“The Road to Wigan Pier” by George Orwell

Duration: 6 hours 54 minutes
Talking Book Number: TB 7961

Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London” was a book that interested me when I reviewed it in January 2007. I wanted to read another of his works and this one was suggested to me. It was published four years later and it seems to be rather more famous.

It’s a book of two parts. The first part describes the results of Orwell’s researches into social conditions in northern England in the thirties. I call them researches because that’s what we’d call them today. He visited the northern working class in their homes and workplaces and he presents his observations backed up with facts and figures from library research. It’s a noticeable improvement on the descriptions of his experiences in Paris and London. Perhaps they inspired him to approach his self-imposed task of social journalism in a more organised manner. The result is highly effective.

Orwell uses the same clear journalistic style writing style that he used in “Down and Out”. In some ways it resembles the sort of polemical documentary that we now get from the likes of Michael Moore. If you don’t know Moore his “Stupid White Men” (TB 13326) is available from the library. But Orwell’s descriptions of the squalid working and living conditions are also surprisingly poetic. His style demonstrates that even in a book like this he is first and foremost a novelist. There’s something very human about his presentation of the material, both in terms of the people he meets and the character of Orwell himself. There are eccentric characters who are as sympathetically-drawn as those in “Down and Out”. There are descriptions of the grim north which are at times rather quaint and quirky and at others outrage-inducing in their clarity. All of this has something rather Dickensian about it but in Orwell’s case the outrage-inducing descriptions of poverty aren’t melodramatic or mawkish. They don’t leave you with a sense of impotent rage in the face of a hostile world. Orwell’s anger is combined with his Socialist vision of how things could be put right. And in the end they were. The levels of poverty he describes were removed from Britain by various post-war governments. The disturbing thing is that some aspects of his descriptions are surprisingly contemporary. The culture of deprivation and the indifferent institutions he describes have their counterparts in modern Britain. I saw them first-hand when I worked for a few years in a British Jobcentre.

The second part of the book includes some autobiographical material. Orwell tells us about the social context of his life and explains how it caused him to arrive at his political beliefs. Such an exercise in the case of most writers would be unutterably dull, but in Orwell’s hands it becomes impressively confessional and easy to identify with. I found his descriptions of his schooling and his later work for the state both appealing in this manner. His feelings and reactions are quite recognisable to me. He also talks about the period when he was “Down and Out in Paris and London”, providing a little more context to the material in that book.

Orwell goes on to engage in political, social and literary criticism. His theme is the state of Socialism in Britain in the thirties. His politics are much clearer and better thought-out than in “Down and Out” but his independence of mind is still clear. He writes perceptively about the British class system and the human condition. He paints a cruel portrait of the Socialists around him and gives a rebuttal to reactionaries of the time. These are quite amusing if a little arrogant and acerbic. He manages to be quite entertaining on the whole. This is quite an achievement since the task that he’s undertaking is one that’s impossible to complete without at least some degree of dryness. His grestest weakness is a tendency towards repetition.

He ends the book with a clarion call against Fascism. His intention is clearly to produce a book which argues in support of Socialism and to suggest how it might be built in Britain. The intellectual content of his analysis is certainly good. In fact he is so successful at playing the Devil’s advocate in his arguments that it might be possible to see Socialism as a lost cause. There are a few flaws in his attempts to extrapolate his ideas and to predict the future. Futurology is a difficult and inexact science at the best of times. It makes his work a hostage to fortune and a victim of our dissecting hindsight. But his writing on this subject is certainly no worse than his contemporaries. His political predictions aren’t at all bad and his socio-scientific ones stand up reasonably. The irony is that he probably needs to make no predictions at all. His analysis of the state of British politics and society would probably be just as applicable today as it was seventy years ago.

This version of the book has a twenty-minute appendix. It’s made up of the original foreword which the publisher added to the first edition. This contains a disclaimer to the effect that Orwell’s views are not those of the publisher. It also contains an attempt to refute some of Orwell’s arguments. Its main interest is in contextualising the book and indicating the sort of reception that it originally received. Overall it is not very helpful and you might want to skip it.

The reader is Michael Tudor-Barnes. He makes an excellent job of it, even better than he did on “Remains of the Day”. His deep-voiced rendition is delivered in clear received tones. He injects into the reading all of the passion necessary for such a work. He even manages this in those passages which consist largely of facts and figures. His music-hall northern accents and his voices for sneering bourgeois critics are rather entertaining too.

Star Rating: five stars (out of five)

Original Book Text: five out of five.
RNIB Disc Recording: five out of five.

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“Life of Pi” by Yann Martel

Duration: 6 hours approx. (abridged)
Publisher: Harper Collins

I have a maths teacher friend who occasionally lends me commercial audiobooks. The last one he lent me was Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident...”. This time it’s Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi”. When he handed it to me he commented “This one’s abridged but that’s probably a good thing”. I assumed that he meant he didn’t like it very much. He hadn’t given me any idea what it was about. I suspected it might be a non-fiction book about the history of mathematics.

As it tuns out it’s a novel about an Indian called Pi Patel. He’s the son of a zookeeper and he recounts events from his childhood in the seventies. He’s rather a likeable character which helps counter some of the problems with the structure of the book. The main text is a first-person introspective narrative which produces the usual claustrophobic effect. In this case it’s magnified by periods of loneliness that the character experiences. The book also has an annoying habit of giving tedious lists and copious quantities of data about any topics that happen to concern him.

There is a second main character in the book. It is Yann Martel, the author. He appears in numerous authorial interjections which interrupt the flow of the narrative and become increasingly annoying. He also appears in the introduction where he comes across as surprisingly arrogant. He seems to believe that he can write about anything without needing to research the subject properly. At one point he tells us that he wanted to write a book about Portugal so he took a holiday in India. His explanation is that no writing is ever really be about itself. Perhaps he thinks that as a writer he make anything out of anything. If this book is anything to go by it looks like he can’t.

Martel claims that Pi’s story is derived from interviews he conducted with Mr. Patel later in his life. The book’s introduction and interjections explain how the author came to discover the tale. The idea is that this is a true story and that Martel is merely recording it like some kind of journalist. It’s an idea that Martel cultivates quite successfully and there were moments when I wondered whether it was indeed true. The narrative is quirky and gives the tale a pleasantly realistic feel. Occasionally it does become rather hard to believe and on one occasion even ridiculous but Martel’s justification is simply that this as one of those tales where truth is stranger than fiction.

