over her muddled memories of childhood. The tipping point that forces her to confront her ill-starred Irish family and to revisit and reinterpret her past is the suicide of the charming waster of a brother who shared its horrors with her. Not, then, a cheerful earful, with overtones of the woodshed in Cold Comfort Farm, but one that lovers of deft word-handling and searingly truthful exposure of human frailty may enjoy sipped in small doses (to leave time for reflection), perhaps when alone.
Christina Hardyment, The Times, 15 March 2008
So accustomed have I become to having to wait months, sometimes even years, for the latest Booker prizewinner to come out, that I couldn’t believe my luck to find this up there on the shelves in my local library, alongside the Christies and Coopers, Trollopes and Taylor Bradfords. A good 75% of my library’s talking book selection are popular novels by women writers. At the last count there were only two books, The Ghost Road and The Blind Assassin, by the six women who have won the Booker in the past twenty years. Such are the vagaries of audio publishing that two of last year’s entries, On Chesil Beach and Mr Pip, came out on CD before they had even reached the shortlist.
Enough griping. The Gathering is here and we print-intolerant book lovers should be grateful to Naxos – first, for being so previous and second, for having the nous to get the incomparable Fiona Shaw to read it. Frankly I’m not sure I’d have lasted the course without her subtle, humorous, sensitive reading. If you like deeply depressing family sagas awash with skeletons in cupboards, drunks, misfits, children screwed up by religion and sexual abuse, you’ll enjoy The Gathering. The narrator – Veronica, 39, former shopping journalist, married to a successful banker – is number seven of twelve Irish children: Midge, Bea, Ernest, Stevie, Ita, Mossie, Liam, Veronica, Kitty, Alice and the twins, Ivor and Jem. Far from being a happy family who could field their own football team plus reserve, with the exception of Jem they’re a mess. Liam’s suicide prompts the family to gather and Veronica to delve deep into its unhappy history. Beautifully written, brilliantly read, but I still think Mr Pip should have won the Booker.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian, 19 April 2008
Give it a few minutes, and you will be agog
Whether you know Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier or not, don’t miss this reading by Kerry Shale, who varies his performance brilliantly as the story shifts from platitudes to a rollercoaster ride of intimate revelation. Written on the eve of the First World War and satirising the complacency and immorality of the age, the book is an experimental narrative, moving to and fro in time with explanations inserted as if recounted to a friend. ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard’ is the opening line, but within seconds we are wondering how on earth it can be as we hear of the impeccable social credentials of the two couples at its core. Give it a few minutes, and you will be agog, uncertain whether to laugh at its first-person narrator’s gullibility or cry at the tragic outcome. Poetically resonant and painterly in its word pictures, the book was regarded by Ford as his best. Don’t be misled by the studiously ironic title: the only conflict in the story is that between the sexes.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
Horovitch’s reading is brilliant
Every harassed negotiator, every beleaguered political wife and anyone given to ever-increasing moments of melancholy at the way things are should keep a copy of Hašek’s classic ‘don’t let the bastards get you down’ novel to hand. It’s anti-war, anti-establishment, anti-religion and – praise indeed – even funnier than Catch-22. Joseph Heller based his hero Yossarian on Švejk. Hašek, born in Bohemia in 1883, based the irrepressible Švejk’s career in the first world war on his own rackety life. Horovitch’s multi-voiced, multi-accented reading of the hotchpotch of characters is brilliant: dotty major-generals, hard-drinking priests, lecherous officers and, of course, the good soldier himself, beginning every exchange with ‘Beg to report, sir . . .’ – that he joined the enemy by mistake, missed his train, lost his way, issued the officers with the wrong cipher book (part 1 of Ludwig Ganghofer’s The Sins of the Fathers instead of part 2), and so on. Give it five minutes, you’ll be hooked.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
the perfect vehicle for [Anton Lesser’s] array of voices, accents and characters
Maybe you should listen to this first to understand the impact it had on Mister Pip’s pupils. Too bad they didn’t hear Anton Lesser’s version, though chances are if they had, it would have affected them even more powerfully. Lesser reads so many audiobooks – I’ve just finished his beautiful if soporific rendering of Rumi’s Spiritual Verses – that you forget what a huge range his acting skills cover.
This is the perfect vehicle for his array of voices, accents and characters, starting with the terrifying Magwitch on the run (if that’s an appropriate description of a man wearing a leg iron) from the prison hulks moored off the Essex marshes, to cold, arrogant Estella, hardwired to break men’s hearts, and the steely lawyer Mr Jaggers, beside whom Lord Goldsmith looks like Bambi. The adventures of the upwardly mobile apprentice blacksmith turned gentleman have always trailed far behind Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities on my Dickens hit list – Pip is such an awful snob – but I’m bound to admit that Lesser makes him not only sympathetic but even likeable.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
some of the most memorable speeches on record
I thoroughly recommend this all-too-short compilation of some of the most memorable speeches on record. There are all the obvious ones – Socrates after his sentence of death, Elizabeth I at Tilbury, the Gettysburg Address. Martin Luther, Danton, Emmeline Pankhurst, Burke and Fox are also here, but for me the highlight is Charles I from the scaffold. He famously wore two shirts so that if he trembled people wouldn’t think it was from fear. But listening to his long, rambling, repetitive, clearly nervous words you wonder how many of those onlookers were fooled.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
utterly compelling, crystal clear, [and] totally absorbing
There are many recordings of Shakespeare’s most famous play, but now you can enjoy the most legendary of all – the live 1948 broadcast of John Gielgud’s Hamlet. It remains utterly compelling, crystal clear, totally absorbing, with a classic quality that reflects the utter rightness of the interpretation.
There is a delightful unscripted moment in Act V when Esme Percy (playing Osric) can be faintly heard calling admiringly “Oh! Oh! He’s enchanting,” during a brief Gielgud pause.
The third CD can also be put into a computer, where it functions as a CD-ROM with MP3 files, allowing us to listen to a twenty-five minute talk about the play that Gielgud gave on the BBC Third Programme six years later. It provides fascinating insights into the way he approached the role (which he played more than five-hundred times): “I kind of found the part as I went along in a very strange and sincere way which I’d never done in acting. I found for the first time a way to communicate my feeling to the audience because it was so very strong.”
Christina Hardyment, The Times
Delightfully illustrated with generous musical pieces
Taken from humble parents to be a choirboy, six-year-old Haydn endured hunger and harshness, but finally became the “father” of the symphony and the string quartet. Exiled for years in the isolation of the Esterházys’ Hungarian palace, he finally saw London – and the sea – at 60. Delightfully illustrated with generous musical pieces.
Rachel Redford, Observer
Jacobi injects drama into this erudite journey
Jacobi injects drama into this erudite yet fast-paced journey from Beowulf to the modern myth of Eliot, illustrating through scores of generous quotations Emily Dickinson’s definition of poetry as the ‘cold which no fire can warm’.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
A history of 600 years of poetry is a daunting row to hoe, so let’s start not with Beowulf (which is Danish anyway) but with the 1557 anthology Songs and Sonnets and see how, circa 400 years later, we arrive at Disillusionment of Ten O’clock, my favourite Wallace Stevens poem, published in 1923. That, by the way, is not Whitfield’s cut-off point, it’s mine. He soldiers bravely and chronologically through his leviathan list of poetic categories – medieval, Elizabethan, metaphysical, Cavalier, graveyard, Augustan, romantic, Hartford wits, Victorian, confessional, Georgian, war, modern, new apocalypse, postmodern, ending with performance poetry – but I incline to Macaulay’s view that ‘as civilisation advances, poetry almost necessarily declines’. Thomas Wyatt’s poem in Songs and Sonnets, says Whitfield, shattered the medieval moral narrative tradition. Its title, The Lover Showeth How He Is Forsaken of Such as He Sometime Enjoyed, does not sound promising. Read on. ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek / With naked foot stalking in my chamber. / I have seen them gentle, tame and meek, / That now are wild, and do not once remember / That sometime they have put themselves in danger / To take bread at my hand; and now they range, / Busily seeking with a continual change. / Thank’d be fortune it hath been otherwise, / Twenty times better; but once especial, / In thin array, after a pleasant guise, / When her loose gown did from her shoulders fall, / And she me caught in her arms long and small, / Therewith all sweetly did me kiss, / And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”’ Sensuous, mysterious, intellectual and above all personal, this melodious crystallisation of emotion was like nothing previously classed as poetry and set the stage for the Elizabethan golden age. Thence to the whole glorious canon of poetic greats – Donne, Milton, Blake, Keats, Hopkins, Frost, Dickinson, Yeats and, yes, in my book, Stevens. If poetry truly is the alchemy of words and the music of ideas, he has to be in the premier league. ‘The houses are haunted / By white night-gowns. / None are green, / Or purple with green rings, / Or green with yellow rings, /Or yellow with blue rings. / None of them are strange, / With socks of lace, / And beaded ceintures. / People are not going / To dream of baboons and periwinkles. / Only, here and there, an old sailor, / Drunk and asleep in his boots, / Catches tigers / In red weather.’ Don’t ask me what it means, just listen to it. Whitfield’s history is less a textbook than a rough guide, but if his enthusiasm doesn’t inspire you to buy a volume of Swinburne – aristo, atheist, aesthete, alcoholic, sadomasochist – I’ll be surprised.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
Barry Davies’s narration is in the best spirit of sports commentary
Fitting the 26 Olympic Games that have been held since 1896 into an audiobook, A History of the Olympics is an awesome challenge. We’re talking 28 different sports, many divided into numerous events.
The veteran sporting journalist John Goodbody goes for the highlights, be they triumphs or disasters, ecstasies or agonies, but he also has a nice ear for colourful detail. “These are the Olympics: you die for them,” gasps a discus thrower as he removes the collar protecting his injured neck before throwing for a gold.
One of the rowers in the winning American eight of 1924 (the year of those glittering prizes) was Ben Spock, later to become a legendary writer of baby and childcare books. Johnny “Tarzan” Weissmuller turns up in the Twenties.
Because there are so many Games to cover, Goodbody has to be selective. His emphasis is mainly on solo triumphs: track events, swimming and gymnastics, but he ranges well beyond the ordinary, including paraplegic events (and finds plenty of space for his own, judo). He also finds time to consider the issues that have done most to damage the spirit of the Games: racism, gender bias, politicking and drugs.
There are training tricks (mowing the lawn in a rubber suit carrying weights; freezing a litre of blood to be reinjected before the supreme effort) and nicknames (Little Miss Perfect, the 7ft armspanned Albatross, Rocket Man, Three Blondes in a Boat), unusual backgrounds and relating what happened to the golden boys and girls afterwards.
Does it work? Barry Davies’s narration is in the best spirit of sports commentary, but the brain (well, my brain) can only handle so many amazing facts at a time. So this is a publication to sip rather than guzzle, on a morning jog or drive to work. At the end, however, is a 45-minute interview with Sebastian Coe to provide just the sort of in-depth view that the History itself couldn’t.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
If your passion is for the Olympics rather than the venue, this comprehensive guide to the history of the games is the perfect gap-filler between heats. It’s a serious book, bristling with statistics but, thank goodness, with enough anecdotes to keep sporting lightweights like me enthralled. My hero is the American gymnast with a wooden leg who won, wait for it, three golds, two silvers and a bronze at the St Louis Olympics in 1904.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
The narration is polished and vigorous
This is a rich Barnesian marinade of musings, analyses and witty, idiosyncratic re-workings of myths and stories. The narrative voice in ‘Stowaway’ is a savvy rodent, who reveals Noah as a drunk preying on his cargo. The account of the terrorist hijacking of a cruise ship told by the guest lecturer in ‘Visitors’ is a tangle of chilling mishandlings and misunderstandings. ‘Shipwreck’ is an account of the sufferings on the raft from the wrecked Medusa, followed by a jaunty analysis of Gericault’s painting. And that’s just three of the ten [and a half] chapters. The narration is polished and vigorous, but unintrusive so that the exuberance of the narratives and ideas take centre stage.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
Fact, fiction, myth, opinion – Barnes’s series of disjointed narratives about Noah’s Ark, terrorist hijackers, shipwreck, woodworm, love and more is all of these. It leaves you torn between thinking that its sum is greater than its parts and that, then again, some of the parts are pretty damned good too, especially the half-chapter titled ‘Parenthesis’. Somehow this pithy new Alex Jennings recording perfectly succeeds in combining the various ‘history is bunk’ and ‘love conquers all’ strands.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
up there with Longfellow and Lowell
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–94), by profession a doctor and once up there with Longfellow and Lowell, has a strong line in patriotism and rousing rhythms: “Nerveless the iron hand/ Raised for its native land.” He’s homely and romantic too, praising nature and “Yankee girls” and seeing majesty in a caged lion.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
Fashions change in poetry just as they do in music or clothes. Once, Oliver Wendell Holmes was all the rage, and counted Poe and Lincoln among his admirers. Now, except perhaps for Old Ironsides and The Chambered Nautilus, he is remembered mostly as the father of the Supreme Court justice. Often witty, rarely personal, Holmes’s poetry has passed into the realm of the specialist and historian. Yet in Peter Marinker’s sensitive readings, the many charms of these poems emerge. Marinker lets the meter and rhyme stand on their own, speaking in sentences rather than forcing the lines and respecting the sentiment without falling into sentimentality.
D.M.H., AudioFile Magazine
Jeremy Northam delights the ear
The presence of Gerard Manley Hopkins on the A-level English syllabus for more than forty years means that anyone with a love of language has at least some lines of his poems by heart, so many of you will be able to murmur along as you listen to Gerard Manley Hopkins, the latest in the Great Poets series. Jeremy Northam delights the ear with thirty-eight of Hopkins’s finest poems, beginning with the little jewel of Heaven-Haven and including the incandescent Wreck of the Deutschland and the vaulting leaps of The Windhover.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
To read Hopkins’s poetry aloud, you have to be sensitive to all his chiming alliteration, assonance and idiosyncratic rhythm, and yet allow the poet’s own voice to be heard. Jeremy Northam does just that, giving the listener the essence of Hopkins: the ‘dearest freshness deep down things’.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
Holmes is, as usual, two steps ahead of everyone
Conan Doyle’s novella of the fog-enshrouded moors is one of his most well known. Holmes and Dr. Watson are enlisted to solve a mystery involving a curse, a “hound from hell,” and a family inheritance. Holmes is, as usual, two steps ahead of everyone else, much to Watson’s delight.
Bella Todd, TimeOut
Naxos’s Hound of the Baskervilles is read by David Timson – every character pitch perfect! But the brilliant thing is that there’s a bonus CD-ROM (disc 1) and on it is the complete text, both abridged and unabridged. So a young adult – or an adult – who’s a poor reader, can listen and read at the same time, using a computer or a TV. Entertainment and tuition all in one! And there’s also a study guide for those who want background, author detail and so on. A fabulous piece of kit!
Kati Nicholl, Daily Express
Despite screen effects of mist-enshrouded moors and a slavering monster-hound, there's nothing like the original Conan Doyle. It's read here at a ripping pace by the excellent David Timson. The mystery mounts: the Baskerville legend; Mr Stapleton's violent repulse of Sir Charles Baskerville's romantic approach to his sister ... Is the fiendish hound real, or some hellish emanation? Will cunning and guns be enough to save Sir Charles from its jaws? Included is a stimulating CD-Rom with the complete text and a study guide.
Rachel Redford, The Oldie
du Maurier is one of the best storytellers in the business
Television remakes of Rebecca aside, Daphne du Maurier is one of those novelists, like Doris Lessing, whom few people under forty seem either to reckon on or know much about. This is a great injustice. She is quite simply one of the best storytellers in the business – proper old-fashioned stories, with characters you gradually get to know and feel for, and plots whose originality and ingenuity have never been equalled.
The House on the Strand – which, I confess, I had never heard of until this Naxos version, punctuated by wonderfully atmospheric music, came out last year – is a dazzling example of her skill. The narrator, Richard, has been persuaded by his friend Magnus, a biophysicist, to be a guinea pig for a new drug he is working on, which, Magnus claims, can take the subject back in time – real historic time, not hallucination. Richard travels to Magnus’s house in Cornwall, the setting for most du Maurier novels, and takes the plunge. It works. Within minutes he finds himself transported back 600 years to the fourteenth century, the invisible observer of a series of tragic political and domestic intrigues with which he becomes increasingly fascinated. The side effects of the drug and the social effects on his real life and family are catastrophic. Too bad they don’t write stories as intriguing as this any more.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
I have no hesitation in recommending this translation
Ian Johnston provides his readers with a clear and comprehensible translation of the Iliad that presents itself as a dynamic equivalent of the Greek original. Johnston captures the flow of the text with an eye to both accuracy and his modern readership. Ultimately, the Iliad was, in its original language, trapped within the past, filled with specialized language and archaisms for the ancient audiences who witnessed its live performance. However, Johnston has recognized that retaining Homer’s language can be disadvantageous for instruction in the undergraduate setting. Without resorting to unwarranted slang or hyperbolic peculiarities, however, he has managed to make Homer’s story come alive. Instead he has attempted to capture the native meaning of the text itself and has shown himself judicious and consistent in his treatment of epithets, recurring lines, and other singularities of Homeric epic. Further, since about half of the Iliad is composed of direct speech (meant to slow down the cadence of action and emphasize significant moments in the plot), Johnston’s practice of setting off these sections by quotation marks and indentation is particularly helpful for the individual reader and for the classroom alike. I have used the on-line version in several classes and it certainly seemed to keep the students’ interest and instil familiarity with this central Western classic. On many grounds, then, I have no hesitation in recommending this translation, and suggest that it holds particular value as a text for high school and undergraduate level university acquisitions.
Andrew Porter, University of Missouri, Columbia
Ian Johnston’s new translation of the Iliad has been freely available on the Internet for the past four years and in that time has become a popular site for general readers, teachers, and students alike. And it’s easy to understand why. Johnston’s translation is extremely faithful to Homer’s Greek text, and yet at the same time is characterized by a very readable English style, so much so that the clarity and fluency of this translation immediately set it apart from many other alternatives.
One interesting point about the diction is that Johnston has deliberately avoided all outdated language of Medieval chivalry or ancient warfare (so there are no greaves, cuirasses, steeds, or targes in this text, no carls or bowyers, or lances). And yet, by his faithful translation of Homeric epithets and repetitions, he keeps reminding us that this poem has its origins in an ancient style. The result is an interesting and evocative synthesis of a past vision and modern sensibilities.
