For the last three weeks I have been in North East India, travelling through Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Generally, this means that the only music one hears is unbelievably loud Indian pop music, especially when travelling on the buses. If you have seen Slumdog Millionaire you will get the meaning though you still have to have the experience for true lasting effect.

These inter-city buses want to entertain their passengers (though one only has too look around!) so it is de rigeur to have a video machine playing Bollywood movies end to end at an EXCRUCIATING volume. From Rajgir to Bodh Gaya I made the bad mistake of sitting near the front, close to the speakers. No chance of moving as the aisle as well as the roof and the back window bracket were full. It is a two hour journey. Read the rest of this entry »

Confession time: I don’t listen to everything that we release before publication. When we started, I not only listened to everything but I also produced everything – or virtually everything – for many years. But now, when our new titles often run for 20 hours or more, I simply can’t get through them. I sample them, of course. But for the complete experience, I am always playing catch-up.

And, at the moment, I am playing catch-up with Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, read by David Horovitch which came out early last year.

WHAT A DELIGHT!
Classic comedy, I mused, may not seem as rich a seam as classic tragedy or classic romance. For every Pickwick Papers or Tristram Shandy we have two or three Tess of the d’Urbevilles or A Tale of Two Cities. Or Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary. Is this because comedy is less durable than deeper, richer emotive states engendered by the great epics of love and loss? Does time take its toll more severely – except, perhaps, in drama? After all, Mrs Malaprop can be very funny, even today. And so can Shakespeare’s Mechanicals.

But on the whole, comic novels do not last so well. Within the classics – within so many Dickens! – there are delightful characters that genuinely make you smile or laugh out loud. Then there are the evergreen Bertie Woosters for when the sky is dark, or The Wind in the Willows or Three Men in a Boat or The Diary of a Nobody. And Mark Twain.

Go abroad, however, and there is the added difficult (for English speakers) of translation – another hurdle which often trips up travelers in the genre.

However, if you don’t know it, I urge you to try The Good Soldier Švejk in our world premiere audiobook recording… though those who do know it will need no persuading.

My stepfather was Czech, and even though he spent decades in England, his English was larded with a strong accent. One of our great Christmas treats was to sit by the family fireside (yes! we did!) while Harry Samek from Brno read some of his favourite passages in the glittering Parrott English translation. Švejk pawning the piano to buy schnapps for the chaplain. Švejk doing nefarious deals to acquire dogs (he is a buyer and a seller of dogs) to pass on to his lieutenant or others.

Who is Švejk? The scene is Prague at the outbreak of World War I. The Archduke has been assassinated. Men are being drafted to the front. But not Švejk. He is not quite a glass full; he is an innocent, bumbling (with his smiling, open, honest face) through one scrape after another. Or is he really so innocent?

He is accused of sedition – but did he really traduce the Emperor or the state?

He is accused of being a malingerer – but has he really got rheumatism?

And there I was, only yesterday, on the cross trainer followed by the running machine, followed by some weights, laughing, laughing out loud even. My gym mates started to give me a wide berth. I tell you, laughing on a running machine is a contradiction in terms. And, frankly, dangerous.

But David Horovitch does an absolutely sparkling job. He has Švejk off to a tee. And the myriad of other characters who pop up along the way.

I went to the morning of the recording, produced by Roy McMillan. It was such an important novel from my childhood, I wanted to hear what David would make of it. I was slightly nervous, to tell the truth, because I had my stepfather’s thick Czech accent in my ears, even after all these years.

I need not have worried. From the start it was clear that this great comic book was in perfect hands. Funny, satirical, sardonic, the recording is a genuine pleasure. This is what the audiobook experience is all about for me.

What more could I ask? A classic comedy in a perfect translation read with imagination and real, pure fun. AND, therefore, furthermore, I remain longer in the gym, getting slimmer and fitter. Can’t say the same would be true for Heart of Darkness…

The power of the classics to catch the imagination of a wider public is repeatedly demonstrated by the success of adaptations, whether the focus falls on Jane Austen on film, Mrs Gaskell on television (the popularity of Cranford on British television last year was a total surprise) or on Paradise Lost broadcast by BBC radio. Suddenly, a path appears that leads thousands back to the original words of the author.

Last year this was true of Persuasion in the US, where PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre brought Austen again to the fore, and awakened fresh interest in Juliet Stevenson’s unabridged recording.

And over the Christmas/New Year just gone, the brave BBC Radio 3 decision to broadcast Anton Lesser’s peerless unabridged Naxos AudioBooks recording of Paradise Lost – the 12 Books over 12 days – threw a sharp spotlight on ‘the greatest epic poem in the English language’. Frankly, it was difficult to keep it in stock…

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AUDIOBOOKS make very good Christmas presents. Often, it is the kind of present that your mother, father, son, daughter… etc., …didn’t know they wanted. And it certainly makes a difference to those mountain of books that come at this time of year, and that pile up ‘waiting for when I can get round to it.’ With audiobooks, of course, they can be listened to on the move, in the car, on an MP3 player, in the gym, or on a walk, or at home in bed when one is too tired to read… in other words, there are plenty of opportunities.

So, here are some Christmas ideas:

FOR MOTHER

1. Little Dorrit – unabridged or abridged by Charles Dickens
   You saw/missed the TV drama – now listen to the original words read by Anton Lesser.
2. Villette – unabridged or abridged by Charlotte Brontë
   Why should Jane Eyre dominate the CB landscape?
3. The Lives of the Artists – abridged by Giorgio Vasari
   To inspire a visit to Florence and Rome and Italy generally.
   
4. Under Milk Wood – unabridged by Dylan Thomas
   The greatest radio play ever in the original recording with Richard Burton and the superb cast.
5. The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
   A new recording of an always challenging play.
6. The Great Poets – William Wordsworth
   A good selection of the best-known poems remind us of his quiet meaning.

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Last month, in AudioFile, the American audiobook magazine, the reviewer praised Rupert Degas’s reading of Haruki Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance. It is not, I think, immodest to print the review in its entirety, as it was given an ‘Earphones’ award, a gong of particular distinction.

DANCE DANCE DANCE
By Haruki Murakami
Read by Rupert Degas

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. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine [Published: August 2008]

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The other day, we ditched two new recordings before they even got to the CD pressing plant, and got different actors in to read them afresh. It is an expensive business to do that, but they were both part of a new box-set scheduled for next year, and to have two average-to-poor CDs in a 6 CD box was simply unacceptable.

I am not sure how often this happens in other audiobook companies. We have found it necessary to do this from time to time over the fourteen years since we started, but I use a simple yardstick: if I can’t bear to listen to it, why should anyone else? And, frankly, I don’t have to buy it!

But it is a problem with the way the audiobook world works. We decide on the book to be recorded, and consider the ideal voice or voices: young, old, fresh, mature, light, substantial, classic or contemporary. Do we want someone with a chameleon of characters at their disposal like Rupert Degas, or do we want someone who just touches the character yet conveys 3D – like Juliet Stevenson?

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