Martel enthusiastically pastiches Pi’s Indian speech patterns but they don’t sound authentically Indian to me. This might not show up so much in the printed form but the Hindi accent used in this recording makes it clearer. Equally inauthentic is Pi’s strangely un-Indian way of thinking. His concerns are chiefly the exotic things that usually interest white people about India such as Hinduism and Mrs. Ghandi. Comparative religion seems to be his hobby. But he doesn’t have the fascination with the prosaic that often marks out genuine Indian writers. I’m used to reading Indian authors such as Anita Desai, R. K. Narayan and V.S. Naipaul. They are much better writers than Martel and they give an idea of the genuine Indian mindset. Perhaps the explanation for Pi’s un-Indian traits is that the reminiscing Mr. Patel is now supposed to be a Canadian citizen. Maybe his thought and speech patterns are those of an Asian Canadian. I can’t be sure as I don’t know any Asian Canadians. But if he were supposed to be an Indian citizen or a British Asian I’d be pretty confident that the pastiche wasn’t up to scratch.

About a quarter of the way through the book the story changes. Pi experiences a series of dramatic events and he has to endure and survive an arduous ordeal. There are some gruesome bits about nature red in tooth and claw which may make the book unsuitable for vegetarians and the squeamish. The ordeal that Pi undergoes lasts so long that it takes up the entire remainder of the book. It’s Martel’s success or failure in recounting it that makes or breaks the novel.

The best thing about Martel’s description of these dramatic events is the surprise with which they appear. They make an impressive contrast to what has gone before and they come as a real shock. At least they did for me. I was not expecting them at all because I was lucky enough not to have read the RNIB synopsis. Nor had I bothered to find out what was printed on the back of the tape box. Both of these are terrible spoilers that will tell you all about the events. Presumably these events are the very thing that the book is famous for and so it’s considered OK to reveal them. That’s rather a shame as most readers won’t experience the surprise I did.

Otherwise I found the description of Pi’s ordeal overly-long and slow. It’s rather similar to the long incarceration scene in Frederick Pohl’s “The Other End of Time” (reviewed June 2006). It has the same lethargic development and lack of action but this time it’s lonelier and there is less social contact. There are many extended and rather dull passages describing Pi’s predicament which are broken up by a few stressful thriller-like sections. I found the sudden switching between the two different styles rather uncomfortable. But the book does have a saving grace in its resolution. The ending allows us to re-evaluate the material which has gone before and make up our own minds about how to interpret it. It also raises questions about the nature of fiction and its relationship to the divine.

The book is not divided into chapters which can sometimes be a problem. RNIB talking books frequently get jumbled in production and it’s hard to report the location of faults without chapter numbers to refer to. There are no such faults with the commercial version but I don’t know if the unabridged RNIB version (TB 13950) is OK or not. It’s over twice the length of the commercial one at 12 hours and 38 minutes. I really can’t imagine what the author does with all that extra time. Perhaps this is the reason that my friend was glad that he had read the abridged version.

The reader on the RNIB version is Garrick Hagon who’s usually excellent. I expect he made a good job of this title. The commercial version is read by Kerry Shale. I haven’t heard him before and I’m not sure what his real accent is. His reading of the author’s voice is fine but not so the accent he uses for Pi. I think it’s supposed to be Indian-Canadian but it occasionally strays into some sort of Welsh-Irish hybrid. It isn’t a voice that’s very comfortable to listen to for long periods. The commercial recording also has the odd habit of fading in and out between the reader’s two different voices. At one point Shale makes an attempt at a Japanese accent but he really shouldn’t. It comes out as rather comic. Shale’s overall reading style is the modern emotional one that’s normal in the world of commercial audiobooks and is increasingly found in the RNIB’s Talking Books.

I’d recommend this book to those who like Hinduism, zoos and ordeals. I wouldn’t recommend it to those looking for a book filled with characters and action.

Star Rating: Three Stars (out of five)

Abridged Book Text: three out of five.
Commercial Tape Recording: three out of five.

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“The Golden Fleece” by Robert Graves

Duration: 23 hours
Talking Book Number: TB 5329

I recently had a friend recommend this book to me. I’d not read anything by Robert Graves before but I knew his name from the celebrated seventies BBC TV adaptation of “I, Claudius” (TB 797). I only had a vague idea about this tale but I’m quite keen on myths, legends and fantasy stories and so I was enthusiastic about trying it.

“The Golden Fleece” is Greek myth presented as historical novel. It’s similar to the way that Gore Vidal presents Roman history in “Julian” (TB 1878). It tells the story of the adventures of the Argonauts and it focusses primarily on their interaction with each other. My idea of fantasy heroes is mainly derived from north European sources like Beowulf or Tolkien so I was not expecting the sort of characters that Graves uses. His Argonauts are much more ordinary, like the characters in “I, Claudius”. The exotic setting contrasts with the ordinary activities of normal people. The story of a shipful of men out on an adventure is reminiscent of a modern group of young people on some sort of outward bound expedition. The chaos of decision making, feuding and squabbling, bonding and celebrating, setbacks and triumphs are all very familiar.

The writing style Graves uses is clear and not particularly complex. It’s a mixture of straightforward modern English and some old Victorian vocabulary. Graves uses few adjectives but instead relies on exotic details for description and atmosphere. Nevertheless it does require a little concentration to take everything in. There are a large number of characters in the book and where necessary the great families have their genealogy provided. A little familiarity with the classics may prove useful though it’s far from essential.

The tale takes the form of a great journey which has been a mainstay of fantasy writing since Tolkien. At times the book becomes a travelogue of exotic locations. It would probably help the reader to have some knowledge of the geography of the East Mediterranean and Black seas. I don’t know if Graves provided a map for the printed version but we obviously don’t get it. The story includes lots of details about navigation and seafaring which make it sound a little like the voyages of Thor Heyerdahl (four of whose books are in the TB Library). The overall effect is quite cinematic. It made me wonder if anyone ever tried to make a film of Graves’ version. It’s certainly effective as an adventure story, which may well be how the original legends were seen.

But this is far from a standard Hollywood version of the story. It’s set clearly in the ancient world and carries with it a set of values that are quite alien now. They are the sort of ideas that Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson describes in "The Greek View of Life" (reviewed April 2006). There’s also a lot of ancient Greek and Minoan history and archaeology behind the book. It’s the sort of material that Jacquetta Hawkes gives in “Dawn of the Gods” (reviewed January 2007). Hawkes is particularly interested in a theory about the matriarchal nature of ancient societies in the Greek peninsula and islands. The inhabitants are said to have originally worshipped a mother goddess and only later adopted a patriarchal society and the worship of a sky father.

