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David Eccles - Jonathan James-Moore on audiobooks

A Word in Your Ear

I am, literally, a bad reader. I have mild dyslexia and well remember, when reading Peyton Place in my youth, taking ‘sonofabitch’ as ‘sofabitch’ and thinking it was a piece of bordello furniture. I am also partially sighted and have difficulty reading in either bright or low light; and with poor peripheral vision I tend to miss the ends of lines. So the advent of audio tapes and of the Talking Book (pioneered by the RNIB) has been a splendid thing for me.

A conventional book provides particular pleasures – the look of the binding, the aesthetics of the typeface, the feel of the page – but a Talking Book does have one physical advantage: it is usually smaller and lighter, and so easier to pack. It leaves the listener freer, too, to respond to the ambience. Listening to a Talking Book where the only illumination is glimmering candlelight or a flickering fire is something all its own. Shadows emphasize mystery and Gothick horror, subdued light engenders romance, and comparative silence encourages confidentiality or even a sense of conspiracy with the author. I particularly recall being snowed in at New Year in an isolated country cottage where we had to resort to burning broken furniture in the stove for warmth. In these circumstances, we felt ourselves truly beleaguered in a Russian winter as we listened to Juliet Stevenson’s evocative reading of Anna Karenina.

The quality, character and intonation of the reader’s voice inevitably affect the listener’s experience. But there is still room for the imagination to bubble and create a personal vision. As Joyce Grenfell memorably put it in her wireless criticism for the Observer, ‘The pictures on radio are better.’ I find it extraordinary that there is no acknowledged system for the notation of the spoken voice – as there is for the singing voice and even for ballet choreography. During the past two years I have been working with Stephen Greif (an actor and re

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I am, literally, a bad reader. I have mild dyslexia and well remember, when reading Peyton Place in my youth, taking ‘sonofabitch’ as ‘sofabitch’ and thinking it was a piece of bordello furniture. I am also partially sighted and have difficulty reading in either bright or low light; and with poor peripheral vision I tend to miss the ends of lines. So the advent of audio tapes and of the Talking Book (pioneered by the RNIB) has been a splendid thing for me.