Johnston has chosen to use a hexameter line for the narrative and a pentameter for the speeches, although he freely departs from strict adherence to a fixed pattern (at times the rhythm gets a trifle ragged). This is, one assumes, an attempt to gain both the gravitas of the longer line and the speed of the shorter one. And in this he has a good deal of success, particularly in the speeches which are almost always vigorous and dramatic. They sound like something passionate people might actually say. And he handles the Homeric similes very well, letting them unroll at length, gathering momentum as they go, so that the power described in the imagery is underscored by the movement and sound in the poetry. This style also brings out very forcefully the extraordinarily graphic and evocatively ironic battlefield deaths.
It easy to understand why this translation has attracted the attention of drama companies and has led to stage productions in Philadelphia and Oxford and to a recording of the entire poem by Naxos AudioBooks. It’s high time this translation was available in the form of a published book.
Dr Anne Leavitt, Dean, Malaspina University-College
the audiobook box set of the decade
Eight hours longer even than Naxos’ complete Sherlock Holmes, this has got to be the audiobook box set of the decade! All six complete major novels are read here in mellifluous and engagingly vital voices which – however many times you listen – instantly draw you into Jane Austen’s world.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
Together for the first time, the complete and unabridged audio recordings of Jane Austen’s novels handsomely presented in a boxed set. Counting 69 CDs and running over 83 hours, this is the Holy Grail of Austen audio book recording as only Naxos could present with superb readings by Juliet Stevenson, Emilia Fox, and Anna Bentinck. Included are Austen’s six major novels, the novella Lady Susan and her unfinished novels Sanditon and The Watsons. This is definitely the essential collector’s item. ‘Nuff said!
Laurel Ann, austenprose.wordpress.com
Top of the boxed sets is Jane Austen: The Complete Novels, read by Juliet Stevenson, Emilia Fox and Anna Bentinck, flaunting alongside the favourites of television drama the less-familiar Northanger Abbey and Lady Susan.
Carole Mansur, Telegraph
While I haven’t listened to all of them, I listened to the Jane Austen biography, and am finishing up Northanger Abbey as of this post. With a 45-minute commute, these audiobook CDs have become treasured friends. I am always amazed at the talent Naxos AudioBooks gets to narrate their classic releases, and Juliet Stevenson is no exception. She is an accomplished actress of stage and screen, and delivers captivating performances on these discs.
Janet Hagen, eCommerce Manager, Naxos of America
amazingly good value
What makes this special apart from Emma Fielding’s deft narration is the bonus CD-ROM which contains the unabridged text and a study guide by Francis Gilbert. Although the guide targets “young adults”, any intelligent reader will find it stimulating. One of a series and amazingly good value.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
Time-crunched students and creative educators will welcome this abridged version of the classic novel. Fielding transports listeners into the 1800s; her tone and British accent subtly communicate the gradations of social strata, with characters distinguished by vocal modulation. Archaic sentence structure becomes the flow of natural speech, and Fielding’s pace combines with the skillful abridgement to propel listeners through the tale. Musical segues mark transitions through the use of period classical selections. The audio package includes a CD-ROM featuring the abridged and unabridged texts and a study guide. Other titles in Naxos’ Young Adult Classics series are Frankenstein, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and Pride and Prejudice.
Mary Burkey, Booklist
an unrivalled unabridged edition
Most people are familiar with the story of Jane Eyre, the mousey governess who falls in love with the master of Thornfield Hall while his mad wife rants and raves in the attic. But to appreciate the complex issues that Charlotte Brontë addresses, it's necessary to listen with care – Jane Eyre challenged the conventions of womanhood and marriage as well as subtly highlighting the racist sentiments of the day.
With all this in mind, Amanda Root gives a polished reading full of understanding of the text. She lingers long on the imagery that conveys the idea of women as prisoners to convention and cleverly develops Jane’s character through the stages of her life that see her transformed from an angry little girl to a woman of independent means and ideas. Classy budget CD label Naxos AudioBooks have produced an unrivalled unabridged edition, beautifully packaged and easy to use.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
Sean Barrett will wring your heart
Kafka Tamura, a precocious fifteen-year-old from Tokyo with oedipal tendencies, runs away from home, meets a transsexual librarian on Shikoku, Japan’s smallest island, reads a lot of books, sleeps with two women (his sister? His mother?), finds his true self in a magical forest. Meanwhile, sixtysomething, brain-damaged Nakata murders a man who kills cats to make flutes from their souls, legs it to the same Shikoku library and finds his true self in a motel room. I think. Murakami isn’t good with loose ends but he is brilliant with talking cats, mixed-up adolescents, quirky relationships and stories requiring off-the-wall imagination. I wouldn’t have lasted the course without Sean Barrett, whose Nakata will wring your heart. You either love or loathe Japan’s favourite novelist. I’m still undecided.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
unashamedly brain-taxing at times, but never for too long
Everything I know about Buddhism – and it’s a fair amount – comes from my Burmese mother, but even she would have been impressed with Jinananda’s intelligent encapsulation of one of the world’s great religions into a mere 78 minutes. No, that’s not his real name. He was born Duncan Steen in Bedford in 1952, joined the Western Buddhist Order when he was 34 and has written scholarly books about karma (i.e. action/energy) and what he prefers to call rebirth rather than reincarnation. The key to enlightenment is selflessness, but what exactly is self? “The self,” says Jinananda, “is like a wave. Each wave has its own characteristic shape but it also changes at every moment, as does the water of which it is composed. It is the same with rebirth – there is no unchanging or separate entity that passes from one life to the next. What does pass to the next life is the wave of karmic propensities or choices made in the previous life.” It is unashamedly brain-taxing at times, but never for too long. Why did my mother never tell me that in the centre of all Buddhist prayer wheels there’s a tiny model of a farmyard in which a cock, a pig and a snake, representing craving, illusion and hatred, are chasing each other in circles? Eat, love and pray by all means, but take time to learn as well.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
Compact guides to political, financial and ethical issues are the current fashion in audio publishing, and Naxos’s In a Nutshell series weighs in at the more intellectually taxing end of the market. Close attention to this study of the theory and practice (well, theory mainly, obviously) of rebirth will open your mind to the fundamental mysteries of human existence. Though covering many religions and traditions, its overall viewpoint is Buddhist and the central concept of karma – that “ethical or unethical choices of action have consequences now and in future lives” – might lead to a helpful re-examination of one’s behaviour. No easy answers here, but confirmation that “existence is necessarily impermanent and unsatisfactory”.
Karen Robinson, The Sunday Times
Karma and Rebirth in a Nutshell is an accessible starting point. Its lucid and persuasive author and narrator Jinananda began with the Venerable Bede’s likening of a human lifespan to a sparrow flying out of darkness and into a bright feasting hall, then disappearing into the deep forest. Karma led me to The Voice of the Buddha on which Kulananda guides the listener through the Buddhist equivalents of the Christian gospels. To set things in context, I listened to David Timson presenting The Middle Way: The Story of Buddhism, and tomorrow I’m setting off to Cornwall listening to Kulananda’s guide to mental discipline, The Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path Traffic jams? No problem – they are just temporary hiccups in the eternal flux.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
This is a scholarly yet accessible introduction to the spiritual theory often called “reincarnation.” The author, born Duncan Steen in 1952 in Great Britain, became a Buddhist in 1986. He is the author of several books on Buddhism. The introduction makes clear that the topic is not a simple one, with a history of debatable nuances among believers of various, Eastern traditions. Jinananda makes clear he is speaking from the Buddhist tradition, and that the various Buddhist traditions are somewhat splintered on the subject. He begins with research from a University of Virginia professor which details accounts of children and adults across the globe who have seemingly remembered past lives. This includes the phenomena of children exhibiting mastery of foreign languages not logically available to them and knowledge of verifiable facts of history they could not know. He then delves into the subjects of Karma, Tibetan Buddhist cosmology, and other aspects of the subject. His grasp is broad and his enthusiasm for the subject apparent. He reads in a calm, unaffected manner. This is an excellent resource for those interested in the subject.
Nancy Chaplin, SoundCommentary.com
India in all its teeming life, mystery and beauty
Rudyard Kipling’s masterly Kim comes as quite a relief in this abridged version read by Madhav Sharma. It always comes up gold, packed with ravishing scenic descriptions, characters and a sense of culture and period as the orphan Irish lad, brought up in Lahore street life, who embarks on a fascinating journey, joining the Indian Civil Service and developing into a master spy.
Robert Giddings, Tribune Magazine
Kim, the ‘little friend of all the world’ and chela or disciple to the questing lama, is caught up in the espionage of ‘the Great Game’. The real protagonist in his magical adventure, however, is India in all its teeming life, mystery and beauty, highlighted by a captivating narration.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
Espionage has become so sophisticated and hi-tech that it’s difficult to believe that this, the greatest of all spy stories, was published more than a century ago when agents relied on wits rather than gadgets. Set against the background of the Great Game being played between Britain and Russia on the north-west frontier after the second Afghan war, it tells the story of an 11-year-old orphan boy who looks and sounds like a native but beneath his filthy rags is white. Kim, né Kimball O’Hara, wears his Irish soldier father’s ID round his neck and survives by running errands for a wily Pashtun horse trader with an ancient Islamic proverb to suit every occasion. ‘Children should not see a carpet on the loom until the pattern is made plain,’ he advises, his great red beard wagging solemnly. What Kim doesn’t know is that his mentor is also a “chain man” or spy for the British. Mahbub Ali’s constant travels through the subcontinent, selling horses to army officers and maharajahs, affords the perfect cover. How Kim, travelling with a holy lama in search of the sacred river, meets Colonel Creighton, who recognises his unique qualifications and talents and sends him to a mysterious spymaster to learn the secrets of espionage, is riveting. Adventures aside, Kipling’s descriptions of India, its exotic people and places, are awesome, as are Sharma’s seemingly inexhaustible collection of accents British and Indian – in Kim’s case, a subtle mixture of both. No mean feat.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
my choice for audiobook of the year
Those longing for African heat should check out Naxos’s recording of King Solomon’s Mines. Naxos have been quietly making some of the best recordings of Victorian and Edwardian children’s classics around, and this joins their excellent E Nesbit audiobooks as a must-have. Although my children began by squeaking, “That’s racist!”, and we were all appalled by the description of the elephant hunt, the thrill of Rider Haggard’s yarn is undiminished. Bill Homewood’s ability to summon up the entire cast, from Sir Henry Curtis, Dr Goode and beautiful Foulata to the evil King Twala and the witch Gagool, is magnificent. He gets the clicks, the accents, the rhythm of the prose and the feel of Africa spot on. The music, a mixture of Max Steiner’s original score to King Kong and Gottschalk’s Night in the Tropics is powerfully evocative. I tried vainly for years to get my kids to read this book, and they listened agog as the four adventurers struggle across the burning desert, over Sheba’s Breasts and into a lost kingdom where their former servant and the rightful king must fight a battle. If you have children of 10+, this is my choice for audiobook of the year. I only hope Naxos go ahead with She and Allan Quartermain next, because despite Rider Haggard’s lack of political correctness, these are tales from a time when both Englishmen and Africans understood what heroism meant.
Amanda Craig, The Independent
I recommend it highly
Jane Austen’s epistolary novel Lady Susan has never received much attention in comparison to her other six major novels. It is a short piece, only 70 pages in my edition of The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen: Minor Works containing forty-one letters and a conclusion. Scholars estimate that it was written between 1793-4 when the young author was in her late teens and represents her first attempts to write in the epistolary format popular with many authors at that time. In 1805, she transcribed a fair copy of the manuscript but did not pursue publication in her lifetime. The manuscriptwould remain unpublished until 54 years after her death with its inclusion in the appendix of her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh’s biography of his aunt, A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1871. Lady Susan’s greatest fault lies in its comparison to its young sisters. Since few novels can surpass or equal Miss Austen’s masterpieces, it should be accepted for what it is – acharming melodramatic piece by an author in the making. Notonly are we presented with interesting and provocative characters, Austen reveals anearly understanding of social machinations, wit,and the exquisite language that would become her trademark. Its greatest challenge appears to be in the limitations of the epistolary format itself where the narrative is revealed through one person’s perspective and then the other’s reaction and reply not allowing for the energy of direct dialogue or much description of the scene or surroundings. Withstanding its shortcomings, it is still a glistening jewel; smart, funny, and intriguing wicked. Given the obvious challenges of converting a novel written in letter format into audio recording, I was amazed and delighted at how listening to the novel enhanced my enjoyment. Naxos AudioBooks has pulled together a first rate production presenting a stellar cast supported by beautiful classical music. Casting British stage and screen actress Harriet Walter as the fabulously wicked Lady Susan was brilliant. She offers the appropriate edge and attitude necessary to complement the text. With Walter’s, we are never in any doubt of Lady Susan’s full capacity to scheme, manipulate and ooze immorality and deception. Unlike many audio recording where one narrator uses many voices to portray each character, this recording offers 7 actors, similar to a stage or radio production with each part cast with a unique actor offering variety and interest. We truly connect to eachportrayal of the character as they write their letters, inflect emotion into their train of thought, and personalize the production. The addition of period music by Romberg and Mozart equally enhance the setting. Running two hours and thirty minutes, this audio recording of Lady Susan actually enhanced my understanding and enjoyment of this often neglected yet highly amusing novella. I recommend it highly.
Laurel Ann, Austenprose.wordpress.com
This is a beautiful meditation on change
Sicily 1860: Prince Fabrizio has always lived contentedly with the “lovely mute ghosts” of the past. But now, with the impending unification with Italy and his nephew’s undesirable marriage, he fears ruin. This is a beautiful meditation on change, with Sicily and its golden landscape in the starring role. Brilliant.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
David Horovitch’s voice, rich in timbre and sepia in tone, is wonderfully paired with this masterpiece, a tale of degeneration and ruin. Like the declining House of Salina itself, Horovitch’s presentation possesses a certain ‘shabby grandeur’ that acquires a suitably obnoxious edge in conveying the vulgarity and ruthlessness of those who are tearing down the old order with the help of upstart money, main chance and relentless ambition.
Katherine A. Powers, The Washington Post
Even through the most active scenes, David Horovitch always projects a hint of the elegiac tone that suffuses this novel. Published in 1958, Lampedusa’s story recounts the changes in Sicilian culture that took place during the violent Italian unification of the mid-1800s. Listeners, many of whom might know nothing of mid-18th-century Sicily, will feel the strains of change – the one constant aspect of history. Most of the book is told from point of view of Fabrizio, a nobleman, and Horovitch's voice makes him gruff and cultured, noble with an edge of barbarism. We feel the prince's conflict between his love of his own past and his appreciation for the possibilities of the newly unified Italy.
D.M.H., AudioFile
In his bougainvillea-covered villa five hours by cart from Palermo, Prince Fabrizio faces change, even annihilation, as Garibaldi is about to hand over the whole of the Two Sicilies to King Victor Emmanuel to make a united Italy. The Prince meditates on change and growing older, seeing his future only too clearly with ‘beslobbered pillows and a pot under the bed’. Nevertheless the sensuous whole sparkles with colour and imagery: the ‘tyrannous sun’, the ‘yellow cheeks’ of peaches, the dogs ‘as passive as bailiffs’. Every listening yields more. Wonderful.
Rachel Redford, The Oldie
heartbreaking
This is the first of what is bound to be a stream of biographies celebrating the bicentenary of the composer's birth – but none, I bet, will include as much if any of the music. At least half this audio is devoted to the works, played with great passion and even greater panache by Turkish virtuoso Idil Biret. Everyone knows about Chopin's affair with George Sand, but I hadn't realised what a bitch she was towards the end, mocking his pain and accusing him of hypochondria. Fascinating older women, even if they're famous, sexy, clever and French, have their disadvantages. The story about Poland's national treasure penniless, alone and close to death in 1848, being taken to Edinburgh by rich, well-meaning patrons and seeking out a Polish family to talk to in his own all-but-forgotten native tongue, is heartbreaking. Just like his nocturnes.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
More than any musician or composer in history, Fredrick Chopin ‘owned’ the piano as an instrument, and made it sing. His fascinating life from prodigy to tragic death by consumption at age 39 is chronicled in The Life and Works of Chopinby Jeremy Siepmann, who also narrates, (with actor Anton Lesser reading excerpts from Chopin's letters). The audiobook intersperses biography with a wide sampling of music in such a way that the listener is beguiled into visualizing that bygone era in Paris when Romanticism flowered with imaginative, new melodies and tonal colors grown out of folk tunes and the symmetry of a classical past. Words fail to evoke the timeless and unique beauty of Chopin's creations then, which were not only among the greatest works for keyboard ever composed, but also the most universal. The story behind it all – including Chopin's unusual life and loves – is an intriguing snapshot of early 19th Century France, yet its distance in time shrinks to nothing with such a musical score as accompaniment. (As a companion video, we recommend the movie Impromptu, which starred Hugh Grant as Chopin.) A free thinker, shy and modest, Chopin was an unrivaled poetic genius who evolved, from nowhere, a new style of playing with a gift for composition that was boundless. His was art, not for art's sake, but for the heart's sake. Chopin's own words tell us why: ‘Bach is like an astronomer who, with the help of ciphers, finds the most wonderful stars. Beethoven embraced the universe with the power of his spirit. I do not climb so high. A long time ago I decided that my universe will be the soul and heart of man.’
Jonathan Lowe, burjreview.blogspot.com/
Lesser has fun with the comic characters
Charles Dickens’s tale of debtors’ prisons, cheating bankers, inept bureaucracies, and slowly sinking working people will resonate in today’s economic meltdown. Dickens always mixes commentary with romance and humor, and the enthusiastic Anton Lesser, a master of timing, character, and accent, understands that. The title character is born in the Marshalsea Prison, and her sense of delicacy and thoughtfulness, as well as her discomfort with sudden wealth, are effectively rendered by Lesser. Arthur Clennam, who cannot see that Little Dorrit loves him, sounds thoroughly decent and likeable. Lesser has fun with the comic characters. The listener will laugh out loud as the unrelentingly silly Flora chatters on and on at great speed and Pancks’s dedication to work (with his hair standing straight up) is tested by his grasping capitalist boss.
A.B., AudioFile
with Anton Lesser’s magical voice
Holding court in the debtors’ prison of the Marshalsea symbolises the vanity and arrogance of society, just one of Dickens’s many targets in this classic novel. He lashes the prison system, and his characters are grotesque and horribly flawed: bed-ridden Mrs Clennam rails against the world she has wronged; Flora Finching spews out non-stop romantic gush as she pursues her love of twenty years before. Only in ‘blessed’ Little Dorrit herself, one of Dickens’s unfeasibly good women, is there any hope for the future. Sprawling, and lacking a strong central character, Little Dorrit isn’t one of Dickens’s best, but with Anton Lesser’s magical voice, who cares?