I was surprised to find that this theory is also a major theme of Graves’ book. At first I’d wondered if it was original to Hawkes but it must have predated her 1960s book by at least a generation. It may derive from sources such as James George Frazer’s “The Golden Bough” or Joseph Campbell’s “The Masks of God”. I’m not sure as I’ve not been able to find accessible copies of either of these.

In this novel Graves presents the earlier matriarchal system as one in which the sexes lived separately in single-gender communal groups. The only other place I’ve come across this idea is in a short story by William Golding in “The Scorpion God” (TB 1901). Graves presents women in this early society as having great power. When the new patriarchal system brings in the new institution of marriage the power of women wanes and their oppression begins. Most cultures experience social conflict between the old matriarchal and new patriarchal systems. This conflict reaches an extreme form in the case of the Amazons. The dialogue in the book inevitably contains a lot of banter about sexual politics. Luckily none of it is anywhere near as chauvinist as one might expect from a sixty-year-old novel.

Religion is an important element of the book. The gods and goddesses are after all the backbone of ancient Greek mythology. But in this book we don’t get the usual scenes of the plotting Olympians. The text doesn’t even confirm their existence. Instead we get numerous conversations in which the devout and superstitious Argonauts speculate about Olympian motivations. It’s only through human eyes and beliefs that we see the activities of the deities. Divine agency is revealed through the strange behaviour of animals, dramatic natural phenomena, the conflict of opposing religious factions and the interaction of different tribes. When the ancient Greek speaks of Father Zeus overcoming the Triple Goddess it’s easy to read this as the overcoming of one tribe and one cult by its rival. The reader is invited to see Ancient Greek religion as social concept rather than a supernatural one. It’s the interaction between different cults rather than different gods that’s behind much of the plot. This isn’t a narrative about monsters and magic. Instead it’s a story driven by character, society, politics and history.

Graves’ novel is nothing like the commercial fantasy genre that has become dominant since the fantasy boom of the eighties. Nor is it like the whimsical Victorian penchant for bizarre settings, magic and the supernatural that was its predecessor. What it’s most similar to is Mary Stewart’s re-working of the Arthur myth in “The Crystal Cave” (TB 1584). It’s a form of materialist creative mythology that I suspect may have been quite popular in the mid-twentieth century. Graves gives his reasons for writing this version in an hour-long appendix of historical sources. His belief is that the Greeks would have told this tale as a piece of history. The listener at the time would have regarded it as a believable story. Graves considers many of the fantasy elements in the story to be metaphorical in origin. His aim is to write a version that gets back to the original historical tale and allows us to have a version of the story that we can literally believe. So he gives us a materialist version where religious belief, superstition, confusion, deceit, dreams, lies, self-delusion and trickery explain the magic and mystery. It’s a version that’s much more believable to a modern audience brought up to trust history and archaeology rather than omens and portents.

As a result of this approach the story has some unusual features. One is that the flow of the narrative seems a little eccentric and quirky. Events rarely turn out to be what one would expect from a heroic fantasy novel. Curiously this isn’t a negative feature. The story feels surprisingly realistic and believable as a consequence of its unpredictability. And the portrayals of some of the characters are rather different from the Hollywood standard of hero. Jason is a brooding, indecisive and weak leader while Hercules is a boorish and stupid oaf. I’m uncertain whether these characterisations are original to Graves or whether they are drawn from the Greek text itself. My unfamiliarity with the traditional version means that I’m left guessing as to what the normal version of the story and the characters might be like. But certainly this is an interesting and unusual take on a famous fable and it made a very enjoyable read.

The reader is George Hagan. His reading style isn’t the modern emotional sort but fortunately it isn’t unbearably old-fashioned and stilted either. He reads with a deep clear authoritative voice which is easily comprehensible and quite appropriate for this sort of text. He also copes admirably with the plethora of Greek proper names that would have had me tumbling and tripping over them.

I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in Greek legends or exotic adventure stories. I wouldn’t recommend it to those who like their fantasy strictly fantastic.

Star rating: five stars (out of five)

Original Book text: five out of five.
RNIB Disc recording: four out of five.

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“After the King: Stories in Honour of J. R. R. Tolkien” edited by Martin H. Greenberg

Duration: 21 hours 3 minutes
Talking Book Number: TB 10572

I found this book in the fantastic fiction section of the on-line catalogue. It’s a compilation of nineteen modern short fantasy stories. I suspect that at least one of them was commissioned for the book. Although Tolkien’s name appears in the title there is nothing Tolkienesque about the book’s contents. It all sounds rather like a marketing ploy to me.

The tales in the book are a reasonably diverse set. There are standard commercial fantasy stories, original takes on the genre, pseudo-historical stories, science fiction stories and even science fantasy stories. It’s a genre that seems to attract women writers and these are quite well represented in the book. Some of the stories are even women’s fiction, more or less. Unfortunately these stories are also some of the weakest.

The main use I can see for the book is to allow the reader to try out a number of different fantasy writers. That’s certainly the case for me as I’ve only read three of these authors before. I imagine that this is also the publisher’s idea. At the end of the book there’s what I can only call an advertising section. It gives an indication of the reputation of each author and tells us which of their novels we’re supposed to buy.

The key question for us is bound to be “How many of these writers have their works in an accessible format?”. The answer is likely to be “Not many”. My impression is that few of these writers are going to be found in the commercial audiobook market. Sadly commercial audiobooks are still generally restricted to only the most famous writers. There are no more than two authors in this book that can really be classed as famous. This lack of variety in what’s available among commercial audiobooks is something that I find frustrating. Many of the writers that I enjoy most are far from well known. Hence their works are far from easy to find in accessible formats. And anyway I much prefer reading a broad spectrum of authors to surviving on a diet of audiobooks by the same few famous writers. Hopefully a combination the RNIB’s “right to read” campaign and the general expansion of the audiobook market will eventually combine to rectify the problem.

In the meantime we can take advantage of the Talking Books library. Its stock is rather different from what’s available commercially since it’s run to provide accessibility rather than to make a profit. The on-line catalogue indicates how many of the nineteen writers in this book are available to us. It seems that there are four of them present in the library and 90% of the titles by those four are written by the two most famous. This must be pretty similar to the sort of representation that the commercial sector gives these authors. I was a little disappointed in this case to find the Talking Books library doesn’t provide us with anything very different. It means that for visually impaired readers this book’s main function of providing examples for further reading is irrelevant.