A conventional book provides particular pleasures – the look of the binding, the aesthetics of the typeface, the feel of the page – but a Talking Book does have one physical advantage: it is usually smaller and lighter, and so easier to pack. It leaves the listener freer, too, to respond to the ambience. Listening to a Talking Book where the only illumination is glimmering candlelight or a flickering fire is something all its own. Shadows emphasize mystery and Gothick horror, subdued light engenders romance, and comparative silence encourages confidentiality or even a sense of conspiracy with the author. I particularly recall being snowed in at New Year in an isolated country cottage where we had to resort to burning broken furniture in the stove for warmth. In these circumstances, we felt ourselves truly beleaguered in a Russian winter as we listened to Juliet Stevenson’s evocative reading of Anna Karenina. The quality, character and intonation of the reader’s voice inevitably affect the listener’s experience. But there is still room for the imagination to bubble and create a personal vision. As Joyce Grenfell memorably put it in her wireless criticism for the Observer, ‘The pictures on radio are better.’ I find it extraordinary that there is no acknowledged system for the notation of the spoken voice – as there is for the singing voice and even for ballet choreography. During the past two years I have been working with Stephen Greif (an actor and reader in his own right) to try to fill this gap, along with a board of assessors consisting of expert voice coaches, writers, producers and lecturers in dramatic literature. We have now developed a system called VoiceQuality, which is being used by the Spotlight Casting Directory – their website also contains clips of actors’ voices. VoiceQuality provides a lexicon of twenty adjectives to describe the quality (breathy, gentle, melodious, silky) and twenty to describe the character (amused, assured, engaging, sympathetic) of an individual’s natural speaking voice. The actors choose the adjectives which they believe most nearly match their own voices, and so provide an aid to casting for audio work. Some voices can provide good company. I’m thinking particularly of Jill Balcon’s reading of The Unequalled Self, Claire Tomalin’s wonderful biography of Samuel Pepys. Her duchess-like taffeta tones vividly conjure up both the personalities and the period. But the Royals of recorded reading are surely Miriam Margolyes and Martin Jarvis. Miriam wrests every ounce of comedy from Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I, in which the royal family wake up to find themselves in a Republic and relocated from the Palace to a Midlands council estate. Martin Jarvis’s readings of Richmal Compton’s Just William stories are unequalled. He lightly catches the nuances of the repressed English accent and the earnestness of the aspirant middle classes, transporting us to another place and time. Each summer I escape to my Umbrian hideaway to fulfil my listening duties as one of the judges for the unabridged fiction category of ‘The Talkies’, the Audio Book Publishing Association’s annual awards. During the ten days I spend there listening to the shortlist, the hours reel or spin by (many books are now available on CD as well as cassette). The criteria we apply are: the suitability of the title for audio; the quality of the reader’s performance; and overall enjoyment and ease of use. The range of the shortlist is remarkable, although thrillers and mystery seem to predominate. There is a lot of blood on the cassette deck. In 2003, however, the two that worked best for me were A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr, read by Nick Rawlinson, and Embers by Sándor Márai, read by Paul Scofield and sensitively produced by John Tydeman. A Month in the Country centres on the restoration of a medieval wall painting in a Yorkshire church by a traumatized First World War survivor. In Embers, set in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a dying aristocrat entertains his late wife’s lover to dinner in his echoing schloss. Paul Scofield’s golden voice gives perfect weight and meaning to each syllable, powerfully evoking a whole life and the passing of an Empire. Both these novels are particularly suited to the Talking Book format since they are first-person narratives, making a direct connection between reader and listener. In 2004, a semi-dramatized comedy science fiction, The AntiPope, jostled on the shortlist with two Agatha Christies (Endless Night and The Pale Horse), a Daphne du Maurier (I’ll Never Be Young Again), Joe David Brown’s Paper Moon, a rites-of-passage story set in the American Depression of the 1930s, and Sarah Cauldwell’s intriguing thriller The Sirens Sang of Murder, the comedy of which was highlighted by Eva Haddon’s witty and wry delivery. This novel moves between Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the Channel Islands as we are invited to unravel the motives for murder in the convoluted world of tax avoidance trusts. It certainly provided the requisite pools of blood, as did Country of the Blind, Christopher Brookmire’s take on the unsavoury world of the media barons. However, it was the Irish last year who took the category to a sublime level. First, there was Dermot Crowley and Sean Barrett’s masterly reading of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. Crowley delivers Beckett’s archetypal tramp as if he has actually lived the life, while Barrett brings a satirical edge to the journal of the tramp’s provincial tracker. The narrative is secondary to the words themselves, heard as sound, free of meaning, yet full of humour and satire. However in the end, for me, it was Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan’s stunning rendering of James Joyce’s complete and unabridged Ulysses that won the day. Norton effortlessly inhabits a huge range of characters, while Marcella Riordan is a roisterous, raunchy Molly Bloom. This mind-bending, ear-stretching twenty-seven and a half hours is longer even than Bloomsday itself. Appropriately, I listened to it on the centenary – 16 June 2004. It is a tour de force, making a great but difficult work accessible. I was genuinely sorry when it was over, bereft at the loss of so many amusing and frank friends. Audio books have moved on from being a service for the blind or deputizing for a parent reading a bedtime story, or even a way of trying to silence children on long car journeys. They are available in many bookshops, but the specialist is the now well-established Talking Bookshop in London’s Wigmore Street.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 5 © Jonathan James-Moore 2005


About the contributor

Jonathan James-Moore read Engineering at Cambridge, or rather just looked at the diagrams. Lured by the stage, he spent ten years as a theatre manager, joining the BBC in 1978 where, by a process of erosion – all other talent having left for TV – he rose to be Head of Light Entertainment, Radio. He now works as a freelance audio producer.

The Talking Bookshop, 11 Wigmore Street, London W1U 1PE, tel 020 7491 4117, fax 020 7629 1966, freephone 0800 074 5086, e-mail [email protected], www.talkingbooks.co.uk

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