Rachel Redford, The Observer
Narration and script combine to present a merry audiobook
The image of Little Lord Fauntleroy as a pampered, golden-curled boy in a ridiculous suit of velvet and lace is a travesty of the original and hugely successful 1855 story. Eight-year-old Cedric inherits riches: a castle and a title. He has to leave America where, despite his own poverty, he has befriended unfortunates, to join his old Scrooge of a grandfather in England. Of course his innate goodness and generous little heart win over the curmudgeonly old man. The unsentimental narration – and the drifts of Elgar – lift it into the realm of fable.
Rachel Redford, The Oldie
This meticulous abridgment does a good job with Burnett’s classic rags-to-riches story. Kindly fate transports an American boy, Cedric Errol, to England when he is discovered to be heir to the earldom of Dorincourt. Prepared to hate the American upstart, the crusty earl finds he can’t resist his grandson’s love. Teresa Gallagher’s gentle, refined voice brings the precocious Cedric into listeners’ hearts with arresting success. Equally well depicted are the pithy sayings of the ancient earl and Cedric’s mother’s bell-like tones. Characters and significant dialogue appear seamlessly, and there are few continuity issues in the abridgement. Narration and script combine to present a merry audiobook.
Audiofile Magazine, February/March 2008
Glen McReady reads with relish
The upside of creating the world’s most famous (and smuggest) detective is celebrity, fortune and a knighthood; the downside is that you’re stuck with him. In desperation Conan Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes off, but his publisher insisted he resurrect him.
In 1912, twenty years after his Baker Street sleuth first appeared on the Victorian crime scene, Conan Doyle wrote The Lost World, his best and last non-Sherlock Holmes novel. Cross Scoop with Jurassic Park and you’re getting close. Lovesick young reporter Edward Malone is briskly informed by Gladys that if he wants to marry her he has first to prove his heroism, for it is her wish to bask in the reflected glory of a husband whose great deeds are universally acclaimed. Malone’s kindly news editor suggests he expose a bogus explorer, one Professor Challenger who claims to have stumbled across a lost civilisation in Brazil. Perched on an inaccessible plateau roughly the size and shape of Sussex at the back end of the Amazon, it is inhabited by prehistoric monsters and primitive tribes. Alas, all the evidence – the bones, hides, feathers etc – were lost on the return journey. A second debunking expedition is proposed. Glen McReady reads this good old-fashioned ripping yarn with relish. I liked the pterodactyls roaring as fearsomely as Hendon aerodrome on a race day.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
In 1912, Doyle took his Victorian readers deep into the South American jungles where, high atop a treacherous plateau, a small band of British explorers encountered a terrifying world of prehistoric creatures long thought lost to the sands of time. The adventurers included a young newspaper reporter, Ed Malone; the swashbuckling aristocrat, Lord Roxton; the skeptical scientist, Professor Summerlee; and the brilliant and bombastic Professor Challenger, who leads the party. Doyle unfolds high adventure at its best with fantastic encounters with pterodactyls, stegosaurs and cunning ape-men. Glen McCready’s performance captures the time and tone of Doyle’s material perfectly without straying into melodrama. He nicely balances Malone’s sense of youthful wonder with the professors’ scientific pragmatism, while fully exploiting the humor spread strategically throughout, planting numerous chuckles among the thrills. McCready’s entertaining reading more than fulfils the author’s introductory wish to ‘give one hour of joy to the boy who’s half a man, or the man who’s half a boy.’
Publisher’s Weekly, February 2008
In this science fiction thriller about a death-defying search for dinosaurs in the uncharted depths of South America, Conan Doyle drew on contemporary interest in palaeontology and Darwinian evolutionary theory. Young journalist Edward has joined Professor Challenger’s expedition to prove himself worthy of his beloved Gladys’s hand, but his romanticism is soon rocked by the terrifying dangers of pterodactyls and ape men. As Thinking Boy’s Adventure it can’t be beaten – and the narrator sounds uncannily like a driven nineteenth-century adventurer himself!
Rachel Redford, The Oldie, April 2008
Silver-tongued Juliet Stevenson makes herself the personification of Jane
The audiobooks I most cherish are Juliet Stevenson’s unabridged readings of Jane Austen, all of which are now available from Naxos AudioBooks. Austen’s novels were written in the knowledge that they would be read aloud: it’s easy to imagine both chuckles and tense intakes of breath as their characters display foibles familiar to all of us, get into scrapes and misadventures, and emerge stronger and wiser.
Silver-tongued Juliet Stevenson makes herself the personification of Jane, never overplaying her low-key sarcasm or missing a necessary emphasis. I’ve just whiled away a cold with the one I know least well: Mansfield Park, the tale of how timid Fanny Price charmed the hearts of her wealthy and worldly relatives.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
Liza Ross capably handles the many characters
Liza Ross capably handles the many characters in Baum’s sequel to The Wizard of Oz. She develops a voice and sensibility for each character and adapts her voice for quick-moving dialogue and nonstop adventures. Ross depicts a youthful Tip, a boy who lives with his guardian, the witch Mombi. The witch brings to life Jack Pumpkinhead, whom Ross incarnates with a voice as stiff as the squash-headed figure’s unbending legs. Threats from Mombi send these unlikely heroes to the Emerald City, where they unite with the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman to recapture the city from an all-girl army. New characters join the familiar ones, all of whom Ross imbues with appropriate vocal qualities. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award.
S.W., AudioFile Magazine
Rhind-Tutt cleverly indulges the satire and the fantasy
Rhind-Tutt cleverly indulges the satire and the fantasy in a novel unpublished until 26 years after Bulgakov’s death. The absurdity of the Stalinist system is inventively mocked, Christ is sympathetically re-examined and over all is a layer of idiosyncratic fantasy.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
First published 26 years after his death in 1940, Bulgakov’s extraordinary satire of life under the political, cultural, religious and bureaucratic strictures of Stalinist tyranny has been variously described as Solzhenitsyn crossed with Lewis Carroll and the most powerful Russian novel of the 20th century. His cast of characters, real and imaginary, make Dickens’s dramatis personae appear sparse. Bulgakov’s include Pontius Pilate, a talking cat who puts on black-rimmed spectacles to read official documents quite often upside down, the devil at whose annual grand ball Stravinsky conducts the band, a poet imprisoned in a psychiatric asylum not unconnected with the Master of the title, and his ever-faithful lover Margarita. Ah, Margarita – what a woman. But maybe I’d be, too, if I had the magic ointment that makes one look 10 years younger. It sounds like a test run for botox. She makes a Faustian pact with the devil for true love’s sake so that the Master can write his precious books without fear of arrest. A classic that can be read on many levels, it’s played strictly for laughs by Julian Rhind-Tutt. But there is a much darker side.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
This novel, considered by many a masterpiece of 20th century Soviet era literature, is complex and many layered. It tells three stories, including that of Pontius Pilate and Jesus, the story of the Master who is in an insane asylum and his true love Margarita, and a writer who wants to destroy his own masterpiece which is the first story of Pontius Pilate. The main story is set in Russia in the 1930’s [sic.] and involves the devil who is disguised as Professor Woland, who can use black magic. Actually, listeners may wish for some magic of their own to keep the three stories straight, to separate fantasy from reality and to appreciate the nuances of the stories, all of which require a knowledge of art, religion, history, the Soviet era and the life of Christ. In addition, there is the usual difficulty of keeping the Russian names straight as characters are called by alternating versions of their first, middle and last names throughout. And then there is the fact that this novel is a satire and so it is up to the listener to figure out if the author actually means what he is saying. Fortunately, narrator Julian Rhind-Tutt, a British actor, is a magician with his voice. Within a minute, he can voice three characters and the narrator, gliding silkily from one to another with great distinction among them. Even if listeners aren’t totally sure what is going on at all times, this audiobook is still is a pleasure to listen to. And after this audiobook, listeners can always go on to read the book with a confidence gleaned from this intelligent and entertaining interpretation.
Soundcommentary.com
Bulgakov’s satire of the greed and corruption of Soviet authorities illustrates the redemptive nature of art and faith, and Julian Rhind-Tutt’s superb interpretation does the classic full justice. With a dramatic flair and a deep, multilayered voice, he pulls off a host of fantastical characters including Professor Woland (Satan) and several of his associates, Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ, witches and madmen and a variety of early 20th-century Moscow literary and theater types. Two minor caveats: a few characterizations are too nasal, and his cockney accents for low-class Russian characters are a bit disconcerting.
Publisher’s Weekly
How this posthumously published satire got written in Stalinist Russia and survived is as fascinating a story as the one it tells. Upon finally being printed, it became an international sensation that literati still acclaim as a modern classic. This complex, multilayered, and Rabelaisian novel is impossible to summarize. Suffice it to say that when Satan incognito brings a hellish gang to the officially atheist USSR, mayhem ensues, in the course of which the author verbally skewers the Soviet literary, social, and political establishments. Incongruously for the American ear, Julian Rhind-Tutt gives a decidedly Cockney spin to his narration. But he also gives it mischief, invention, and unflagging energy. Thus, he makes even the more obscure passages enjoyable listening. A fine reading of an important book. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award
Y.R., AudioFile
Rhind-Tutt cleverly indulges the satire and the fantasy
Rhind-Tutt cleverly indulges the satire and the fantasy in a novel unpublished until 26 years after Bulgakov’s death. The absurdity of the Stalinist system is inventively mocked, Christ is sympathetically re-examined and over all is a layer of idiosyncratic fantasy.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
The first recording of Bulgakov’s ‘The Master and Margarita’ blazes with vicious satire and obsessive love, cosmic vision, irreducible humanism, and the sheer joy of a talking, gun-toting, gherkin-spearing cat. Julian Rhind-Tutt smoothes the transitions between the story of Jesus and Pontius Pilate and that of the Devil’s dizzying visit to 1930s Moscow. The only hitch? It’s abridged, although I didn’t notice the cuts.
Bella Todd, TimeOut
First published 26 years after his death in 1940, Bulgakov’s extraordinary satire of life under the political, cultural, religious and bureaucratic strictures of Stalinist tyranny has been variously described as Solzhenitsyn crossed with Lewis Carroll and the most powerful Russian novel of the 20th century. His cast of characters, real and imaginary, make Dickens’s dramatis personae appear sparse. Bulgakov’s include Pontius Pilate, a talking cat who puts on black-rimmed spectacles to read official documents quite often upside down, the devil at whose annual grand ball Stravinsky conducts the band, a poet imprisoned in a psychiatric asylum not unconnected with the Master of the title, and his ever-faithful lover Margarita. Ah, Margarita – what a woman. But maybe I’d be, too, if I had the magic ointment that makes one look 10 years younger. It sounds like a test run for botox. She makes a Faustian pact with the devil for true love’s sake so that the Master can write his precious books without fear of arrest. A classic that can be read on many levels, it’s played strictly for laughs by Julian Rhind-Tutt. But there is a much darker side.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
This novel, considered by many a masterpiece of 20th century Soviet era literature, is complex and many layered. It tells three stories, including that of Pontius Pilate and Jesus, the story of the Master who is in an insane asylum and his true love Margarita, and a writer who wants to destroy his own masterpiece which is the first story of Pontius Pilate. The main story is set in Russia in the 1930’s [sic.] and involves the devil who is disguised as Professor Woland, who can use black magic. Actually, listeners may wish for some magic of their own to keep the three stories straight, to separate fantasy from reality and to appreciate the nuances of the stories, all of which require a knowledge of art, religion, history, the Soviet era and the life of Christ. In addition, there is the usual difficulty of keeping the Russian names straight as characters are called by alternating versions of their first, middle and last names throughout. And then there is the fact that this novel is a satire and so it is up to the listener to figure out if the author actually means what he is saying. Fortunately, narrator Julian Rhind-Tutt, a British actor, is a magician with his voice. Within a minute, he can voice three characters and the narrator, gliding silkily from one to another with great distinction among them. Even if listeners aren’t totally sure what is going on at all times, this audiobook is still is a pleasure to listen to. And after this audiobook, listeners can always go on to read the book with a confidence gleaned from this intelligent and entertaining interpretation.
Soundcommentary.com
Bulgakov’s satire of the greed and corruption of Soviet authorities illustrates the redemptive nature of art and faith, and Julian Rhind-Tutt’s superb interpretation does the classic full justice. With a dramatic flair and a deep, multilayered voice, he pulls off a host of fantastical characters including Professor Woland (Satan) and several of his associates, Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ, witches and madmen and a variety of early 20th-century Moscow literary and theater types. Two minor caveats: a few characterizations are too nasal, and his cockney accents for low-class Russian characters are a bit disconcerting.
Publisher’s Weekly
poetry – good, bad, or indifferent – can be appreciated most when read aloud
What price, fame? One would wish to ask that question of the shade of William McGonnagle [sic.] (1825–1902), who for more than 100 years has had the dubious distinction of being hailed as the worst poet to have ever written in the English language. His rhymes are trite. His meter is erratic, and the tone of his poems frequently doesn’t comport with the subject at hand. Someone adept at greeting card jingles displays more talent than McGonnagall [sic.]. Witness his “Tay Bridge Disaster” as only one example, for the man was, alas, utterly serious about his “art” and, thus, prolific. By compiling a selection of McGonnagall [sic.] work, Naxos Audio has not only provided a highly entertaining hour’s diversion but has confirmed something that every teacher of English has always known: poetry – good, bad, or indifferent – can be appreciated most when read aloud. Gregor Fisher, with an intelligent performance and a lovely Scots accent, lends what credibility he can to the author’s efforts, exposing the weakness of his verse while never letting the audiobook descend to the level of a cheap joke. Academics will enjoy this and might find the audiobook a useful tool around which to build a poetry and literary aesthetics lesson. Other lovers of literature who may (or may not) find much admirable in poetry to begin with will be amused by just how bad it can really get!
soundcommentary.com
The 1879 Tay Bridge disaster killed 90 rail passengers. Here’s how McGonagall, 1830-1902, ‘the world’s worst poet’, begins his requiem: ‘Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay! / Alas! I am very sorry to say / That ninety lives have been taken away / On the last Sabbath day of 1879, / Which will be remember’d for a very long time…’ Well, it made me laugh, especially read by Rab C. Nesbitt. But maybe after two weeks of non-stop rain on Loch Linnhe, anything would.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
Derek Jacobi is completely in his element when reading Milton
This collection of Milton’s poetry is Naxos’s contribution to the celebrations surrounding the 400th anniversary of the birth of the great English poet. It is an accessible choice featuring short poems, the famous sonnets on his deceased wife, Cromwell and blindness, plus some extracts from the epic Paradise Lost (also available from Naxos in a four-hour reading by Anton Lesser). The quality of Derek Jacobi’s audio performances can be erratic, but he is on top form here, his sparkling confidence with meter and rhyme allowing meaning to be revealed. Samantha Bond’s expressive empathy also transcends the complex language and the classical references to deliver powerful ideas on politics (Milton was a republican), religion and love. Musicality is central to the poet’s works: his friend Henry Lawes set many of the poems to music, so it is fitting that his pieces, performed on original instruments, are integral to this production.
Karen Robinson, The Sunday Times
The incomparable Derek Jacobi is completely in his element when reading Milton. His performance of the sonnet “On Shakespeare” seems particularly well suited to his voice, which is so closely associated with the Bard. Samantha Bond is equally comfortable with Milton’s verse, and the two work well together in the selections that call for two voices. While Paradise Lost is, no doubt, Milton’s most well-known masterpiece (if not his most widely read), this recording includes only brief selections from it, totalling less than seven minutes. This is a wise editorial choice as it leaves room for some shorter and more accessible poems that showcase the work of these two outstanding narrators.
D. B., AudioFile Magazine
Anton Lesser excels as the doomed but magnificently heroic Lucifer
October 2008 marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of John Milton, a man who rivals Shakespeare as a coiner of phrases still in everyday use (“Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new”, “They also serve who only stand and wait”, “A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit”, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven”, “Now, Voyager ...”).
To celebrate, Naxos has compiled The Essential John Milton, a tribute that should stand as a model for how to do a great writer honour. The first three CDs are devoted to Paradise Lost and the fourth and fifth to Paradise Regained. Both are read by Anton Lesser, who excels as the doomed but magnificently heroic Lucifer. The sixth is a chronological selection of Milton’s poetry, which shifts from rural idyll to thumping polemic. The seventh offers extracts from his most famous prose writings. If, like, me, you have always meant to read Paradise Lost, then do as I did and get to know Milton the man before attempting his awesome mountain of blank verse.
Begin by listening to the last CD, an illuminating biography written and read by Roy McMillan. It sets Milton in his age: the troubled Civil War years of the seventeenth century. He was a Protestant disowned by his father for leaving the Roman Catholic Church, an arrogant student convinced early of his own genius. He became a Puritan apologist whose arguments in favour of divorce (as a result of his own initially disastrous matrimonial experiences), the freedom of the press and parliamentary democracy are memorably trenchant.
Once I’d listened to the poems and prose, I knew the mindset of the man, and cantered confidently into Paradise Lost. OK, I haven’t finished listening to it yet – but this time I will.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
Madoc’s plummy tones reverberate with authority
In this classic high fantasy, sequel to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen two British siblings named Colin and Susan continue to cross into a world populated by Tolkienesque characters—elves, dwarfs, and a wizard. First published in 1963, this adventure finds the youngsters unwittingly unleashing horsemen known as the Wild Hunt and facing their old evil-witch nemesis. Madoc’s plummy tones reverberate with authority. His characterisations are spot-on, and the classical music that opens and closes the chapters is moodily dark and atmospheric, adding cachet to the production. There is a ponderous quality to the tale, however, as the action never really catches fire. For listeners who enjoyed the earlier title and are fans of classic fantasy.