I can’t review this book in my usual way. There’s too little in common between the different tales and different authors to review the book as a whole. Instead I’ve written capsule reviews for each story and given each one its own star rating.

“Reeve the Just” by Stephen R. Donaldson

A grim little tale of cruelty, innocence and redemption with few fantasy elements. Ironically the story fails to be as dark as it needs to be and it misses many opportunities for originality. It’s also far too long due to the use of a terrible faux-Victorian writing style. The reader’s choice of Yorkshire accents for the characters made me think of “Wuthering Heights”. One star.

“Troll Bridge” by Terry Pratchett

A vaguely interesting little description of a meeting of two old soldiers. There’s not a lot of narrative as the focus is on character and dialogue. It makes use of Pratchett’s standard Discworld setting and mildly-amusing writing style. It made me think of the movie “Shrek”. Two stars.

“A Long Night’s Vigil at the Temple” by Robert Silverberg

A far-future post-holocaust science fiction story about faith and doubt. It’s a little slow and lacks a clear ending. There is a touch of Gothic reminiscent of H. Rider Haggard but the story doesn’t really make much use of it. Two stars.

“The Dragon of Tollin” by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

A cliched standard fantasy tale set in a world with some of the worst proper names I’ve ever heard. Its revelations are predictable and rely mainly on the imaginary biology of dragonkind. One star.

“Faith” by Poul & Karen Anderson

A reasonably effective children’s story written in a rather atmospheric Disckensian style. It’s a dark and grim piece though the structure of the narrative is a little American for my taste. Three stars.

“In the Season of the Dressing of the Wells” by John Brunner

Brunner lives up to his reputation with this excellent little story about religion and romance in the rural England of the twenties. It contains his usual progressive and anti-war themes. The style makes me think of William Trevor or Daphne Du Maurier. There are hardly any fantasy elements in it. Five stars.

“The Fellowship of the Dragon” by Patricia A. McKillip

A terrible little cliched quest story set in a bog-standard fantasy world. It’s as American and silly as Scooby-Doo. Even a bit of gender-reversal can’t save it . One star.

“The Decoy Duck” by Harry Turtledove

A vaguely reasonable culture-clash tale concerning the religious conversion of northern barbarians. There is hardly any fantasy to it other than the imaginary proper names. It would probably have worked better as a historical story. Two stars.

“Nine Threads of Gold” by Andre Norton

A feeble attempt at a redemptive children’s story set in a dark age that follows a golden age. The pacing is appallingly slow, the setting cliched and the faux-fantasy patois embarrassing. One star.

“The Conjure Man” by Charles de Lint

The only story that’s explicitly in honour of Tolkien, this is an eccentric modern-day tale about magic and the nature of story telling in urban America. The writing style isn’t bad but there isn’t all that much in the way of narrative. Two stars.

“The Halfling House” by Dennis L. McKiernan

A silly first-person comic quest story in the standard modern fantasy genre. There is just a hint of originality in the camp and quirky writing style. There may even be a little satire on the fantasy genre. It’s a shame that there’s some annoying moralising in it. The many comical character accents are well voiced by the reader. It should appeal to Terry Pratchett fans. Two stars.

“Silver or Gold” by Emma Bull

A rather wet women’s fairytale quest story in a world of rural domesticity. The setting is clearly American but this is less incongruous than usual due to the presence of some native American and old New England elements. It’s a dull tale told with aching slowness. One star.

“Up the Side of the Air” by Karen Haber

A two-act children’s pantomime about a sorcerer’s apprentice. It’s reminiscent of an old Disney cartoon with the modern twist of a feisty girl. The setting is rather J. K. Rowling. Two stars.

“The Naga” by Peter S. Beagle

A neat pastiche of a South Asian romantic fable as told by Pliny the Elder. Three stars.

“Revolt of the Sugar Plum Fairies” by Mike Resnick

A short comic tale set in contemporary urban America. Its theme is the relationship of fantasy with our modern commercial society. The dialogue and characterisation are amusingly done. Four stars.

“Winter’s King” by Jane Yolen

A short atmospheric piece about an enchanted boy. The setting evokes an archetypical northland of north European fable. There’s not much narrative. Three stars.

“Götterdämmerung” by Barry N. Malzberg

I didn’t really understand this one. The characters are fantasy stereotypes but with some quirky dialogue. It may be that the whole thing is some sort of satire on Wagner. The characters have Wagnerian names and the story makes reference to the lost ring. Unfortunately I’m not acquainted with Wagner so I can’t be sure. Two stars maybe.

“Down the River Road” by Gregory Benford

An impressive science fantasy tale set in an imaginatively surreal alien world with a strange cosmology. The setting simultaneously resembles the America of the old Deep South and Frontier West. The writing uses a patois culled from both these sources. The narrative is a detective story which is resolved nicely. It’s rather like a story by Michael Moorcock, John Brunner, Doris Lessing or Brian Aldiss. Five stars.

“Death and the Lady” by Judith Tarr

A women’s tale of exile, Church, witchcraft and Faerie set in Mediaeval France. It’s a largely historical piece and the fantasy elements are not particularly central to the narrative. The dialogue is well done though the pace is a little slow. Two stars.


The reader is listed as Jonathon Oliver. His deep resonant English voice is quite effective, particularly for the surprisingly large number of tales set in the grim north. He reads in the modern emotional style and his character accents and voices aren’t bad. There’s also a second reader called Lorelei King who doesn’t seem to be listed. She reads about a third of the stories in a flat and slightly sinister American accent. Her character voices are reasonable and her style is OK for the American tales.

I’d only recommend this book to people who want to try out new fantasy writers and who aren’t worried about accessibly issues. I wouldn’t recommend it to those who are actually looking for anything Tolkienesque.

Star Rating: two stars (out of five)

Original book text: two out of five.
RNIB Disc Recording: four out of five.

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“The Story of Art” by E. H. Gombrich

Duration: 15 hours 5 minutes
Talking Book Number: TB 13696

I first came across the name Ernst Gombrich when I was a student. He’s a writer with a great interest in the faculty of human sight. His book “Art and Illusion” was used to illustrate some ideas about the complex and mysterious way that vision works. Like most students I didn’t actually bother to read it. But I’d like to catch up on it now if it were accessible. Unfortunately it’s only to be found in the old RNIB cassette library and hence is no longer available. I’ve put in a request or it to be converted to CD so maybe it’ll turn up sometime in the future.

“The Story of Art” is another of Gombrich’s famous titles. It’s still available because it’s in the digital Talking Books library. It’s an introductory volume about art history for the complete beginner. That’s fortunate for me because I don’t know very much about art. Like most visually impaired people I don’t really have much of a background in the visual arts. Unlike most visually impaired people I don’t have much of an excuse. I didn’t become visually impaired until my thirties which would have given me plenty of time to become acquainted with the likes of Picasso and Rembrandt. Perhaps I’m just a pleb.

There’s plenty of potential for producing a dry textbook with a subject such as this. Fortunately Gombrich manages to avoid that pitfall with his history of sculpture, painting and architecture. In fact it’s a surprisingly interesting and comprehensible book. It does require a degree of concentration to read as it’s rather dense but that’s inevitable as its scope is incredibly broad. The time period that it covers stretches all the way from cave painting to modern art. This has the consequence that the story is told at breakneck speed. It’s a little like one of those books that purport to tell the history of the world in one volume and so Napoleon gets no more than a couple of sentences. Gombrich also tries to cover most continents and civilisations although his attempts to avoid being Eurocentric are a little token. The inclusion of early Buddhist art takes up about three minutes whereas the art of Italy fills many chapters.

Since this is art history rather than art appreciation Gombrich does more than just talk about the art itself. He also provides useful and succinct historical and religious context. So for Christian art he provides relevant explanations about passages from the Bible and tells us about the significance of events such as the Reformation. He gives details about the development of new artistic methods and techniques such as the first uses of printing and oil painting in art. He discusses changes in artistic conventions and talks about the changing social status of the artist. For famous artists he provides a few biographical details. A lot of famous artists achieved their fame because, as well as being good, they were the first to achieve some new effect. Gombrich duly identifies the first examples of things like landscapes, still lifes and portraits. And he brings his knowledge of the mysteries of human sight to the subject. He points out how artists have exploited the idiosyncrasies of human vision to produce complex and startling effects.

Gombrich has a number of pet theories which he is keen to put forward. One is the idea that art doesn’t have Dark Ages and Golden Ages. Artistic styles are different at different times but all periods produce good and bad art. He points out the flaws in a great work as well as its merits, and he tells us what is lost with each new artistic movement as well as what is gained. He does appear to have a few personal preferences for one period over another but he tries hard not to let these interfere with his manifesto. Occasionally he fails in this such as when he bemoans the way that industrialisation killed craftsmanship or photography killed pictorial art. At one point he has difficulty not being reactionary about the things that were lost. But these instances are exceptions and they don’t really detract from what he’s trying to say. And anyway I imagine that his personal preferences are probably far less extreme than those of most art historians.

Gombrich has a particular technique for contextualising art. This is to try to understand the motivations of the artist. Gombrich is very keen on speculating about what the artist’s intention must have been in creating the work. He tries to explain the social context that the artist lived in and the social function of the art itself. He imagines what contemporary viewers of the work would have thought and how the society of the time would have seen it. This contextualisation of the art is surprisingly successful in allowing us to see it, as it were, with fresh eyes. It also allows us to see how famous pieces of art have achieved their present status.

But there are inevitably problems with this approach. For one thing it’s a increasingly hard to be sure about the intention of an artist the further back you go. In the case of cave painting Gombrich is on the same shaky ground as the archaeologist searching for “ritual significance”. The whole approach seems rather old-fashioned and structuralist to me. Artistic intention has been out of fashion in art criticism since postmodernism. Its retention in art history creates an odd division between the two disciplines. The issue is particularly significant when we reach the art of the recent past and the present day. Indeed, Gombrich acknowledges that art history becomes impossible when you get too close to the present and that the criticism of living artists is a very uncertain task.

One feature that marks the book out is its great feeling of energy. This is very much a story and it has a sense of rushing towards a climax. This hurtling pace continues until around 1939 when it suddenly collapses. The coverage of post-war art in the last couple of hours of the book is anticlimactic and comparatively weak. Gombrich has to move reluctantly from art history into the rather speculative criticism that he’s so wary of. This is partly due to the fact that the book was first published sixty years ago and Gombrich has been adding an extra chapter to the end of the book with every subsequent reprint. The result of this is that the last few chapters are full of revisions to the ideas put forward in earlier chapters. The story ends in uncertainty and confusion. Gombrich succeeds in setting the stage for post-war art but he fails to cover it properly. For that we need Robert Hughes’ “Shock of the New”. That book’s currently inaccessible since the RNIB’s recording of it is also in their unavailable cassette library. As with “Art and Illusion” I’ve put in a request for it to be converted to CD.

I have to admit that I’m probably nit-picking. Gombrich’s book is an extremely good introduction to art history. The real question for us concerns something I haven’t mentioned yet. It’s probably not that great a surprise to anyone that the printed version of the book is lavishly illustrated. Gombrich tells us that he considers it vitally important for the reader to be able to see all the pictures that he describes. He has purposely restricted his discussion to art that could be illustrated in the book so as to achieve this end. He has even made sure that all the illustrations appear on the same page as the text discussing them.

The RNIB’s Talking Book version obviously has no illustrations. Since this isn’t a Learning and Skills title we don’t even get their captions. Does this matter? Clearly it makes a big difference. Since we are not able to see the art we have to rely on Gombrich’s word for all the ideas he presents. At times this can get a little confusing and even frustrating. It’s a bit like reading book reviews of books that you can’t get in accessible formats. So the question arises as to whether converting this book to a Talking Book was a worthwhile exercise. The visually impaired community has much less reason than the rest of society to be interested in the visual arts. Do we have any reason to want to know about art history? Do we really need a book like this?

My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that we do. We may have less opportunity to appreciate this sort of art but that applies to a lot of things in our society. We rely on accessibility aids for many aspects of our lives. A book like this provides us access to something that would otherwise be denied us. It may not be perfect access but it’s one of the few ways in which it’s possible to learn about art that we can’t see. And despite the reservations that I have about this version I thought that overall it works surprisingly well. Gombrich’s descriptions of the pictures do an impressive job. They make the art comprehensible and convey an understanding of its significance. In some cases they even allowed me to imagine and visualise it. That’s quite an achievement.