Karen Cruze, Booklist
Robert Donat’s finest performance
Murder in the Cathedral revives the awesome 1953 Old Vic performance of Eliot’s play about the power struggle between Henry II and Thomas Becket, originally performed in the cathedral itself at the 1935 Canterbury Festival. In it you will hear echoes – ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality’ – taken up in Burnt Norton. The cut-glass feminine vowels of the chorus annoy in the opening scenes, but persevere: this was Robert Donat’s finest performance.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
beautifully complemented by the three-voice narration
The delicacy of this haunting, mythical novel is beautifully complemented by the three-voice narration and the intermittent Dowland and Byrd. It creates the mesmerising, unhappy worlds of Christian IV’s Denmark, where his musicians play unseen in chilly cellars, and of crazed Count O’Fingal’s Ireland, where he pursues a tune heard in his dream.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
Rose Tremain is an even more arresting and atmospheric writer than Zafón, and much better at intricate plots. Her Music and Silence is told from three points of view, made more vivid on audio by the use of three narrators: Michael Praed, who projects the eccentric but guilt-haunted King Christian IV of Denmark (1577–1648), Alison Dowling, horrid as his strident, sex-obsessed consort Kirsten, and Clare Wille as the gushingly romantic Francesca, Countess O’Fingal. Linking them all is the lute player Peter Claire (cue apt Naxos lute music by Dowling and Byrd) and his ill-fated affair with Emilia, Kirsten’s companion.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
Michael Praed shines in his performance of Tremain’s 1995 Whitbread Award-winning novel. His intimate, sensual voice and use of pacing – even within sentences – adds nuance to each scene. He has a distinct voice for each character, and his variety of accents are believable and without affectation. Especially engaging are the story’s central characters: King Christian IV of 17th-century Denmark has the quiet, gravelly voice of age and profound sadness; the lutenist Peter Claire (the central love interest) is very appealing. Clare Wille expertly handles the emotional swings of Christian’s childish, scheming and sex-crazed wife, Kirsten. The device of alternating voices becomes somewhat annoying in an abridgment, but the plot line is clear, and lovely 17th-century lute intervals signal omissions.
Publisher’s Weekly
English lutenist Peter Claire performs in the royal orchestra of King Christian IV’s 17th-century Danish court, stirring the hearts of the principal women in this novel. Royal family dynamics are interwoven with love and lust as Claire catches the eye of the king and achieves a far-flung influence on a number of fronts – his political clout reaches from a widowed Irish countess of Spanish origins to the workers in the Scandinavian silver mines. Chapters are interspersed with delicate lute chords, and the alternating voices of the readers animate the narrative of each of the main characters. Feminine and breathy, Alison Dowling and Clare Wille give velvety, expressive voices to the female characters’ tales. Michael Praed’s strong, unaffected speech depicts the intensity and desperation of the characters he portrays. Mortal danger and the prospect of tragedy build as the narrators deliver their spirited array of voices.
A.W., AudioFile Magazine
Adam Sims is a terrific narrator
Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is adventure of a different sort – and the only full-length novel Poe ever wrote. Young Arthur stows away to go to sea with his friend Augustus, only to encounter mutiny, storms, cannibalism, a mysterious island in the Antarctic sea, ambush, and the loss of the ship. It’s a novel which influenced other writers such as Melville and Verne and one of the characters is named Richard Parker – the name which Yann Martell gave to the Bengal tiger in The Life of Pi – and though it’s a tad over-the-top, it’s hugely enjoyable nonetheless. Adam Sims is a terrific narrator.
Kati Nicholl, Daily Express
The crew of the whaler Grampus has mutinied with stowaway narrator Pym on board. The sufferings of the survivors are hideous, with starvation driving them to cannibalism. This is a teasing, gripping adventure that travels through the mysterious deep and the blackness of death to a strange world of ethereal whiteness.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
An unexpected turn of events transforms the novelty of life on the high seas into a nightmare. Going to sea with his best friend, the story’s first-person narrator, Arthur Pym, travels the world and miraculously survives abominable horrors—mutiny, shipwreck, abandonment at sea, and hostile natives in the Galapagos. Narrator Adam Sims has a youthful, slightly raspy voice that ideally suits the young narrator. His articulate enunciation and measured pace are consistent throughout the story. To accommodate Poe’s lengthy tangents, Sims shifts his tone to match the formality of the historical asides. Through his enthusiastic narration, Sims gives the listener an exciting rendering of Poe’s only novel.
T.D.M., AudioFile
In his late teens, Arthur Gordon Pym, hero of Edgar Allan Poe’s only full-length novel, runs away to sea with his friend, Augustus Bernard, on his father’s vessel, the American whaling brig, Grampus. Their plan is that Arthur will start the voyage as a stowaway, until they are far enough out to sea to prevent his return to Nantucket. Nothing goes according to plan, however. A couple of days out, a mutiny forces Augustus to conceal Arthur’s presence for his safety. Not only Arthur’s fate, but his very life is in question as conditions deteriorate, and the forces of man and nature rise against him. The tale is actually in two parts, the first records this voyage of the Grampus, the second deals with an ill-conceived and somewhat fantastical voyage to Antarctica. Poe’s sense of the macabre and unexpected pervades the novel, creating an ever-rising suspense. Adam Sims, a veteran of radio, television, and theater performances, renders a very successful recounting of Arthur’s tale, most of which is delivered in the first person. Sims conveys Arthur’s naivete, adventurous spirit, ingenuity, and optimism concerning all the perils that befall him during the two journeys. This audiobook will appeal to adult and teen readers alike who love sea stories with a captivating story line and laden with heightened suspense. Several graphic passages dealing with cannibalism and violence may not be appropriate for junior high audiences.
Susan Allison, Soundcommentary.com
a poetical hymn to pastoralism
Aficionados of Japanese literature (not me alas) will know all about these two seminal 13th and 17th-century philosophical texts about giving up material possessions. Why I included them in my holiday reading package I’m not sure – two weeks on a Scottish island isn’t exactly renouncing the world. I’m glad I did. Hōjōki, like Virgil’s Eclogues, is a poetical hymn to pastoralism. Bashō’s prose – he was a famous haiku master – is equally passionate. If you get bogged down by the historical and cultural allusions, download the fifty-page crib that comes with CD 2 and voilà. It takes a while to tune in to the Japanese readers but you’ll end up wanting to compose your own haikus. Here’s my favourite: Writing a poem / with 17 syllables / can be quite difficult.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
Teresa Gallagher gives every character a distinct voice
E. Nesbit’s The New Treasure Seekers takes us back to the start of the last century and the six Bastable children who get into scrapes by always trying to be good. Older children will sympathise with the senior Bastables as their younger siblings create havoc – while all listeners will chuckle at their Just William-type antics.
This Bastable book stands on its own but the earlier The Treasure Seekers and The Wouldbegoods are also available. And though they sound as though they are being read by a cast of dozens, it’s because reader Teresa Gallagher gives every character a distinct voice – an amazing performance. Suitable for 9–15 year olds.
Kati Nicholl, Daily Express
Barrett delivers a standout performance
This week I travelled hopefully through Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry. Both made excellent audiobook journeys, possibly the better for being abridged. Like James Joyce, McCarthy is best appreciated when heard aloud rather than merely read, and the narrator, Sean Barrett, does his laconic, lapidary prose full justice. We are in the Big Country: Texas in 1980, with drug barons pumping slugs every which way. When Llewellyn Moss happens on a massacre and purloins a satchel containing $4.5 million, he appears doomed. But isn’t he our hero? Surely he can outwit a psychotic hit man who enjoys macabre rituals of death? Don’t hold your breath.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
It’s difficult to imagine a better narrator for No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy than Sean Barrett, (after hearing this short novel performed), although (knowing his work) I’m sure that Tom Stechschulte is also superb in his version. What makes Barrett a great choice to speak the killer’s words here is oddly similar to what made Javier Bardem a great choice for the character of Anton Chigurh in the Coen brothers movie version. Barrett has an understated, calm, but not quite laid-back air about his delivery, with vocal characteristics to match. There’s an element of tension present that the mirror surface can’t quite hide. You expect the worst to happen, and it does. As for the story, if you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s about a escaped killer tracking a man who found a bag of money related to a failed drug buy. Tommy Lee Jones plays the sheriff in the movie, and he’s trying to find both men before they find each other. Sounds simple enough. But as this morality tale plays out against the stark backdrop of west Texas it also expands its reach past mere entertainment into the realm of literature by extending its scope beyond three men in the desert to the bigger questions that have plagued man from the beginning. Hearing this “audio movie” version will be instructive for Coen brothers fans and screenwriters too, since you can compare, as I did, the dialogue between the book and the movie, and so see what choices the Coen brothers made in editing. Surprisingly, they stayed pretty much with the story, (except for one major scene), and were true to the dialogue too, but there are other subtle differences. (Some scenes were tightened, others emphasized by the Coens. Little extra dialogue was added, but some was subtracted.) By comparing, you will be able to figure out why (and which) things work better on the screen or on the page. As reader, Sean Barrett is an appropriate guide to this very original story, with spot-on west Texas accents and believable female characters, too. Speaking in the voice of the killer, though, he’s chillingly real and a minimalist just like Chigurh himself – a man of few emotions, attuned to destiny, accepting of fate, just telling it like it is, whether you like what truths are revealed about the world or not. (Naxos)
Jonathan Lowe, audiobookstoday.blogspot.com
Barrett delivers a standout performance in an artful abridgement that captures the essence of McCarthy’s classic. Set along the border between the U.S. and Mexico, the story follows the tragic and bloody adventures of Llewelyn Moss, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, and the sociopathic killer Anton Chigurh. When Moss makes off with millions of dollars of drug money, his life changes forever as both Bell and Chigurh pursue him, the latter leaving a trail of dead bodies in his wake. Barrett’s portrayal of Moss, Bell, and Chigurh are pitch perfect as are his renditions of the secondary characters and of the sheriff’s first-person reminiscences interspersed throughout the novel. This audio book is a rare gem and a mandatory listening for McCarthy fans.
Publishers Weekly Best Books 2009
J.L., AudioFile
After I was warned that the movie would give me nightmares, the abridged version of this seriously violent story about double-crossing drug dealers on the Tex-Mex border seemed a wise choice. That old chestnut about a picture speaking a thousand words doesn’t apply to McCarthy. He is as frugal with words as George IV, who insisted on laying the fires in Windsor Castle himself, was with fuel. In fewer than 40 McCarthy can describe the full horror of a desert massacre down to the dying breath of the only survivor pleading for water. What I hadn’t reckoned on terror-wise was Sean Barrett’s reading. Suspense, panic, desperation, madness, despair – I’ve heard him do all of them brilliantly in Stalingrad, Perfume, Malone Dies and many more, but I’ve never heard anyone identify as menacingly with the cold-blooded inhumanity of a psychopath as Barrett does here. Anton Chigurh, the hitman sent to recover $2½m stolen by a rival gang (or, more likely, by a dodgy cop), makes the judge in Blood Meridian, another McCarthy spine chiller, look as dangerous as Peter Rabbit. He has opaque blue eyes, ostrich-skin boots and a cattle-killing bolt gun to dispatch his victims. It leaves one heck of a mess but it’s untraceable. If he’s feeling generous his targets can stake their lives on the toss of a coin, but more often than not he asks politely if they will please look at him when he shoots them so that he can see the final terror in their eyes. If it sounds like gratuitous violence, remember that The Road, McCarthy’s most recent book, won the Pulitzer prize. Nothing he does is gratuitous. Ed Tom Bell, the hapless sheriff on whose patch the drug drop takes place, is used to violence. His grandfather was gunned down on his doorstep, his father was killed in the first world war, his own platoon wiped out in the next, and the local guy who stumbles across the bullet-ridden bodies is a Vietnam veteran. But Chigurh’s brand of evil plumbs new, incomprehensible depths that Sheriff Bell’s old-school law can never hope to vanquish. Definitely not a feel-good book, but the combination of McCarthy and Barrett is addictive.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
Excellent reading by Claire Wille
Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels explore the social divisions of the 19th century with a vivacity that resonates in the Britain of today when they are widening again. Which isn’t to say that they are worthy and consequently dull. No, Gaskell’s books are rich with romance and peopled by characters the listener truly feels for. North and South takes Margaret Hale, daughter of a C of E vicar, from the drawing rooms of London and the exquisite beauty of the New Forest to the grim northern industrial town of Milton where, appalled by the conditions his workers live and work in, she finds herself in conflict with mill owner John Thornton. Excellent reading by Claire Wille.
Kati Nicholl,The Daily Express
a wonderful testament to one of [Austen’s] less appreciated novels
In the late 1700s, romantic gothic fiction was a popular genre epitomised by Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, which involved a beautiful heroine who suffers mental torture at the hands of her aunt’s husband in his ruined castle. Writing a few years later, Austen presented herself as the literary equivalent of Dawn French and mocked Radcliffe’s work with her own version, Northanger Abbey. This satire laughed at the idea that all young girls were beautiful and good-natured and all large buildings imposing and full of mystery. Juliet Stevenson conveys all the irony that Austen intended in her work, and this is a wonderful testament to one of her less appreciated novels.
Kim Bunce, The Observer
Northanger Abbey is the exuberant lesser known child of Jane Austen’s oeuvre. Even though it was her first novel to be completed and sold in 1803, much to Austen’s bemusement it was never published and languished with Crosby & Co for thirteen years until she bought it back for the ten pounds that the publisher had originally paid. It was finally published posthumously together with Persuasion in late 1817. If its precarious publishing history suggests it lacks merit, I remind readers that in the early 1800’s many viewed novels as lowbrow fare and unworthy of serious consideration. In “defence of the novel” Austen offered Northanger Abbey as both a parody of overly sensational Gothic fiction so popular in the late eighteenth-century and a testament against those opposed to novel reading. Ironically, Austen pokes fun at the critics who psha novel writing by cleverly writing a novel defending novel writing. Phew! In a more expanded view it is so much more than I should attempt to describe in this limited space but will reveal that it can be read on many different levels of enjoyment for its charming coming of age story, astute social observation, allusions to Gothic novels and literature, beautiful language and satisfying love story. I always enjoy reading it for the shear joy of its naïve young heroine Catherine Morland, charmingly witty hero Henry Tilney and the comedy and social satire of the supporting characters.
It is believed that Jane Austen wrote many of her first works for the entertainment of her family and would read them aloud for their opinion and enjoyment. It is not hard to imagine that Northanger Abbey was presented to her family in this manner. The language and phrasing lends itself so freely to the spoken word, almost like a stage play, that I was quite certain that an audio book would be a great enhancement to the text. Add to that the talent of a creative narrator and you have a great combination for several hours of entertainment ahead of you. I adore audio books and listen to them in the car during my commute to work. This Naxos AudioBooks recording is read by the acclaimed British stage and screen actress Juliet Stevenson whose performance as the acerbic Mrs Elton in the 1996 movie adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Emma was amazingly as outrageously funny as Austen’s insufferable character. Stevenson’s reading did not disappoint and far exceeded my expectations. She added just the right amount of irony and humor to the reading that I was never in doubt that it is a burlesque of campy Gothic fiction or other overly sentimental novels popular in Jane Austen’s day. Her choice of characterizations was imaginative and captivating. Hearing her interpretation of the emptiness of Mrs Allen and her frivolous distinction for fashion, Isabella Thorpe and her shallow endearments, and Henry Tilney with his knack for reading and adapting to different personalities with wit and charm, I have a deeper appreciation and understanding of the novel and recommend it highly.
‘And what are you reading, Miss — ?’ ‘Oh! It is only a novel!’ replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. ‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda’; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best–chosen language.” Ch 5
Laurel Ann, Austenprose.com
Lesser does passion and romance brilliantly
There are scholars who argue that, given the glaring contrast in style, structure and characterisation between the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer could not possibly have written both.
Assuming you already have the Iliad produced by Naxos last year, here is your chance to decide for yourself. Personally, I prefer the Odyssey and, since Anton Lesser reads both, my preference has nothing to do with the voice. To be honest, I preferred Derek Jacobi’s more macho recording of the Iliad, no longer available, which was more suited to the relentless descriptions of blood-fests.
Homer’s scene changes are almost cinematic, a plus if you’re trying to get teenagers to engage with it. One minute you’re in Ithaca where the hero’s faithful wife Penelope is fending off a house full of unwanted suitors, then you’re on Olympus eavesdropping on the gods arguing, as usual, about which mortals to support and which to put the boot into, and then it’s over to the idyllic island where the beautiful nymph Calypso holds Odysseus prisoner.
The Odyssey, with its litany of challenges, betrayals and, of course, heroism, is the perfect vehicle for Lesser, whose musical voice does passion and romance brilliantly.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
Anton Lesser is wonderful
The lascivious and repellent dwarf Quilp who dogs saintly Little Nell and her feckless grandfather is one of Dickens's most vividly nasty creations. Anton Lesser is wonderful in all the intricacies of this powerful fable – a sound investment for winter evenings.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
prepare to be delighted with Neville Jason’s transcendent reading
What pleasures await in this exceptional production of T.H. White’s classic retelling of the tales of King Arthur and Sir Kay and Merlin and the Sword and Round Table in magical once-upon-a-time England. For those who have never read these five books, prepare to be surprised by their adultness, their laugh-out-loud humor and tongue-in-cheek commentary on modern life; for those who know them well, prepare to be delighted with Neville Jason’s transcendent reading. The lovely timbre of his narrative voice, his rhythmic, easy pacing and host of individual characterizations transport listeners into White’s weird and wonderful otherworld as quickly as Alice slipped through the looking glass. This long production is so entrancing that one wishes it would never end. The beautiful packaging and helpful notes add to the satisfaction. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award
A.C.S., AudioFile
the kind of production that makes the lines live
Did you hear Othello on Radio 3 on Sunday? It was the highly acclaimed recent production from the Donmar in London, the one where people who went to see Ewan McGregor because he’s a film star came away stunned by the power of his performance as Iago, where people who go to see all the Shakespeare they can marvelled at the depth and dignity of Chewetel Ejiofor as Othello, the one for which tickets were like gold.
Well, there it was on Sunday, free, and it was everything all the critics had said. It was the kind of production that makes the lines live, where you hear more than you knew was there, where you forget this is acting and just see the people. It swept you up, brought you inside its every minute.
All those fools who want to take Shakespeare off the national curriculum had their rebuttal here. Even those idiots who wonder what Radio 3 is for had their answer.
So don’t write to say this is minority stuff, or you don’t see the value of the licence fee. Only a properly funded public service broadcaster is going to bring great work in outstanding new performances to the masses, and the masses deserve the best.
There is no necessary distinction between quality and popularity. What mass audiences like is not necessarily rubbish. By the same token, some things only small audiences like are worth their place in any schedule because a) a small radio audience is still something like 100,000 listeners, while b) it is insulting to assume Shakespeare is only for posh people, and c) things that start with small audiences can be the place for new ideas and talents to grow.