The Reader is Jon Cartwright. His deep rich tones reminded me a little of the British comic and actor Hugh Laurie. His reading is unemotional but it’s very clear and precise and it’s reasonably pleasant to listen to. But somehow there’s also a slightly odd and sinister edge to it. It’s as if Cartwright is only just managing to skirt around the stilted Robert Gladwell style.

I’d recommend the book to those who don’t know much about art but wish they did. I wouldn’t recommend it to those who don’t have any such interest.

Star Rating: four stars (out of five)

Original Book Text: four out of five.
RNIB Disc Recording: three out of five.

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“The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” by Mark Haddon

Publisher: Random House Audio
Duration: 6 hours approx.

This is a recent popular title which a friend of mine lent me on tape. It was an unabridged commercial recording and is inevitably slightly different from the RNIB version. That one is 6 hours and 24 minutes long, is read by Daniel Philpott and its talking book number is TB 13534.

This title is not one that I would have chosen to read, primarily because of the murdered dog that’s referred to in the title. I’m not keen on murder mysteries nor on cruelty to animals so I didn’t find myself particularly attracted to it. But my wife had read it and liked it so I was prepared to give it a go.

The protagonist is Christopher Boone, a fifteen-year-old working-class boy who lives with his dad in Swindon. He has Asperger’s syndrome (a form of autism), he goes to a special school and he’s a precocious maths genius. The premise is reasonably simple - Boone decides to investigate the killing of a local dog. That puts the book pretty neatly into both the murder-mystery and domestic fiction categories.

As a murder mystery it’s very weak. I can never guess whodunits but even I got this one. But maybe that’s not really the point of the book. Maybe the murder-mystery is only a device to sell the book to the mainstream audience that wouldn’t want to read a domestic tale about a disabled teen. Certainly the narrative falls neatly into the modern school of human drama writing of things like Kate Atkinson’s “Human Croquet” which I reviewed in March 2006. As narratives go this one isn’t too bad but it’s almost a digression. Not very much of the text actually deals with the domestic drama so I guess that’s not really the point of the book either. It’s more like the psychodrama of J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” (TB 1922) where a young man is an innocent abroad because his mental state is inappropriate to his circumstances.

There is a conceit within the book that it is some sort of school writing project undertaken by Boone. The writing style is presumably intended to pastiche that of the fictional protagonist who is the writer. It reads as if it were written by someone much younger than fifteen. That’s a little strange because the character’s reading age measured by his vocabulary is at least equivalent to his years. But possibly this is all a part of the Asperger's syndrome. As is usual with the first-person narrator structure it’s very intimate and almost claustrophobic. It requires that you like the narrator-protagonist for the whole thing to be bearable. In this case I found Boone rather irritating and after a couple of hours I wanted to escape from him.

Most of the text deals with Boone’s thoughts, mainly his musings on life. They’re presented as if Boone has taken the reader into his confidence and is explaining his view of the world. For the primary topic of Boone’s monologue is himself. The whole book is essentially a description of Asperger's syndrome from the point of view of one who has it. It’s as if the point of writing the book was to detail all the syndrome’s symptoms to the reader in an easily-digestible way. There is something very laboured about this didactic aspect and it rapidly becomes wearing and predictable.

There’s a strange shortage of emotion in the writing style. Events in the protagonist’s emotional life are referred to but never described in any detail. Instead there’s a huge amount of intellectual material. This is undoubtedly inspired by the nature of Asperger’s syndrome but it doesn’t feel quite right to me. It sounds more like the experience of talking to someone with the syndrome than actually being them. It’s as if the writer has confused knowing someone with the syndrome with being someone with the syndrome.

The writing style is actually very monotonous. Most things are described in excessive detail. This is undoubtedly intended to represent a particular feature of the syndrome but it makes the book read rather like Bradbury’s “The History Man” which I reviewed in August 2006. Except that instead of producing a sinister air, this book is pervaded with an anxious one. Since many of the events are trivial that makes it almost melodramatic. Perhaps that’s what the syndrome feels like but it doesn’t make for a pleasant read.

The book also seems to be an opportunity for the writer to demonstrate his knowledge of mathematics, physics and philosophy. I wasn’t particularly impressed by this content but then these are the things I’m actually qualified in. I don’t know whether others would find this material fascinating, boring or incomprehensible. I just found it annoying.

The reader of my version was twelve-year-old Ben Tibber. A twelve year-old is an odd reader to voice a fifteen-year old character and to me Tibber sounds far too young. As far as I know those with Asperger's syndrome don’t have particularly young-sounding voices. Tibber is a competent reader but his voice is monotonous. Like a child reading out text that he doesn’t understand he puts in very little emotional inflection. Maybe that’s an intentional interpretation of the book’s subject matter. Whatever the reason it’s not fun to listen to. At least Tibber is spared the task of having to voice the other characters because guest actors are used for the different roles to good effect. There is some rather strange use of background music and sound effects but they’re only slightly intrusive.

I’d recommend this book to those interested in learning about Asperger’s syndrome. I wouldn’t recommend it to those looking for a murder-mystery.

Star rating: two stars (out of five).

Original book text: two stars.
Commercial recording: two stars.

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“The Adventures of Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Translator: J. M. Cohen.
Duration: 45 hours approx
Talking Book number: TB 2230

This is a book of chivalric comedy that I’ve wanted to read for a long time. Its sheer fame and the number of popular references to it have always made it something I felt I ought to know more about. I suspect it’s a book that has been inspirational for many later writers. A short story about the novel appeared in Borges’ “Fictions” which I reviewed in October 2006. My main acquaintance with chivalric comedy comes from more recent popular examples such as “Alice through the Looking Glass” and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”. This was my chance to find out about the Cervantes original.

One of the first things that struck me was that the chivalry presented here is different from that I’ve come across before. I found it interesting to see the world of King Arthur presented from a Mediterranean perspective. We’re so used to hearing about the knights of Hollywood fighting Saxons in the English greenwood that we’re largely unaware that the rest of Europe has its own chivalric myths. The knights of Spain rode through the dusty deserts of a setting more like the cowboy’s Mexico than Celtic Cornwall. They protected people from malicious Moors rather than sinister Saxons. The Moorish enemy is one that’s only recently been resurrected in our Anglophone fears but I suspect it’s far more culturally embedded in Spanish thought.

The book’s well-known premise is that a mad elderly seventeenth-century middle-class Spaniard suddenly decides to take up an outdated life of a Mediaeval knight-errant. The book explains his bizarre actions as a result of his obsession with tales of chivalry. It appears that this sort of romance literature was very popular in the Spain of the time and Cervantes takes every opportunity to criticise and ridicule that type of novel. In fact, the subject of the role of the seventeenth-century novel turns up in numerous discussions within the book. There are many digressions where embedded unrelated tales are told. I suspect that the purpose of these may be to satirise the commercial fiction market of the day.

From other things I’ve heard I suspect that the real cause of Quixote’s madness is probably broader than just literature. In Cervantes’ day there was apparently a widespread cultural revival of Mediaevalism. Europe was awash with a passion for all things chivalric. It wasn’t just romantic literature. This cultural obsession extended to art, antiquarianism, furnishings, dress and music. The chivalric was highly fashionable. Quixote can be seen in some ways as the excessive form of the fan that we might now find in such fields as pop music, football, science fiction or superheroes. He has the books and the toys and the clothes and is determined to live the dream.

This version of the book has a writing style that’s inevitably highly dependent on the quality of its translation. I ought to make some comments about J. M. Cohen’s work as translator. His version was undoubtedly an easy one for the RNIB to get permission to record since Cohen’s translation is “out of copyright”. From what I can tell it must have been written about four hundred years ago, at around the time when Cervantes’ book was written. I must say I doubt this is the translation that most people use. A friend of mine who’s had a go at reading a printed copy said he didn’t think his translation was anywhere near as old. And a BBC Radio dramatisation of the story I heard subsequently used English which sounded only about one century old rather than four.

The language in Cohen’s version is very antiquated. It’s rather like the English of John Bunyon in “Pilgrim’s Progress” which I reviewed in October 2006. In fact Cohen was writing about seventy before Bunyon and his English is significantly more archaic and inaccessible. If you’re not familiar with the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible then you may not find this book very easy to read. And sadly Cohen is no Shakespeare. His style is certainly passable and workmanlike but it lacks the beauty of many of the famous English writings that come down to us from that time.

This causes a problem. The book is far from the simple tale of a Spanish madman I had come to expect. It’s humour is based on more than just Quixote’s fannish anachronism. Rather the book is a piece of social satire and the whole of Spanish society of the period is satirised. The characters that Quixote meets allow Cervates to ridicule his own society in a way I found reminiscent of Chaucer. I suspect that the language of the Spanish text is full of embedded nuances and I imagine that they are all translated faithfully by Cohen into the English of his day. This would probably make this translation hilarious to those with a good working knowledge of English society in the Stuart period. Unfortunately I’m not one of them and a large amount of the humour and satire is lost on me.

If this version of the book had been provided with some sort of explanatory introduction it might have helped to get round this problem. Unfortunately there is not one single word of introduction on the disc. Cervantes provides a humorous preface which is itself part of the satire but there is nothing else to enlighten the reader. Now I know that I usually say I prefer coming to a book with as few preconceptions and plot-spoilers as possible. But this is different. You can’t really appreciate this book without understanding the satire. An introduction could have served to provide the social context to make it comprehensible.

I don’t think it’s that normal for “Don Quixote” to be published without an introduction. My friend with the printed copy tells me that his version had a lengthy introduction from which he gained most of his understanding of the social context. And the BBC Radio adaptation I listened to allocated the first quarter of its time to Cervantes explaining the book to the listener. It seems that maybe it’s just us poor RNIB readers who are left to struggle with an out-of-copyright edition that’s nothing but the text.

Nevertheless I persevered with this far-from-perfect version of the book. As I went on I experienced a range of difficulties with it. I found myself rather bewildered by the various self-referential conceits. One of these concerns the origins of the text itself. At times the book claims to be a novel by Cervantes. At others it says it is a translation from an Arabic source. There is also a point in the text where the story jumps from one supposed source to another in the middle of the action. The book even manages to appear within its own pages. In the world within the book there are also other, false versions of the book circulating as well as false impersonators of Quixote himself. I can’t help suspecting that I might have been less confused by all this if I had found the translation more accessible or an introduction had explained some of it to me.

Dialogue forms a large part of the text and I found some of it quite baffling. Characters go on at great length and rarely make any effort to keep to the point. I must admit that I lost concentration more than once. This is unusual for me. The last time I experienced it was while reading Virginia Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse” (TB 767). In this case I suspect it wasn’t due to the writing style. Rather I think it was a result of my difficulties in understanding the translation. Following the humour and satire in the dialogue was something I found particularly hard. To take one tiny example, Sancho Panza’s catch phrase is “Body of me!”. I’m still wondering if it’s a popular blasphemous euphemism of the time or whether it has some other meaning. It’s the dialogue that provides much of the characterisation in the book and I’m sure I missed out on a lot of it. The one exception is Quixote and Sancho’s numerous long squabbles. Quixote’s wordy, pretentious and woffling speech contrasts wonderfully with Panza’s working man’s tongue full of proverbs and malapropisms. I just wish I’d found the rest of the characters that easy.

I ought to add that there are some errors in the listing of this book in the on-line catalogue. It lists the duration as 21 hours and 45 minutes. In fact it’s on three discs and it’s around 45 hours. The category is listed as “children’s adventure stories”. Perhaps today’s children are a little more literate than they were during my schooldays. I’d certainly hesitate before giving this book to a child to read. Not that its subject matter is unsuitable. Rather I would expect most children would struggle with it. I did.

The reader is the notorious Eric Gillet. He’s famous for being one of the worst readers that the RNIB has ever employed. He could easily compete with Robert Gladwell in the terrible-recording stakes. I think that this is a very early recording. Gillet manages to sound incredibly elderly or possibly drunk. His slow morbid monotone drags us tediously through the text. His speech is far from clear and he stumbles over words. He leaves large pauses as he turns over pages, has coughing fits or maybe falls asleep. He uses the Anglicised way of pronouncing the Spanish names which sound strangely antiquated to my ear. So Quixote sounds like “quick soot” and Juan sounds like “Jewson” without the “s”. Additionally La Mancha rhymes with “anchor” and Sancho with “blanco”.

As you may have guessed I’d only recommend this recording to scholars. I wouldn’t recommend it to the general reader. The irony is that underneath all the recording and translation problems I suspect that there’s a rather good book here. Perhaps there is a case for a new RNIB recording like the one that was recently done for “Lord of the Rings”. Copyright is now less of a problem than it used to be. It should easily be possible for a modern reader to record a modern translation with a modern introduction. Then maybe we’d have something worth reading.

Star rating: two stars (out of five)

English Book Translation: one out of five.
RNIB Disc Recording: one out of five.