Gillian Reynolds, The Daily Telegraph
The cast of the sellout Othello at the Donmar Warehouse spent three days recording this version. Working with Michael Grandage, the director of the stage production, they had to rely on their voices alone for dramatic impact. Ewan McGregor’s Iago keeps the plot moving with urgent passion rather than cool and measured calculation as he whips Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Othello into a jealous and murderous frenzy against his new bride (Kelly Reilly, oozing sex with a honeyed come-to-bed voice). Yet McGregor’s interpretation throws no new light on Iago’s true motives as Ejifor brings terrifying power to his character’s disintegration. For the actors’ views, watch the accompanying DVD of cast interviews.
Karen Robinson, The Sunday Times
Naxos’s recordings Our Island Story is a jewel in the crown
Naxos’s recordings of H. E. Marshall’s Our Island Story is a jewel in the crown. Written at the height of Edwardian confidence in the British Empire, it tells the history of Britain from its beginnings to the death of Queen Victoria. This is exactly what children need to counter the disconnected history now taught in schools. Read by the dulcet Anna Bentinck and the noble-sounding David Philpott, with stirring music from Naxos’s library of recordings, each of the three volumes give a child five hours of fun.
Amanda Craig, Independent on Sunday
History has all the best stories, and all the best histories are more compelling heard aloud. The immediacy of H. E. Marshall’s Our Island Story turned several generations of twentieth century children into history addicts. Long-rubbished by the politically correct, it has just enjoyed a centenary renaissance in print, and could do even better as an unabridged audiobook as much for parents as children.
Here is the history that we grew up on: Boadicea and Caractacus standing up to the Romans, King Arthur and his Round Table, Alfred burning the cakes, Blondel seeking out Richard the Lionheart, the princes in the Tower, Guy Fawkes, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Wolfe at Quebec, Wellington at Waterloo, Florence Nightingale, the Black Hole of Calcutta and the relief of Mafeking. Some of the euphemisms will raise belly-laughs (the Romans “were rude to Boadicea’s daughters”) but there is much still to stir the spirit.
Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall admitted that it included fairytales as well as history, but she was wise about the value of legends and myths to a nation’s sense of itself. Narration is divided between Anna Bentinck and Daniel Philpott.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
Naxos’s recordings of Our Island Story [are] a jewel in the crown
Naxos’s recordings of H. E. Marshall’s Our Island Story is a jewel in the crown. Written at the height of Edwardian confidence in the British Empire, it tells the history of Britain from its beginnings to the death of Queen Victoria. This is exactly what children need to counter the disconnected history now taught in schools. Read by the dulcet Anna Bentinck and the noble-sounding David Philpott, with stirring music from Naxos’s library of recordings, each of the three volumes give a child five hours of fun.
Amanda Craig, Independent on Sunday
History has all the best stories, and all the best histories are more compelling heard aloud. The immediacy of H. E. Marshall’s Our Island Story turned several generations of twentieth century children into history addicts. Long-rubbished by the politically correct, it has just enjoyed a centenary renaissance in print, and could do even better as an unabridged audiobook as much for parents as children.
Here is the history that we grew up on: Boadicea and Caractacus standing up to the Romans, King Arthur and his Round Table, Alfred burning the cakes, Blondel seeking out Richard the Lionheart, the princes in the Tower, Guy Fawkes, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Wolfe at Quebec, Wellington at Waterloo, Florence Nightingale, the Black Hole of Calcutta and the relief of Mafeking. Some of the euphemisms will raise belly-laughs (the Romans “were rude to Boadicea’s daughters”) but there is much still to stir the spirit.
Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall admitted that it included fairytales as well as history, but she was wise about the value of legends and myths to a nation’s sense of itself. Narration is divided between Anna Bentinck and Daniel Philpott.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
the creme de la creme of audio listening
A long holiday journey is perfect for unabridged Dickens. Naxos have followed their excellent Bleak House with Our Mutual Friend, his final finished novel, published in 1865. An almost dead man is fished out of the Thames by a scavenger and his daughter.
Who is he, and how did he get there? The answer lies deep in London’s lucratively managed rubbish heaps, and a gothic mystery worthy of Wilkie Collins unrolls. David Timson makes the cavalcade of contemporary types compellingly real – the nouveaux riches Veneerings, the pompous Podsnaps, Boffin the deep and devious king of Dust, the charitable Jew Riah and the touchingly mad Jenny Wren.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
Our Mutual Friend is a rich, dark work, fuelled by Dickens’s disgust with the worship of money he saw in the society around him. It takes many days to listen to the complete convoluted story, with Timson relishing every shifting mood and all 58 characters, and capturing the sharp edge of Dickens’s satire in set-pieces such as the vulgar dinner parties held by the grotesque Veneerings for their ephemeral ‘best friends’. The whole is packed with powerful scenes, such as where pathos is fired by fury when old Betty is forced to give away the last beloved remnant of her family, her orphaned grandson, in order to avoid the workhouse. Unabridged Dickens as gloriously presented as this is the creme de la creme of audio listening.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
The real protagonist of Dickens’s murder-mystery novel is the befouled River Thames, which gives up its dead to the scavenging Hexham. Timson’s voices for the kaleidoscope of characters, from the dolls’ dressmaker to the false friends of the moneyed Veneerings, are the best of the best.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
David Timson reads with a sense of fun
David Timson reads Dickens’s last complete novel with a sense of fun. As always, Dickens creates a fabulous array of characters: the nouveau riche Veneerings, the dwarf who makes doll clothes, the bizarre schoolmaster, and the abysmally poor who trawl the Thames for bodies or daily sift the dust and dirt of Victorian England for a skimpy living. Timson’s dramatic talents add dimension to each personality – just the sort of acting that makes an audio experience so satisfying. Naxos has done a fine job of abridging the book (Timson also reads the unabridged version on 28 CDs). Not much is lost in terms of plot and characterization, and Dickens’s great satiric and social themes come through clearly: the plight and misery of the poor and the greed and heartless stupidity of the rich. If the abridgment seems a bit disjointed, it simply follows the novel’s narrative style. This is a wonderful listen for Dickens fans and novices alike.
Publisher’s Weekly
Wayne Forester is superb
Three teens unwittingly and inadvertently live out once more an age old Welsh Mabinogian legend. When Allison, who is ill, hears scrabbling in the attic over her head, she gets Gwyn, the housekeeper’s son, to investigate. Nothing is there but a set of dishes with abstract owls painted on them. From then on, it gets spookier as the noises continue, and when Allison traces the owls on the plates and folds the papers, more strange things happen. The Welsh legend/myth involves Blodeuwedd, the flower goddess, and terrible jealousy as two men love her and one kills the other. Nothing can stop the unfolding events. Storms, tempests, pleading, reason, and science only reinforce the tale. Garner’s remarkable writing is simple and straighforward without one wasted word. He lets the audience figure things out through action and dialogue. Characters are well defined. Experienced narrator Wayne Forester is superb. Not only does he take on the voices of disparate characters with practiced ease, he also manages it so seamlessly and immediately that it seems as though there must be two speakers. Twilight readers and others who like to be frightened should enjoy this Carnegie Medal and Guardian Award winner.
Mary Purucker, soundcommentary.com
Alan Garner’s The Owl Service read by Wayne Forester. Forester is superb… Twilight readers and others who like to be frightened should enjoy this Carnegie Medal and Guardian Award winner.
Mary Purucker, SoundCommentary.com
Pithy, informative, entertaining – the real McCoy
As near to the horse’s mouth, historically, as you’re likely to get to this epic conflict between Greece and Persia circa 480 BC. Herodotus’s Histories (this is a tiny extract) have been regularly plundered over twenty-five centuries by historians from Thucydides to Tom Holland. Forget 300, Hollywood’s take on Thermopylae. Listen to the way Herodotus sets the scene: ‘West of Thermopylae rises a lofty and precipitous hill, impossible to climb, which runs up into the chain of Oeta, while to the east the road is shut in by the sea and by marshes. In this place are the warm springs which the natives call the Cauldrons, and above them stands an altar sacred to Heracles ...’ Pithy, informative, entertaining – the real McCoy.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
Stevenson is a natural for reading Austen
What more could I ask for, the sublime Juliet Stevenson reading, unabridged, one of my favourite Jane Austen novels. Stevenson is a natural for reading Austen, never showy, no verbal trickery, and an obvious love for Austen that communicates to the reader. I am trying to eke this out, a chapter an evening, the perfect end to the day.
Sue Baker, Publishing News
Listening to Juliet Stevenson’s marvelous reading, one wonders if she collaborated with Austen in another life. Her narration enhances the text so beautifully that one thinks the author must have coached her. Stevenson applies vocal interpretations that make the characters pop with life. Mary whines and exclaims perfectly; Admiral Croft snaps listeners to attention; Sir Walter Elliot effervesces with indignation over the state of his finances. Only Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth speak in calm, measured tones. Nestled in social commentary targeting the matter of class, the story traces the twists and turns that Anne and Frederick must navigate on the road to love.
AudioFile Magazine
Greg Wise’s wonderful interpretation
This is the classic story of Dorian Gray, beautiful and narcissistic, who sells himself for eternal beauty and youth, while his portrait changes with time, reflecting his aging and the evil in his soul. Intellectual snobbery, cynicism, irony, class differences, and philosophizing ‘youth is the only thing worth having’ are all explored in this rather dark novel, which is lightened with some witty dialog. Accomplished British stage, television, and movie actor Greg Wise’s wonderful interpretation of the story subtly voices the characters and varies the tempo and mood so that even the lengthy descriptive passages come alive. And the musical interludes here are appropriate and pleasant. Adults who are familiar with the story will love Wise’s performance, although those new to it might find some of the philosophizing a bit tedious. Young adults might have problems getting through it for the same reason.
Sue Rosenzweig, SoundCommentary.com
Conan Doyle’s post-First World War message of hope
Professor Challenger, his wife, journalist Malone and adventurer Roxton have gathered with oxygen canisters to watch the final hours of the world. As a poisonous miasma apparently asphyxiates the human race, Malone feverishly writes his copy. More than just SF, this is Conan Doyle’s post-First World War message of hope. Read with gusto.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
In Doyle’s short novel featuring Professor Challenger, the earth moves through a poisonous belt of the ‘ether’ – the stuff supposedly filling space – and the protagonists of the first Challenger novel, The Lost World, reunite to observe what seems to be the end of all life. The book, though a classic of science fiction, is painfully dated in its science and in its casual racism, which only surfaces occasionally but is off-putting. But Glen McCready’s genial reading helps. He supplies appropriate voices for the major characters, including the rumbling, bull-like Professor Challenger, his dainty wife, and the drawling Lord Roxton. Overall, McCready delivers the somewhat talky text with careful expressiveness, helping to bring it to life. It’s entertaining for those who can overlook the book’s deficiencies.
W.M., AudioFile Magazine
Read with upbeat charm by Laurel Lefkow, it’s irresistible
Nothing could contrast more with this than the tranquil moralising of Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 classic, Pollyanna, a hugely popular tale of an eternally optimistic orphan who looks on the bright side of life with such determined imagination that can find an upside even to a crippling back injury. Try it. Read with upbeat charm by Laurel Lefkov, it’s irresistible.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
Life couldn’t be much worse for Pollyanna Whittier after her father dies and she is sent to live with stern Aunt Polly. Pollyanna carries on as her father would have wanted her to, looking for the best, even in bad situations. Lefkow imbues this timeless 1913 classic with a turn-of-the century flair, yet wisely eschews an overly saccharin portrayal of the bubbly and adventurous Pollyanna who maintains a sunny disposition. Lefkow’s reading embraces the characters as she varies her tones to indicate changes in their personalities. Cheerful Pollyanna softens gruff John Pendleton, cantankerous and demanding Mrs Snow, and frosty Aunt Polly. Piano interludes punctuate chapter endings. This entertaining release of a junior classic may revive interest in this once popular novel.
Patricia Austin, Booklet
A sincere thank you to the talented Laurel Lefkow for presenting this splendid 1913 classic in such a delightful manner that even somewhat jaded contemporary listeners will be enchanted. Pollyanna’s sweetly innocent personality and her ‘glad game’ of seeing the best in every situation are in stark contrast to the personalities of her sour and bitter Aunt Polly and even the maid, Nancy, who befriends Pollyanna during her sad early days. Each of these very different characters is warmly rendered by Lefkow. When Pollyanna is badly injured, her beliefs are challenged, a turn of events that brings an element of realism to this old-fashioned story. An excellent insert provides detailed notes about the book.
AudioFile, February/March 2008
a great introduction to young students
This abridged audio recording of Pride and Prejudice read by English actress Jenny Agutter also includes impressive selection of extras as a great introduction to young students. Publisher’s description: Pride and Prejudice is a key title for the new Naxos AudioBooks series Young Adult Classics. An abridged recording with music makes this Regency novel much more accessible to the 21st century young adult keen to get to grips with the classics. Pride and Prejudice is a leading title for Young Adult Classics, being one of the pillars of English Literature, and Jenny Agutter’s friendly reading bridges the gap between the films and the book. This edition includes a bonus CD-ROM which contains the abridged and unabridged texts, and Top Teacher’s Notes by high profile English teacher Francis Gilbert.
austenprose.wordpress.com
Whitfield puts it all into welcome perspective
Tactfully but firmly, without making you feel like a complete wally, Whitfield takes everything you ever thought you knew about the incredible flowering of the arts in Europe between, roughly, 1400 and 1550 and gently tweaks it so that you realise you were probably barking up the wrong fresco. For a start, when I glibly referred just now to the “incredible flowering of the arts”, what I should have said was arts and literature, because it was writers such as Boccaccio, Petrarch and Machiavelli who really started the ball rolling. They and their fellow scholars embraced humanism, represented by literature, moral philosophy and history rather than theology and law, putting Man not God at the centre of things. Botticelli, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Copernicus et al feature too, of course, but Whitfield puts it all into welcome perspective.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
The nutshell’s kernel is that momentous developments followed from placing man, not God, at the centre of the Renaissance world view. These 78 minutes are packed full of detail, from the artists’ exploration of space and perspective to maps reflecting the changing image of the world. Inspiring.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
one of the most powerful uses of music I have ever heard
There is a heartstopping passage in Restoration, at our hero and narrator Robert Merivel’s wedding feast. He describes how, as his father-in-law plays an air of intense melancholy on his viola da gamba, he is overcome with an unhappiness so profound he has to run outside and weep. This epiphany is described to the strains of that very piece, John Dowland’s Flow my Tears, one of the most powerful uses of music I have ever heard on an audio production. The period is the 1660s, and we follow the rise, fall and redemption of the troubled physician Merivel, made palpably likeable by Degas’s performance. He becomes a favourite of Charles II, gains and loses wealth, works at the “new Bedlam” in the Fens and returns to London for the plague and the great fire, finally buttressing his sadness with a sense that he can be “useful”.
Karen Robinson, Sunday Times
David Rintoul gives a rich plummy reading
Thomas Paine, born in England in 1737, was a loser as a husband (two failed marriages) and as a worker at diverse jobs. However, in 1774 he sailed for America and found his true calling, journalism. His essay Common Sense galvanized the rebellious colonies and his later pamphlets, The Crisis, inspired the Continental Army. In 1787 he returned to England where he was welcomed by the influential Edmund Burke, who had been sympathetic to the American cause but who despised the French revolutionaries. Burke wrote Reflections on the Revolution of France in 1790, in which he excoriated the French. Rights of Man is Paine’s reply to Burke’s 366-paged, long-winded, aristocratic text. Short, punchy, simple in style and devastating, Part One of his defense of the French Revolution was an instant success. Part Two got him tossed out of England for seditious libel. He fled to France but did no better there, arguing against the death penalty for Louis XVI. He returned to America in 1802 but was denied the right to vote because of a charge of atheism. He died in obscurity in 1809. Rights of Man (1791) begins with comments to George Washington. Paine then describes the events leading up to the storming of the Bastille, the role of the clergy in France, the establishment of religion by law, the useless monarchy, and the revenues of England and France (French finances are far superior). Part Two (1792) is addressed to M. Lafayette and is a “small treatise” on principles and practices, predicting more revolutions because monarchy is on the way out in Europe. Narrator David Rintoul graduated from Edinburgh University and is a noted actor of stage and screen. He gives Edmund Burke a rich plummy reading. Paine’s voice is incisive and direct. Although some of the text is dry (the section on finances, for example), most is filled with reason, logic and irony. These are eternal words of wisdom from a man of principle. Today’s politicians should read them again and again.
soundcommentary.com
Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man read by David Rintoul. These are eternal words of wisdom from a man of principle. Today’s politicians should read them again and again.
Janet Julian, SoundCommentary.com
McCarthy is best appreciated when heard aloud
Rupert Degas is the most versatile of narrators: he excels in Haruki Murakami and was Pantalaimon in Philip Pullman’s multivoiced Northern Lights. Chill menace is his forte, so when you turn on his narration of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road get ready to turn into a hypnotised rabbit. McCarthy’s acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel is set on what feels like a highway to nowhere, and it helps to know that there is a final shard of hope. A determinedly resourceful man and his Christ-like son creep through a hellish, ash-laden landscape, scattered with the broken relics of civilisation and bristling with cannibals. What keeps you listening is the book’s pin-sharp portrait of a father’s love and the fine match of writing style and reader. McCarthy has that Irish gift for words that make music; Degas tells the story with perfect pitch.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
The conspiratorial, undramatic narration heightens the impact of this powerful and chilling vision of a post-apocalyptic America. Father and son struggle to survive in a ruined environment by feeding off the leavings of the dead. Sounds depressing, but is compelling and strangely beautiful.
Rachel Redford, The Times
This gripping, suspenseful novel will be hard to turn off – even by listeners with no or very little interest in the sci-fi genre. The Road begins in the late fall sometime in the future after catastrophe of horrible proportions has struck the continent. Two survivors, a man and his son, are traveling in a southerly direction. Are they seeking a warmer climate? Are they escaping from marauding bandits? Are they trying to locate other survivors? The pair carry their possessions in a grocery cart. The abandoned towns and cities are covered with a coating of gray ash. The forests contain the charred remains of bushes and trees. They subsist on what they can glean from abandoned houses, barns, and fields. Due to past experiences, they purposely avoid any contact with other people. Were they concerned about deadly contagious disease? robbery? murder? some kind of communicable radiation sickness? As the story progresses, the man becomes seriously ill and finally dies. The boy, of undetermined age, is left alone. Does he survive? Violence is minimal but a sense of doom pervades the story. Narrator Rupert Degas is superb. His deep, whispery, almost ominous tone further enhances this riveting tale of survival in the face of utter hopelessness. He gives each character a distinct voice that is appropriate for the situation. The abridging editor also deserves high marks for maintaining the storyline yet forcing the listener to fill in the blanks, all of which made this a step above a run-of-the-mill sci-fi novel experience. Violence is minimal but a sense of doom pervades the story.
SA, Soundcommentary.com
nothing short of astonishing
Novels about economic migrants don’t have to be as desolate as Steinbeck or as farcical as Marina Lewycka. Somewhere between The Grapes of Wrath and Two Caravans there’s room for a story like this one about Lev, whose job at the sawmill in a small eastern European village has gone (no more trees), so he has bought a bus ticket to England to look for work. It’s bad – Lev’s beautiful young wife has died; in London he’s paid a fiver for a day’s work posting flyers; and the news from home is that a new dam is about to obliterate his village – but it could be worse. He finds work, a friendly landlord and a sexy girlfriend, and his new mobile phone keeps him in touch with his irrepressible buddy, Rudi, at home. You know you’re in safe hands with a writer as professional as Rose Tremain – this won the 2008 Orange prize – and a reader as sympathetic as Juliet Stevenson. Maybe that’s the trouble: it’s funny and touching – but a bit too safe, not quite edgy enough. Still worth reading, though.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
Juliet Stevenson’s performance of The Road Home is nothing short of astonishing. Tremain’s protagonist, Lev, emigrating from an Eastern Bloc country to work in the UK, speaks with a Slavic accent. In his homesick struggles to survive in a foreign culture completely different from his expectations, he meets people with Qatari, Irish, posh-Brit, old-lady, drunk-man, Chinese, Cockney, and young-girl voices. Stevenson renders each so impeccably, and makes them so distinct in timbre and personality as well as accent, that you utterly lose track of the fact that it’s all created by one actor. Most of all, she delivers a moving story of one immigrant who occasionally does unwise or dopey things but never loses our interest or sympathy. Cause for celebration. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award
B.G., AudioFile
Winner of the 2008 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, this latest book by Tremain (The Colour) is the story of widower Lev, an economic migrant who travels from the Eastern Bloc to London to find work to support his child back home. Actress/narrator Juliet Stevenson’s (To the Lighthouse) distinct rendering of each character gives this recording the feel of a full-cast production. Listeners who enjoy Anita Brookner and literary fiction will be moved by this realistic portrait. Highly recommended. The Little, Brown hc was recommended as ‘a worthy addition to the growing body of work centered on the loneliness and frustration of the immigrant experience.’
Carly Wiggins, Library Journal
Juliet Stevenson’s performance of The Road Home is nothing short of astonishing. Tremain’s protagonist, Lev, emigrating from an Eastern Bloc country to work in the UK, speaks with a Slavic accent. In his homesick struggles to survive in a foreign culture completely different from his expectations, he meets people with Qatari, Irish, posh-Brit, old-lady, drunk-man, Chinese, Cockney, and young-girl voices. Stevenson renders each so impeccably, and makes them so distinct in timbre and personality as well as accent, that you utterly lose track of the fact that it’s all created by one actor. Most of all, she delivers a moving story of one immigrant who occasionally does unwise or dopey things but never loses our interest or sympathy. Cause for celebration.
Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award
B.G., AudioFile
Katinka Wolf’s voice resonates as if she were reading in a house owned by one of the story’s historic characters
Katinka Wolf’s voice resonates as if she were reading in a house owned by one of the story’s historic characters, with the slightly cavernous echo lending an earthy and homespun feel to the text. The story of how rote religion and religiosity can betray true faith is penned expertly by Hawthorne. It appears less an attack on Christianity than on those who would take the name but not the responsibility. The abridgment is evenhanded and unforced. This is a story that should be heard more than once as its message may elude many contemporary readers. Wolf’s meticulous performance helps to infuse the theme into the mind’s eye of the listener.
S.M.M., Audiofile Magazine
brilliant and brittle
This is a vintage recording of the 1950s production of Sheridan’s brilliant and brittle eighteenth-century comedy of manners, with Dame Edith as the Machiavellian gossip-monger Lady Sneerwell elevating plummy elocution to Olympian heights, and Claire Bloom as Lady Teazle, sounding incredibly young. But then, I suppose, she was. Her dazzlingly witty exchanges with her ageing husband make Edward Albee’s murderous sparring partners Martha and George sound positively cosy. Sheridan’s wit was legendary. When the Drury Lane theatre which he owned burned down, he sat in a coffee house opposite, watching the blaze. Why wasn’t he distraught at the sight of his entire worldly wealth going up in smoke, asked a bemused onlooker. “May not a man enjoy a quiet drink by his own fireside?” Sheridan replied.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
one of the greatest adventures ever written
Some books are so famous, so familiar, that even though you haven’t actually read them, you feel you have. I think it may have been its worthy biblical title, taken from the Book of Proverbs, that has, until now, put me off this modern classic. Perhaps if I thought more and assumed less, I’d have realised that evangelical conversion was definitely not Lawrence’s bag. In fact Seven Pillars is a sort of Where Eagles Dare adventure written by one of the most extraordinary and enigmatic of British military heroes.
Lawrence of Arabia, as T. E. is better known, has become immortalised by Peter O’Toole’s performance in David Lean’s 1962 Oscar-winning epic. Listening to this gung-ho chronicle by the British army officer who led the Arab revolt against the Turks in the first world war, it’s hard not to see O’Toole, pale blue eyes glinting as he dances narcissistically with his shadow among the sand dunes the first time he puts on Arab dress. Leading the camel cavalry charge at the Battle of Aqaba, being captured, flogged and gang raped by the Turks, sharing banquets with sheikhs in desert tents – it’s an X-rated Boy’s Own adventure steeped in atmosphere.
“The essence of the desert is the lonely moving individual, the son of the road, apart from the world as in a grave.” Churchill described it as one of the greatest adventures ever written. I agree.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
the spectacular range of Conan Doyle’s writings [is] represented here
The success of Sherlock Holmes obscured the spectacular range of Conan Doyle’s writings represented here, including Brigadier Gerard and Professor Challenger from his adventure and historical novels, and his serious essays on spiritualism.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
Sherlock Holmes fans will appreciate this examination of the famous detective’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930). It begins with a biographical sketch of Conan Doyle, a Scot educated in medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Holmes was his most celebrated creation by far, a fact that was more irritating than pleasing to Conan Doyle, whose prolific output included a myriad of short stories and historical novels that he considered more deserving of admiration than the adventures of the clever “consulting detective.” This set includes one Holmes story and a broad sampling of Conan Doyle’s other creations—from a horror story to his impassioned writings on spiritualism and fairies. The audio production is clear and compelling. The narrators, all British, do an excellent job of conveying the drama of Conan Doyle’s well-paced prose.
M.G., AudioFile
Britton goes at a [lively] pace with a fine dramatic sense
We nearly never had the magical medieval tale of Gawain and the Green Knight. Written in around 1401 by an anonymous northerner, the only manuscript to survive got lost for two centuries before resurfacing in 1839. Part ghost story, part thriller, part romance, and part morality tale, it tells of the challenge issued to Gawain at Arthur’s court by a wizard in the guise of a gigantic green-clad knight, of Gawain’s near seduction by his host’s wife just before he meets the Knight, and of how honesty and chivalric courtesy (just) save his head.
New interest in it was aroused by the 1990 opera by Harrison Birtwhistle, but the bewitching music and pyrotechnical staging overwhelmed both poetry and plot. To enjoy it to the full, you need to hear it read aloud.
Until now, there was only Terry Jones’s 1997 reading of J. R. R. Tolkein’s 1975 version, but two new tellings have just been released: the poet Simon Armitage reading his own version and Jasper ‘Peak Practice” Britton reading Benedict Flynn’s. All three are unabridged. So which should you go for? Fan as I am of both Tolkein and Jones in other contexts, their version runs a poor third. Tolkein’s love of scholarly correctness gets in the way of the subtle ebb and flow of the original lines, and Jones has much more of a lisp here than in his excellent Fairy Tales.
Choosing between Armitage and Flynn is hard. Armitage is wittily modern and northern; Flynn respects, but is no slave to, the high language of romance. After the terrible Green Knight has picked up his head and gone, Armitage says ‘don’t be surprised if the plot turns pear-shaped’, while Flynn offers ‘no-one should wonder at [the game’s] weighty ending’. Both shrewdly strew it with alliteration, but differently: Flynn sheaves Gawain’s calves in shining grieves, Armitage has leg-guards lagging his flesh.
The narrations also contrast. Armitage’s lackadaisical intoning made me lose concentration on occasion, but there is a poetic magic about it that fits the fitts featly. Britton goes at a much livelier pace with a fine dramatic sense. So I’m going to suggest that you do as I did: get them both, and listen to them alternately, scene by scene. It works like binoculars: you get a deeper understanding of the original, and magnify its intensity.
Christina Hardyment, The Times, 8 April 2008
A ‘horrid horseman’ in ‘vesture vivid green’ bursts into Christmas festivities at King Arthur’s court and challenges a knight to cut off his head. Sir Gawain does so – and a magical morality tale follows. The alliterative form of the 600-year-old original is brilliantly exploited by both translators and both readers are faithful to the text’s Middle English northern dialect. Armitage has the edge for sheer linguistic vigour, but his reading lacks variety of pitch and pace. Britton’s narration is punchier, capturing, for example, the coy, teasing tone of the seductress who tests Gawain’s chivalry, and the tension as he approaches the Green Chapel.
Rachel Redford, The Observer, 20 April 2008
Slack is able to paint an exquisite picture for the listener
This highly autobiographical novel of life in a Nottinghamshire mining family is told from the viewpoint of Paul Morel, it is his anguished relationships – with his mother, his father, and two women – that dominate the story. The powerful imagery and language are done justice by this superb narration. Slack voices each character in a wonderfully natural way, with excellent dialects, and when he reads the descriptions of the landscapes he is able to paint an exquisite picture for the listener. He reads with pathos and great emotion, with rage and with passion; it is difficult to imagine a better rendition. This will delight both listeners who are new to the novel and those who have read the book. It is a rare treat to find writer and reader so perfectly matched.
soundcommentary.com
Slack’s reading of Lawrence’s classic novel portrays, with clarity, the class differences between Walter Morel and his wife, Gertrude, in the “tough world of coal mining.” Gertrude’s middle-class background and her husband’s working-class origins are clearly indicated in Slack’s varied accents and tones. But it is the mother’s relationship with her children, especially William, the eldest, and Paul, after William’s death, that is most lyrically and elegiacally relayed. Slack’s rendering of Paul’s obsessions and preoccupations is sympathetically handled. Gertrude’s aloofness is icily portrayed. Walter, despite his drunkenness and coarseness, seems far more sympathetic in audio. Paul’s relationship with Miriam Leivers is pivotal, and the tensions that their relationship causes between Gertrude and her favorite son are central to the story. Slack underscores her maternal jealousy, showing it in sharp contrast to Gertrude’s cold manner with her husband. Lawrence’s central themes are heightened through the marvelous British-laced reading.
Mary McCay, Booklist
D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers read by Paul Slack. Paul Slack reads with pathos and great emotion, with rage and with passion; it is difficult to imagine a better rendition.
Sue Rosenzweig, SoundCommentary.com
[Paul Slack] is a Nottingham man and his presentation of the dialect is skilful
Paul Slack must have been a shoo-in to read D. H. Lawrence’s heavily autobiographical novel about an artist’s coming of age in the Nottinghamshire coalfields. A Lawrentian horny-handed son of toil – well, a bricklayer – before taking up acting, he comes from that part of the world and his voicing of the characters in authentic accents imparts a real humanity to the raw emotions. The story unfolds from the marriage of bright Gertrude to miner Walter Morel. This misalliance produces several children and it is on the sensitive Paul that Gertrude directs her frustrated ambition. His fierce love for his mother warring with the need to follow his own desires – analysed with a vigourous relentlessness and pungent imagery – makes this a work whose power stands the test of time.
Karen Robinson, The Sunday Times, 16 June 2008
The jaunty miner who proud Mrs Morel married has become a boorish drunk, so she devotes herself to her sons, particularly Paul. The suppressed sexuality of this intense relationship prevents Paul from choosing a wife. The mute yearning of the dark and brooding Miriam eventually repels him, nor can he give himself wholly to the over-demanding Clara. The cloying love between mother and son borders on the repellent, but the sympathetic narration rescues it, making the web of emotions startlingly real. The narrator is a Nottingham man and his presentation of the dialect is skilful. Mr Morel gains in humanity, emerging as emotionally wounded as his wife.
Rachel Redford, The Observer, 6 July 2008
With Anton Lesser’s patient, precise narration, these religious stories are accessible to a wider audience
This volume contains a dozen stories from Book One of the six-volume collection, composed in rhyming couplets by the Afghan/Persian poet Rumi in the 1260s. With Anton Lesser’s patient, precise narration, and Naxos’s quality production, these religious stories are accessible to a wider audience. Without being effeminate, Lesser’s voice is unusually high pitched for a man’s voice, which may be jarring at first for some listeners. But his classical but unpretentious Shakespearean style, perfectly paced, makes this set worthy of repeated listening. Persian music, commissioned for this recording, sets the tone. The liner notes include background to the work and an introduction by the translator.
S. E. S., AudioFile Magazine
a graceful pre-theater listening experience and a classroom resource
Lesser leads an ensemble cast through eight Shakespeare plays, beginning with gloomy Richard II before moving on to Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VI, concluding with the wicked but laughable Richard III. Elizabethan period music sets the dramatic scenes and provides a bridge between stories. In a mellow British accent and dignified pace, Lesser reads detailed prose versions of the plays. At strategic points, the ensemble actors create a sense of theater by declaiming the speeches word for word. Many of these interludes are famous monologues, but frequent dialogues add interest and variety. An accompanying booklet contains information about each play as well as a track-by-track guide (most helpful, as the back cover erroneously divides Henry V into three parts). This production, like four earlier Shakespeare recordings from Naxos, works both as a graceful pre-theater listening experience and a classroom resource.
Kristi Elle Jemtegaard, Booklist
Lesser leads an ensemble cast through eight Shakespeare plays, beginning with gloomy Richard II before moving on to Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VI, concluding with the wicked but laughable Richard III. Elizabethan period music sets the dramatic scenes and provides a bridge between stories. In a mellow British accent and dignified pace, Lesser reads detailed prose versions of the plays. At strategic points, the ensemble actors create a sense of theater by declaiming the speeches word for word. Many of these interludes are famous monologues, but frequent dialogues add interest and variety. An accompanying booklet contains information about each play as well as a track-by-track guide (most helpful, as the back cover erroneously divides Henry V into three parts). This production, like four earlier Shakespeare recordings from Naxos, works both as a graceful pre-theater listening experience and a classroom resource.
Kristi Elle Jemtegaard, Booklist
Read with gothic gusto
The many films of the Jekyll and Hyde story make you overlook what a cracking good writer Stevenson was. Read with gothic gusto, this tragic tale of the intellectually curious Dr Jekyll overpowered by his murderous alter ego is still horrifying.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
Superb
If Conan Doyle had written only this first novel introducing Holmes to Watson (newly returned from service in Afghanistan), he would have deserved his reputation. The murder of two Americans in London is revealed as revenge for a grievous wrong perpetrated by members of the Mormon community. Superb.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
If you’re nervous of Proust, this is a good standalone extract to start with
It’s extraordinary the difference a reader can make to the way you respond to a book. John Rowe, reading Proust for the BBC, makes you aware of his writing skills. Neville Jason makes you laugh. Remember Charles Swann, socialite, womaniser, champion of distressed duchesses, but not averse to the odd housemaid, and regular visitor to the Proust household in Combray in Book 1 of Remembrance of Things Past? In this, part 2 of the second book, Swann’s Way, he’s in his natural Parisian salon habitat, where, at Mme Verdurin’s, he meets the beautiful, slightly common and incredibly stupid Odette de Crécy. Mme V’s guests are not, thank heavens, the humourless intellectuals of the Ramsay drawing room, and neither is she. Can you imagine Mrs R laughing so hard that she dislocates her jaw? Swann takes a long time to rearrange Odette’s corsage of orchids. Thereafter they do not call it making love, they ‘do orchids’. If you’re nervous of Proust, this is a good standalone extract to start with.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
forget Harry Potter, Merlin is the one
In my audio library I keep a stock of books for anxious friends about to embark on holiday in cars full of children with low boredom thresholds. This lively retelling of the Arthurian legend allegedly saved the day for a family close to hysteria in a traffic jam en route to Cornwall, home of the legendary kingdom of Camelot. Book one of T. H. White’s junior classic The Once and Future King was published in 1939. With its slapstick humour and wizardry – forget Harry Potter, Merlin is the one – it’s probably the most accessible to modern children. White was a pacifist, and in the later books his Knights of the Round Table tend to bang on a bit about good and evil. Here, though, it’s the excitement of battles, tournaments and jousts that counts, not the morality. Of course it’s dated. Jokes about Sir Hector, young Arthur’s guardian, mumbling ‘hic, haec, hoc’ as he gets steadily tipsy will be lost on kids who’ve never done Latin. But Merlin – long white hair and beard matted with bird droppings that he occasionally wipes off with a worn-out pair of pyjama bottoms (his pet owl, Archimedes, isn’t housetrained) – is a timeless comic character. If you like this taster, Naxos does all five books.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
This is education the way it ought to be
“It is what I am for”. Merlin’s timelessly reassuring reply to the boy Arthur is one of many great moments in T. H. White’s magical tribute to Thomas Malory, The Sword in the Stone.
Irresistible too is the book’s opening line: “On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales”. With Merlin as his genial muddled mentor, “the Wart” learns chivalric ways and develops understanding of his own and other people’s characters by taking such shapes as those of falcon, fish and snake. Every page of this tale “of the merry old days of Gramarye” is jeweled with wit and medieval lore and, being reined back by listening, brings a richer appreciation of a book that has been deeply loved by generations of readers since it was published in 1938, and which was written as much for adults as for children.
Neville Jason is in general an avuncular narrator well matched to White’s prose. This is education the way it ought to be.
Christina Hardyment, The Times, 7 February 2008
Neville Jason’s approach, he says, is to be ‘humble to the material’ he is working with and to let the ‘powers of absorption work.’ It is apt that in this classic retelling of the King Arthur legend, the wizard Merlin often teaches the boy Arthur (aka Wart) by changing him into other creatures &nash; a fish, a bird –to learn by absorption, by being, with empathy being the least of the lessons taught. It is a perfect fit of sensibilities. Jason, who was awarded the Diction Prize by Sir John Gielgud at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, delivers fully developed characters with such warmth and spark that listeners are instantly transported to Sir Ector’s castle. Originally written in 1938, this audiobook is perfect for any J. K. Rowling fan, as its humor, intellect and playfulness feels as contemporary as a Harry Potter novel. In fact, Rowling has described White’s Wart as ‘Harry’s spiritual ancestor.’ Combined with the brilliant performance by Jason, what more could a fantasy fan want?
Publisher’s Weekly, March 2008
Richard Armitage couldn’t be a better choice for reader
This Regency romance first published in 1957 by the prolific novelist Heyer, who is considered by many to be the creator of the genre, is very reminiscent of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and the accomplished, charming, British heart-throb Richard Armitage couldn’t be a better choice for reader. When arrogant aristocrat Sylvester, the Duke of Salford first meets plain. smart and witty Phoebe Marlow sparks fly and they dislike each other enormously, especially when Phoebe’s novel, that contains an unflattering, exaggerated caricature based on Salford – and easily recognizable as him – as one of the characters, ispublished. Over the course of the story as Phoebe and Salford frequently see more of each other. of course, the attraction increases. Heyer, celebrated for the accuracy of period details in her novels, evokes much in this novel of her own experiences dealing with writing, publishing and the reading public as heroine Phoebe is publishing her first novel. Although this is an abridged version of Heyer’s work, British actor Richard Armitage makes this exceptionally fun to listen to. The only drawback is that listeners will be disappointed that he didn’t read the full-length version. Armitage is perhaps best known for playing the most appealing John Thornton in the BBC production of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South. He also played the dastardly Guy of Gisborne in Robin Hood, and, a spy in Spooks. Armitage’s reading is warm, lively, simply brilliant. He easily voices all characters and regional and class differences with ease and captures the underlying tension and growing romantic interest between Phoebe and Sylvester. The period classical music between chapters adds wonderful, appropriate atmosphere.
Jean Palmer, Soundcommentary.com
Georgette Heyer’s Sylvester read by Richard Armitage. British heart-throb Richard Armitage couldn’t be a better choice for reader... [and he]... makes this exceptionally fun to listen to.
Jean Palmer, SoundCommentary.com
This turns out to be a sort of Mount Olympus Babylon
This turns out to be a sort of Mount Olympus Babylon, where the bold and the beautiful perform fabulous deeds (Bellerophon slays the Chimera, Orpheus braves the underworld in search of his beloved Eurydice) but also discover the terrible consequences of hubris and vanity.
Karen Robinson, The Sunday Times
the sort of entertainment you feel you should book seats for
These are ten times more imaginative, terrifying and exciting than Greek mythology – though, admittedly, my enthusiasm may stem from the fact that until now I knew practically nothing about the Edda or the Norse gods, except that our days of the week are named after them. To call this a talking book is to describe Lewis Hamilton as a Sunday motorist. It’s a full-scale production, the sort of entertainment you feel you should book seats for. It’s partly the music – Naxos are expert at choosing exactly the right music. The moment you hear those first crashing, thunderous chords of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in C minor, followed by Benjamin Soames’s hushed, reverential announcement – ‘The Creation of the Universe’ – you know you’re in for a major 2001: A Space Odyssey kind of experience.
As for the legends, they’re the stuff of nightmare. From the regions of fire and ice, Muspelheim and Niflheim, emerge the gods (good) and the giants (bad), constantly at loggerheads and preparing for the final showdown, Ragnarök. Odin, king of the gods, breathing life into ash and elm driftwood and creating man and woman; Loki, the treacherous god, whose children from his union with an ogress include a wolf and a serpent; Thor, with his great hammer that always comes back to him like a boomerang; the Berserkers, warriors who get so psyched up in battle they can’t distinguish between friend and foe. Compared to this lot, the folk on Mt Olympus are suburban.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian, 21 June 2008
Anna Bentinck conveys superbly Hardy’s nuances of tone
The story is well known, but listening to an unabridged reading will always illuminate fresh themes and details. It also highlights the range of Hardy’s writing, which can move from the ‘opalised light of the moon’ in heavenscapes, through sweeping landscapes down to a single dewdrop. Anna Bentinck conveys superbly Hardy’s nuances of tone from the locals’ country accents to Angel Clare’s fastidious correctness. D’Urberville sounds kindly – rather than just a wheedling cad – which gives the listener deeper understanding and sympathy for Tess’s predicament.
Rachel Redford, The Oldie
charm, humor, and heartbreak
Once the American listener gets used to a shtetl dweller with an English accent, Neville Jason makes a fairly decent Tevye, the hapless milk and cheese purveyor of pre-Revolutionary Russia who is “cursed” with a house full of beautiful and strong-willed daughters. He himself tells us the funny/tragic stories of his daughter’s various marriages in an already dangerous (for Jews) world being violently yanked into a new century. His tales helped make his creator, Sholem Aleichem, a beloved writer and inspired the hit musical Fiddler on the Roof. While one could wish that Jason had a wider resource of expression and a better appreciation of Aleichem’s excruciating irony, he does very well with the charm, humor, and, especially, the heartbreak of the character he portrays.
Y.R., AudioFile
the book and its characters linger in the mind
David Timson is one of those audio-book readers who, rather than giving a “signature” performance like some of the big stars of the genre, simply inhabits and projects his subjects with a delicate empathy, so it’s the book and its characters that linger in the mind. Which makes him an excellent choice for G.K. Chesterton’s tales of the unassuming Catholic priest who claims that his work at the confessional (where he has to do “next to nothing but hear men’s real sins”) puts him in an excellent position to solve the bizarre crimes that come his way in pre-first-world-war England. Chesterton’s prose can be as ostentatiously extravagant as an Edwardian grandee’s moustache, and is marred by a breezy anti-semitism. This, though, does not seem to be shared by the unassuming cleric, whose humble conviction that his God will eventually triumph over the souls of even the most evil of criminals is the quiet but insistent heartbeat of these unusual exercises in detective fiction.
Karen Robinson, The Sunday Times
clever, funny and inventive
Thanks to its appearance, albeit briefly, in an episode of Lost, the hugely popular television series about survivors on a desert island, sales of Flann O'Brien's comic masterpiece have apparently soared. I can't imagine what this surreal story, set in rural Ireland, about murder, ghosts and people turning into bicycles, has to do with a TV soap that crosses Lord of the Flies with Baywatch. But who cares, if it introduces more people to O'Brien's sublime comic talent?
His writing is invariably compared to those other Irish greats, Joyce and Beckett, but for me he is infinitely more accessible and much funnier. Apart from guaranteeing that it will make you laugh, The Third Policeman is almost impossible to describe: thriller, satire, off-the-wall fantasy, vision of hell steeped in Catholic guilt – it’s all of these, plus romantic weepy towards the end when the narrator, who can’t remember his name and has a wooden leg, falls in love with a lady’s bicycle.
Here’s a taste of O’Brien’s prose on the theme of, you’ve guessed, bicycles: “‘The high saddle,’ said the sergeant, ‘was invented by a party called Peters that spent his life in foreign parts riding on camels and other lofty animals, giraffes, elephants and birds that can run like hares and lay eggs the size of the bowl you see in a steam laundry, where they keep the chemical water for taking the tar out of men’s pants. When he came home from the wars, he thought hard of sitting on a low saddle, and one night, accidentally, when he was in bed, he invented the high saddle as the outcome of his perpetual cerebration and mental researches. His Christian name I do not remember. The high saddle was the father of the low handlebars. It crucifies the fork and gives you a blood rush in the head. It is very sore on the internal organs.’ ‘Which of the organs?’ I inquired. ‘Both of them,’ said the sergeant.”
I thought Jim Norton reading Ulysses was as good as it gets. This is even better.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
Flann O’Brien was as surreal a writer as Salvador Dali was a painter, and The Third Policeman is the strangest of all his books. It is about a murder that may or may not have been committed in a house that may or may not be there by a man who has a wooden leg and a soul called Joe, who does not remember who he is and who may or may not be dead.
Read aloud in Jim Norton’s lilting, confident brogue, all the musicality and wit of O’Brien’s writing is bought out, and our hero’s dreamlike, circular journey through a looking-glass world of twisted logic becomes almost plausible. Vanishing bicycles, ever more ponderous policemen, houses within houses, a lift down to eternity, coloured winds, shifting states of mind and time – the narrative proceeds with enthralling unpredictability, yet by some miracle, disbelief is suspended. What fun not to know which direction any sentence will take.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
This weird novel was not published until after O’Brien’s death in the 1960s. It’s a strange tale, suited to the rich voices Jim Norton conjures up from the boggy Irish landscape where policemen discourse at Blarneyesque length on molecular transfer between man and bicycle and the problems arising from faulty dentition. The sense of the absurd is heightened by the narrator’s frequent references to the ideas of his favourite philosopher, the patently mad de Selby. It’s clever, funny and inventive – and as disturbing as one should expect from a writer who believed humour to be “the handmaid of sorrow and fear”
Karen Robinson, The Sunday Times
The book begins by detailing an odd relationship between two men. A flashback shows something is amiss, and the scene unfolds to a horrible crime. The story suddenly falls into a fantastical, almost stream-of-consciousness, tale of time-travel, with one of the men journeying with police officers in an investigation of a missing bicycle. This complicated novel’s saving grace is an unexpected ending, and Jim Norton’s narration. He employs varying tones and pitches, and one of the officers’ voices is a wonderful Indian-British accent with a friendly, commanding authority. This story will irk some listeners; others will be intrigued. (At the end, listeners learn why the shift to the fantastical happens so fast.) There’s little character development, but listeners won’t mind as Norton does a good job as guide.
M.B., AudioFile Magazine
clever, funny and inventive
Thanks to its appearance, albeit briefly, in an episode of Lost, the hugely popular television series about survivors on a desert island, sales of Flann O'Brien's comic masterpiece have apparently soared. I can't imagine what this surreal story, set in rural Ireland, about murder, ghosts and people turning into bicycles, has to do with a TV soap that crosses Lord of the Flies with Baywatch. But who cares, if it introduces more people to O'Brien's sublime comic talent?
His writing is invariably compared to those other Irish greats, Joyce and Beckett, but for me he is infinitely more accessible and much funnier. Apart from guaranteeing that it will make you laugh, The Third Policeman is almost impossible to describe: thriller, satire, off-the-wall fantasy, vision of hell steeped in Catholic guilt – it’s all of these, plus romantic weepy towards the end when the narrator, who can’t remember his name and has a wooden leg, falls in love with a lady’s bicycle.
Here’s a taste of O’Brien’s prose on the theme of, you’ve guessed, bicycles: “‘The high saddle,’ said the sergeant, ‘was invented by a party called Peters that spent his life in foreign parts riding on camels and other lofty animals, giraffes, elephants and birds that can run like hares and lay eggs the size of the bowl you see in a steam laundry, where they keep the chemical water for taking the tar out of men’s pants. When he came home from the wars, he thought hard of sitting on a low saddle, and one night, accidentally, when he was in bed, he invented the high saddle as the outcome of his perpetual cerebration and mental researches. His Christian name I do not remember. The high saddle was the father of the low handlebars. It crucifies the fork and gives you a blood rush in the head. It is very sore on the internal organs.’ ‘Which of the organs?’ I inquired. ‘Both of them,’ said the sergeant.”
I thought Jim Norton reading Ulysses was as good as it gets. This is even better.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
Flann O’Brien was as surreal a writer as Salvador Dali was a painter, and The Third Policeman is the strangest of all his books. It is about a murder that may or may not have been committed in a house that may or may not be there by a man who has a wooden leg and a soul called Joe, who does not remember who he is and who may or may not be dead.
Read aloud in Jim Norton’s lilting, confident brogue, all the musicality and wit of O’Brien’s writing is bought out, and our hero’s dreamlike, circular journey through a looking-glass world of twisted logic becomes almost plausible. Vanishing bicycles, ever more ponderous policemen, houses within houses, a lift down to eternity, coloured winds, shifting states of mind and time – the narrative proceeds with enthralling unpredictability, yet by some miracle, disbelief is suspended. What fun not to know which direction any sentence will take.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
This weird novel was not published until after O’Brien’s death in the 1960s. It’s a strange tale, suited to the rich voices Jim Norton conjures up from the boggy Irish landscape where policemen discourse at Blarneyesque length on molecular transfer between man and bicycle and the problems arising from faulty dentition. The sense of the absurd is heightened by the narrator’s frequent references to the ideas of his favourite philosopher, the patently mad de Selby. It’s clever, funny and inventive – and as disturbing as one should expect from a writer who believed humour to be “the handmaid of sorrow and fear”
Karen Robinson, The Sunday Times
The book begins by detailing an odd relationship between two men. A flashback shows something is amiss, and the scene unfolds to a horrible crime. The story suddenly falls into a fantastical, almost stream-of-consciousness, tale of time-travel, with one of the men journeying with police officers in an investigation of a missing bicycle. This complicated novel’s saving grace is an unexpected ending, and Jim Norton’s narration. He employs varying tones and pitches, and one of the officers’ voices is a wonderful Indian-British accent with a friendly, commanding authority. This story will irk some listeners; others will be intrigued. (At the end, listeners learn why the shift to the fantastical happens so fast.) There’s little character development, but listeners won’t mind as Norton does a good job as guide.
M.B., AudioFile Magazine
There’s no grey in Dumas’s novels
This swashbuckling classic is set in Louis XIII's France at the same time as Descartes' wanderings took him in 1627 to La Rochelle, whose Huguenot occupants were being besieged by Cardinal Richelieu. Dumas's cardinal, one of the book's many real-life characters, is simultaneously laying devilish plans to be rid of d'Artagnan and his fellow musketeers Athos, Porthos and Aramis. I'd forgotten how complex the plot is, how relentless the action (you can't cut to the chase – the whole thing is one long desperate chase on horseback, in postillions, aboard ships) and how outrageous the characters. There's no grey in Dumas's novels, especially where women are concerned. The goodies, such as saintly Constance Bonacieux – with whom our brave, penniless, honourable, hot-headed young hero from Gascony, d'Artagnan, is in love – are purest snowy white. The baddies, represented by beautiful, treacherous Milady de Winter, once bigamously married to Athos and now working as a spy for Richelieu, make Madame Defarge look as dangerous as Miss Muffet.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
I’m becoming addicted to this Nutshell series
I’m becoming addicted to this Nutshell series, which for someone who regularly rails against audiobooks being abridged sounds inconsistent. It isn’t. These informative little gems are specifically written for a single CD (we’ve had Afghanistan, Darwin and karma so far, the renaissance and French revolution are on their way), the idea being to whet your appetite for further study. Gregson’s encapsulated overview of Tibetan history, geography, traditions, religion, politics and culture covers everything the well-informed tourist needs to know. Locked in by the highest mountain ranges on earth, Tibet’s nomadic tribes have retained their centuries-old lifestyle. They live on barley, yak’s butter and tea, wear shaggy woollen wraparound cloaks, embroidered hats with sheepskin ear flaps and yak-hide boots with turned-up toes. Yaks are to Tibetans what reindeer are to Lapps: food, clothing, transport, fuel. I’ve visited Tibetan lamaseries, where smiling monks wearing huge yellow bonnets like Widow Twanky offered tea laced with rancid yak’s butter, which they then used to polish the wooden floor. In the seventh century, King Songtsän Gampo declared Buddhism the national religion, and in the eighth century the frontiers of Tibet stretched from Butan to Xian in China. Buddhism took hold, but the empire was shortlived. Tibet was subsequently invaded by Mongols, Turks, British and Chinese. It is 40 years since the Dalai Lama fled the Chinese destruction and occupation of his country with little hope of reconciliation or return. Life, fate, has not been kind to the gentle Buddhists of Burma and Tibet.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
Tibet is a high-altitude “land apart”, home to snow leopards, holy mountains and centuries-old Buddhist monasteries. It’s presented here from its beginnings, through its long history of struggle, to its inclusion in China’s 1949 Great Motherland, then the 2008 demonstrations as Han Chinese have grown to become the majority in Tibet’s northern provinces.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
Juliet Stevenson turns this haunting story into a tone-poem
Mrs Ramsay (wife of a distinguished philosopher, mother of eight, and a sympathetic hostess) provides the heartbeat of a shabby-grand holiday house in the Hebrides and at the same time ceaselessly gauges the secret rhythms of its many intertwined pulses. Hers is the dominant interior monologue of this pre-first-world-war interlude. Other voices (most notably that of unmarried artist Lily Briscoe) fade in and out, and Juliet Stevenson turns this haunting story, in which nothing really happens, into a tone-poem of delicately nuanced probings into human relationships. The mood deepens when the neglected house is revisited, post-war, by surviving members of the holiday party, who must ultimately confront ‘that loneliness that was the truth about things’
Karen Robinson, The Sunday Times, 14 May 2008
Nicole Kidman in The Hours may have raised the doyenne of Bloomsbury bluestockings’ literary profile for a new generation of readers, but many people still consider Virginia Woolf’s writing difficult and dated. It is. You either go along with descriptions such as, “the spring, without a leaf to toss, bare and bright like a virgin fierce in her chastity, scornful in her purity, was laid out on fields, wide-eyed and watchful, and entirely careless of what was done, or thought, by the beholders...”, or you don’t.
Somehow, though, when ’s read in a voice as sensitive and intelligent as Juliet Stevenson’s, you appreciate why critics have said that this, her best-known novel, contains some of the most beautiful prose ever written. Just as well, because there isn’t much plot. The action, such as it is, takes place in the holiday home of the Ramsay family, on a Hebridean island before and after the great war. Mrs Ramsay is beautiful, Mr Ramsay difficult, their eight children relatively interesting, their house guests more so.
It’s the relationships that count, constantly shifting and elusive, dependent on a glance, a trick of light, an inflection of tone. Naxos does an abridged version, but don’t be tempted. Woolf is all or nothing.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
Thinking about my own reaction to To the Lighthouse, I enjoyed it more because of Juliet Stevenson’s reading of it. She carried me along in the middle section when I was losing my way. And then I got fired up for it again. What the audiobook did was to impose some additional (and quite helpful) structure on the book. For example the last four tracks are called In the boat, Perspective, Approaching and Arriving.
Pete, Couch trip blog
Jasper Britton provides strong, distinct character voices with a wide range and layers of emotion
Having tried in vain to persuade my pre-teenage children to read Treasure Island years ago – the 10-year-old said he couldn’t handle all that ‘if he durst, quoth I’ stuff and asked for the latest Ian Rankin instead – I now realise where I went wrong. They should have listened to it. What’s more, they should have listened to Jasper Britton reading this best-ever adventure story, which has the same mesmeric ability to keep you hanging on every word as the Ancient Mariner. It has all that’s required of a ripping yarn – danger, suspense, treachery, mystery, a quest triggered by a musty old map in a sea chest with the proverbial ‘X’ marking the spot where the treasure is buried, and a courageous juvenile lead. There are characters with terrifying names: Black Dog, Blind Pugh, Billy Bones and the legendary one-legged Long John Silver, whose villainy is somehow excusable because he’s so damned charismatic. Every car should have it.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
Set in the 1700s, Stevenson’s tale of high adventure and mutiny is filled with colorful characters that are now considered pirate archetypes. English actor Jasper Britton expertly avoids running aground with pantomime. Instead he provides strong, distinct character voices with a wide range and layers of emotion. Britton’s register squawks high in his portrayal of angry Blind Pew, and his mid-range staccato is perfect for haughty Squire Trelawney. His portrayal of Long John Silver is the most compelling. Rather than creating a stereotypical villain, Britton gives the character a rare depth, often convincing us (and young Jim) that he is a good man through a very sincere-sounding delivery. Lads and lasses and scalawags everywhere should ‘sail ho’ and listen to this classic adventure!
L. M., AudioFile Magazine
A truly stunning performance
On the morning of Josef K’s thirtieth birthday, two guards enter his rented apartment and tell him that he is under arrest. He is informed that he will be sent for trial, but in the meantime, he can carry on in his job at the bank. But what exactly is K’s crime? He is not a thief, yet he is evidently guilty of something, although no one seems to know quite what it is. This suffocating and surreal portrayal of bureaucracy saw Kafka challenge the modern world at the beginning of the twentieth century. This unabridged audio version offers a new translation by David Whiting, while Rupert Degas’s dry reading conveys the grotesqueness of man’s ability to place importance on the trivialities of life.
Kim Bunce, The Observer
Innocent man arrested, charged, detained, interrogated and ultimately sentenced for unspecified crimes against the state – the theme of Kafka’s sinister classic about the powerlessness of the individual is as relevant now, more so possibly, as it was when he wrote it nearly 100 years ago. When the next film of The Trial comes out (and there’s bound to be one hoping to outshine the Orson Welles and Harold Pinter versions), it will probably be called The Rendition of Joseph K. ‘Someone must have been spreading stories about Joseph K,’ goes the first sentence, ‘because, one morning, although he had done nothing wrong, he was arrested.’ This curious mixture of low-key and explosive is Kafka’s trademark. Remember ‘Metamorphosis’, where the young man wakes up to discover, more to his annoyance than anything else, that he has turned into a beetle? Thirty-one-year-old Joseph K seems more concerned that his arrest will make him late for work – to start with, at least. But, as the plot thickens to the same obfuscating density as the fog in Bleak House, and more and more demands are made on him to appear before mysterious officials who might have wandered in from Nineteen Eighty-Four or Alice in Wonderland, the tension and terror mount. Surreal, banal, sexy, funny, terrifying – it’s all of these and more, and the end, inevitably, is ghastly. This new translation by David Whiting, commissioned exclusively for audio, aims to make the text more immediately intelligible to the listener, which basically means cutting out some of the repetition and substituting proper names for pronouns so that you know who is talking. The unrelenting nightmare terror remains intact, reinforced by Rupert Degas’s extraordinary reading, best described as controlled teetering on insane. A truly stunning performance.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
Read by Anton Lesser with humour and brio
“Nothing odd will do long,” declared Dr Johnson in one of his most famous dud verdicts. “Tristram Shandy did not last.&rsdquo; The cock-and-bull story by Laurence Sterne has, in its author’s words, somehow managed “to swim down the gutter of Time” from its first, sensational publication in 1759. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman has inspired and provoked writers as various as Dickens, Joyce and Salman Rushdie. At more than 500 pages, it is the perfect holiday read and Naxos audiobooks has just released an unabridged version, read by Anton Lesser with humour and brio. Lesser’s light tenor is perfectly suited to the many roles (Parson Yorick, Doctor Slop, et al.) who crowd Sterne’s narrative. This translates into 15 CDs and about 19 hours of listening. Perfect for a wet summer.
Robert McCrum, The Observer
‘I have never done anything so hard’ a very pale Anton Lesser is said to have declared on completing his brilliant new recording of ‘Tristram Shandy’. A classic actor who’s voiced everyone from Homer to Hamlet, Lesser seems only to open his mouth for wisdom to come out. But then the problems with performing Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century classic of comic metafiction are well rehearsed. As sidetracks sprout from sidetracks, keeping up with the garrulous hero’s chaotic autobiography is one thing. But how the hell are you supposed to read out loud a blank page, or a squiggle? Here sound effects place you firmly at Shandy’s writing desk, while Lesser’s unflaggingly engaged reading insists on the vivid characterisation beneath the stylistic play.
Bella Todd, TimeOut
When I’m in London during the summer, I don’t have the car. This is liberating to an extent, but does mean that I can’t listen to Tristram Shandy. I bought the unabridged 15-CD set at the best possible place – Shandy Hall, Laurence Sterne’s home at Coxwold, in Yorkshire. On visiting, I became uncomfortably aware that I’d never managed to get through any Sterne. Anton Lesser reads Tristram to perfection. By the time I’d driven back to Ramsgate the next day, I had heard 10 CDs, but what about the remainder? My ears are the wrong shape for an iPod; the little earphones fall out. I can’t expect the family to share Sterne in the car. Besides, is he suitable for children? Eventually, they may take to him more quickly than me always going off at a tangent, with no obvious beginning, middle and end, Tristram should appeal to the internet generation. It was a long journey home, because the A1 was jammed. I was amazed to see people turning round and going up a slip road the wrong way in order to escape the hold-up. A lorry driver at the top tried to block them all right, but us cars simply went round onto the verge. How very Italian we’ve become.
Clive Aslet, Town Mouse Country Life
As a general rule I go along with the advice that if a book doesn’t grab you by the end of chapter 4, don’t waste your time, there are plenty more. Yes, but not like Tristram Shandy. Nothing I’ve ever come across is like Sterne’s extraordinary comic tour de force published 250 years ago which, I freely admit, I found pretty hard going a long way past chapter 4. And then, suddenly, I got it. Or at least I realised I was coming at it from the wrong direction. It isn’t a novel. It has no plot. Chapters break off in mid-sentence because, advises the narrator, ‘I would not give a groat for that man’s knowledge in pen-craft who does not understand this: That the best plain narrative in the world, tacked very close to the last spirited apostrophe to my Uncle Toby, would have felt both cold and vapid upon the reader’s palate; therefore I forthwith put an end to the chapter, though I was in the middle of my story.’ And which story might that have been? The one about Uncle Toby’s dalliance with the widow Wadman? Or his manservant Corporal Trim’s tireless reconstructions of Flanders campaigns, complete with battering rams and catapults on the bowling green behind the vegetable garden? Or of Dr Slop, summoned to assist at the narrator’s birth, being thrown from his horse and ... Enough. If you’ve ever sat spellbound listening to a witty, satirical, outrageous, digressive raconteur regaling you with endless stories about preposterous characters that lead nowhere but keep you hanging on every word, trust me – they learned their craft from Sterne. So did postmodernists such as James Joyce and Flann O’Brien. It is tailor-made for audio, as is Anton Lesser’s reading – intelligent, humorous, charming. Dr Johnson admired the book enormously, but opined that ‘nothing odd will do long’. For once he was wrong. Tristram Shandy is decidedly odd and extremely long, but it has stayed the course.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
Brilliant narration
The unnamed protagonist is, like the author, the child of postwar Czech immigrants to America. His life is dominated by a quest to understand the events that have shaped and damaged his parents and the nostalgia in which they are steeped. A world below the visible one is explored through memory, travel and metaphor. Startlingly vivid vignettes of childhood are intermingled with layers of bizarre Czech fairy tales and shocking images of atrocities in Nazi-occupied Prague. In the final section, Slouka fictionalises the past and the all too human frailties of his parents. Brilliant narration captures the intimate, confessional tone and the duality of the immigrant experience.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
a fresh and consistently insightful interpretation
If I’ve read the runes correctly, things are definitely looking up for audio purists (like me) who want their books unabridged. Sales of tamper-proof titles were up by 60% last year for adults and 50% for children which, let’s hope, will persuade publishers who produce only cut-down versions to think again.
From this you can guess that my talking book of the year is War and Peace on 51 CDs, in two impressively boxed volumes, adding up to 61 hrs 45 mins of listening time. Now that’s what I call an epic. Funny, last time I heard the whole thing on cassette it was three hours longer but that’s maybe because it was for blind students and the reader kept stopping to spell names like Bezukhov and Melyukovka. Tolstoy’s classic, set in Russia before, during and after Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion in 1812, rarely features in the best-ever novels charts but that’s only because, though everyone’s heard of it, not many people have actually read it. Here’s your chance. You may have seen a film version – the best is Sergei Bondarchuk’s incredible 1968 blockbuster which had half the Soviet army as extras and 35,000 costumes. But to get into the characters – the real characters of Field Marshal Kutuzov and Bonaparte’s inner circle of generals, not just the romantic leads – you need Tolstoy’s words. Take it to the gym, keep it in the car and let the salons of St Petersburg, the battle of Austerlitz and the vastness of the snow-covered steppes wash over you. Neville Jason’s voice, calm and understated, is the perfect vehicle for this cast of thousands. Give it to someone special for Christmas: trust me, it’s worth every penny.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
The door-stopping unabridged War and Peace becomes compelling as you are caught up in Tolstoy’s novel. Neville Jason is to be congratulated on never flagging.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
Set against the backdrop of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, this unabridged War and Peace is a gargantuan recording accomplishment, particularly for Neville Jason, who reads every word Tolstoy wrote. From the opening in Anna Pavlovna’s pretentious drawing room, I fell under the spell of the gentle and seductive elegance of Jason’s voice. Tolstoy’s musings on the role of battle leaders and on the march of history are particularly pertinent listened to against the backdrop of our own history-shaping Iraq war. An unexpected highlight, brought out by the beautifully paced narration, was Tolstoy’s complex and inventive similes.
Rachel Redford, The Observer
This famously long Russian novel is, concede the audio producers, ‘a remarkable challenge for any reader’. Neville Jason’s performance is supple and relaxed in the sample five hours of the total 62 I’ve dipped into (contrary to this column’s usual practice, I haven’t listened to them all), and he makes the members of the Russian upper crust with their confusingly changeable names into identifiable characters, especially the women. The characters live out Tolstoy’s theories about history, philosophy, monarchy, the intellect and the will, with Pierre, the bastard son of a St Petersburg grandee, at their centre, as they become embroiled in Napoleon’s wars. At, say, two hours’ listening a day, the Bezukhovs, Rostovs, Bolkonskys et al could be part of your life for weeks – far less of a ‘challenge’ than actually reading the book.
Karen Robinson, The Sunday Times
This reviewer derives a special pleasure listening to a good book that he’s already read delivered by an excellent narrator. He can thus better appreciate values the performer extrapolates from the text. Such is the case with Neville Jason’s mature rendering of Tolstoy’s massive classic – 25 CDs to Volume 1 alone – of the Napoleonic Wars in Russia. His efforts are abetted by an excellent, uncredited translation. Once you get used to Russians with British accents, he gives you a fresh and consistently insightful interpretation of the action, atmospheres, numberless characters, and author’s apostrophes. Only his very young women ring a bit false. An accompanying booklet, intended to help the listener keep characters and events straight, is unnecessary, thanks to Jason’s skill.
Audiofile Magazine
Sean Barrett’s clear, measured delivery makes this famous justification of capitalism sound so simple
One of those seminal texts, along with Magna Carta and On the Origin of Species, that you know about but have somehow never got around to reading. You could cheat by getting P. J. O’Rourke’s witty new crib on Smithian economics, but Sean Barrett’s clear, measured delivery of the real thing makes this famous justification of capitalism versus mercantilism (i.e. guilds, protectionism, the corn laws, etc.) sound so simple. Written in 1776, the year of the American revolution, its influence was enormous and still is. Professor Julian Le Grand of the LSE, a one-time Blair adviser, said that Marx may have been influential, but he was wrong, whereas Smith – currently adorning our £20 notes – had the magic combination of being influential and right.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
Philip Madoc’s sonorous voice susurrates as his orotund tones increase the tension
From the first moment of Alan Garner’s classic adventure, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, when the swirling music of Arnold Bax’s symphonic poems gives way to the deep, rich voice of Philip Madoc, listeners are swept away into a breathtaking story (for over-nines) of wizards and trolls.
Amanda Craig, Independent on Sunday
Ancient magic and low cunning team up to produce a penultimate battle between good and evil in this high fantasy. Two children, Susan and Colin, arrive in Cheshire and encounter a sinister and peculiar countryside steeped in the centuries-old “Legend of Alderley.” It is said that 140 knights and their milk white mares hover in an enchanted sleep deep in the ground in Fundindelve, the great dwarf-hall. They will awake when England is in dire peril at the last battle of the world. Philip Madoc’s sonorous voice susurrates as his orotund tones increase the tension. His deep voice is perfect for the Wizard Cedellin Silverbrow, and the dwarves and menacing Svart creatures, but he also gives Susan and Colin’s voices a childish courage, as they face the horrors of a frightening chase through dark subterranean tunnels. Madoc exhibits his classical training at the RSC in his use of dialects, guttural pronouncements, and screams as the children and their protectors fight for their very lives. Selections of music composed by Arnold Bax lend an aura of creepy menace and gloom to selected sections throughout.
Lolly Gepson, Booklist
Laurel Lefkow brings Katy’s earnest ambitions to life
Those who enjoy Jodie will turn with interest to Laurel Lefkow’s spirited reading of Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did, not only because of the heroines’ similarities, but because it opens such a vivid window into a domestic world that we have lost: full of aunts and cousins, innumerable siblings and clearly drawn moralities. Abridgement has meant a loss of detail, but has made the book work better for a modern audience.
Christina Hardyment, The Times
Katy Carr grows from a heedless girl to a responsible teen in this classic story. Narrator Laurel Lefkow brings Katy’s earnest ambitions to life with a pleasant voice. She succeeds in conveying the simple sweetness of this old-fashioned family story. While modern listeners may not understand Katy’s protracted illness, they will identify with her desire to endure patiently and to be a help to her family. Voices for each of Katy’s five siblings are distinct, and the adult voices of her father and Aunt Izzy are equally strong. A sensitive abridgement also contributes to this fine recording. Take a step back in time with this hopeful story of family life.
C. A., AudioFile Magazine
a white-knuckler and a melodrama
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins’s best-selling novel, a white-knuckler and a melodrama, has continued to transfix readers for almost 150 years. Naxos brings six accomplished actors to this story of subjugation, treachery and sleuthing. This is not a dramatized production but, rather, one made up of accounts related in sequence by the book’s characters, who are given voice by different actors. Glen McCready takes on Walter Hartright’s narrative, and his troubled, slightly vulnerable-sounding tone underscores that this particular drawing master may not be quite man enough to tackle the devious Count Fosco. For that, the story calls on Marian Halcombe, companion to Laura Fairlie – the intended victim of Fosco’s ally, the odious Sir Percival Glyde. As Halcombe, Rachel Bavidge makes her native Tyneside accent a token of that admirable woman’s clear-eyed shrewdness and strength. Hugh Dickson reads the solicitor’s account and also that of the self-centered, hypochondriacal Frederic Fairlie, upon whose voice he confers a most glorious querulousness. Other parts are beautifully narrated by Marie Collett and Teresa Gallagher. And finally, Allan Corduner is the definitive Fosco, his voice resounding with the timbre of vainglory and projecting all the menace that is so terrifyingly incarnate in the Count’s vast frame.
Katherine A Powers, Washington Post
Written in 1859, this classic mystery is perfect for audio. Impoverished art teacher Walter Hartright accepts a position to teach at a country house and finds himself involved in a sinister plot to relieve heiress Laura Fairlie of her wealth—and her sanity. The tireless efforts of stalwart Hartright and Laura’s half sister, Marian Holcombe, help save the day. Each of 11 characters, easily identified in a handy cast list, tells his or her story, offering individual perspectives on people and events. The seasoned British actors in this full-cast production play the suspense and emotion to the hilt. Particularly fine are Rachel Bavidge as Marian Holcombe, a warmhearted woman of vast intelligence but no beauty, and Allan Corduner as Fosco, whose mask of geniality hides his true menace. Although it takes a while to fall into the story, this is an excellent rendition of a classic tale, old-fashioned storytelling at its best.
Joyce Saricks, Booklist
The epistolary style is custom-built for audio
Wait six months and you’ll have the unabridged version lasting a full twenty-two hours. For once I’m more than happy with this judicious abridgement of Collins’s 1860 bestseller, which spawned a plethora of Disney-style merchandise – white shawls, fans, china ornaments etc. – but frankly does go on a bit. It was the first of the Victorian ‘sensation’ novels, a gothic thriller with a cast of OTT characters: aristocratic villains, cruel husbands, a dastardly Italian count, a handsome hero of low birth but high ideals, a heroine with, wait for it, a moustache, and of course the mysterious woman in white on the loose from a lunatic asylum, who – no, I shan’t give anything away. The epistolary style – it has ten narrators – is custom-built for audio.
Sue Arnold, The Guardian
a delight in every way
Oliver Ford Davies and Jasper Britton bring cultured accents and theatrical experience to the readings of this selection of poems by William Wordsworth. Davies’s more mature voice alternating with Britton’s younger one enables listeners to understand the flowery language and poetic conventions of the late eighteenth century. With perfect pacing and a wide range of emotions, the speakers perform works that vary in topic – from the appreciation of natural beauty in the Lake District of England to the more enigmatic blank verse of ‘The Prelude.’ The poems are elegantly presented and organized but are not too precious – as evidenced by the country ghost story ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill,’ which is included. This collection is a delight in every way.
R. H. H., AudioFile Magazine
the whole range of Yeats’s verse with lyricism and authority
This volume in Naxos’s Great Poets series offers thirty-two poems from Yeats’s prodigious creative output, which spanned fifty years, from 1889 until his death at the dawn of WWII. Of the three readers, Denys Hawthorne (who recently suffered a stroke that ended his acting career) is the most dramatic in poems such as ‘To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time,’ while Nicholas Boulton‘s younger voice highlights the playfulness of ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ and others. Jim Norton, meanwhile, handles the whole range of Yeats’s verse with lyricism and authority. Unlike some other titles in this series, this one contains commentary before some of the poems, which helpfully places them in context.
D. B., AudioFile Magazine
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