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“Tunnel Visions” by Christopher Ross

Duration: 5 hours 15 minutes
Talking Book Number: TB 12662

Although I was born on the outskirts of London I haven’t lived there for many years. But recently I had to go up there to see my consultant at Moorfield’s Eye Hospital. Now I live in Devon I’d almost forgotten what the city was like and was surprised by the memories visiting it evoked. The same is true of this book. It’s about the London Underground. It’s not one of the many histories of the institution with stories of incredible construction feats and mysterious abandoned stations. Instead it’s a personal account of a tube-worker’s experience of his job below ground.

It’s not the “Forty years on the Footplate” sort of memoir I’d expected. It’s not a memoir at all. The author only worked on the underground for a few months as a fill-in job. What it turns out to be is a travel book. The author is an independent traveller of the backpacking gap-year sort, although one who’s done it for rather longer than most. He’s been everywhere and done everything, doing many odd jobs in numerous strange countries. Now he’s back home doing an even odder job and throwing the eye and the writing style of the traveller on this close-to-home temporary job.

But in many ways it’s not even a proper travel book. Such books at least have the consistency of chronology, a journey from A to B. This is a book that isn’t told in anything like a real time sequence. To be sure it starts with his training and moves on to his work proper. But the work anecdotes that are backbone of the book fall at random into the text. The routine of a routine job on the underground means that there’s no real narrative development nor any journey for the reader to take.

In the end it’s a book that’s little more than another piece of class tourism. The author is well-placed socially. He did once train to be a lawyer and his old friends all seem to be something in the City. But his colleagues on the tube are as working-class as their dull ordinary blue-collar job warrants. For Ross they’re exotic specimens and he attempts to blend in with them in just the way he would when he used to find himself among Mexican peasants or African soldiers. It’s an indication of the tolerance of the tube workers that they put up with him.

For Ross is decidedly odd. He even comments that the others thought him eccentric. He’s obsessed with martial arts and the Japanese way of thinking. In the text he never stops bragging about his days in Japan. He’s a very sad case of the middle-class male nerd. He can’t seem to see that there’s any thing weird at all about the pretentious erudite quotations with which he litters the text. The book is filled with pseudo-intellectual student babble. He doesn’t even seem to realise how self-aggrandising his reminiscences sound when he tells of those times when he was once somewhere exotic on a day when something important happened and it nearly involved him. It feels like he wants to fill the book with radical ideas but in the end he can only come up with reactionary ones. He badly need to grow up. The book that this most reminds me of most is “Hearing Birds Fly” by Louisa Waugh which I reviewed in February 2006. Both are books filled with obsessive introspection and authorial self-absorption. But Ross’ setting is far more prosaic than Waugh’s Outer Mongolia and as a result the focus of his book rests even more strongly on the author at the expense of the subject matter. If you don’t happen to like Ross you’ll probably hate the book.

As you’ve probably guessed I found him irritating and pretentious. I’ve met far too many people like him in my time. To be fair his writing style isn’t all that bad. He does manage some acerbic wit and some drily humorous anecdotes. His text is clearly written, no doubt a result of his training as a lawyer. His paragraphs are all numbered to make the book sound like a collection of Neitzche’s aphorisms or an instruction manual. Ross’ frequent digressions, when not telling you about his foreign holidays, are philosophical and social musings on the ways of the world. Sadly these observations are not particularly original or interesting and we do get rather too much detail about life as seen from the Ross’s-eye view. Luckily he does give it a rest occasionally and we even learn a bit about the London Underground. As a book it’s a little like Alexander Stuart’s “Life on Mars” (TB 12272) though the latter is much better simply because the author is more human.

When I read the book a few weeks ago I noticed a potential problem. Several of the numbered paragraphs from early in the book are exactly repeated towards the end. To me it doesn’t even sound like a repeated reading. Instead it sounds like the same recording repeated in a different place. Now it’s possible, however unlikely, that Ross wrote it this way. My experience with the RNIB indicates that it’s much more likely that, as with “Human Croquet” (reviewed in March 2006), there has been an error assembling the recording onto disc. As in that case there could be text from the original that’s missing. I could report the problem to RNIB’s customer services but I don’t intend to. The last time I tried that it took six months, repeated emails and my provision of an extremely detailed report (which I thought was their job). After denying there was a problem they eventually told me there was something called a “Daisy Defect Report”. Nobody explained, thanked me or told me when the corrected disc was ready. So this time I can’t be bothered.

The reader on this disc is Richard Burnip who does an excellent job. His received BBC tones are mixed with a judicious dash of modern London. They exactly fit the voice of the class to which Ross belongs. The reading is very clear with just enough emotion for an author trained as a lawyer. The character voices are few (why would Ross let anyone else get a word in?) but Burnip does them well too.

I’d only recommend this book to those wishing to find out what a career working for Transport for London would be like. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who doesn’t like pretentious middle-class student types.

Star Rating: One star (out of five)

Original Book Text: one out of five.
RNIB Disc Reading: five out of five.
RNIB Disc Recording: one out of five.

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“Down and Out in Paris and London” by George Orwell

Duration: 7 hours 5 minutes
Talking Book number: TB 5536

I haven’t previously read much of Orwell’s work. I was given a copy of “Animal Farm” (TB 10565 and TB 4677) as a child and a couple of years ago I read “Keep the Aspidistra Flying” (TB 1202). I enjoyed both of them and so I decided to put another Orwell on my list, almost at random. As it turns out this one is autobiographical. It was Orwell himself who was “down and out” in the early thirties, living amongst the poor in the two cities. He describes the world of unemployment, vagrancy, low-paid work, insecurity, lack of food and lack of hygiene that made up the “hungry thirties”. It’s a very evocative book. It conjures a vanished world of poverty (vanished from Britain and France at any rate). It makes me think of “How the Other Half Lives” by Jacob A. Riis. It also reminds me of those modern poverty memoirs written by the likes of Frank McCourt and Maya Angelou.

Orwell’s writing style is very accessible. It’s almost journalistic. At one point he refers to the book as a travel diary and in many ways it does read like a modern piece of travel writing. The first half of the book covers his Parisian experience and the second his London one. There isn’t an explicit split between the two halves of the book but there is a notable difference between the two places, as Orwell himself comments. Paris has a decadent continental atmosphere. It’s rather like Balzac’s Bourbon Paris in “Old Goriot” (TB 763) or the Weimar Germany of the film “Cabaret”. In contrast London is a much more regulated and Dickensian city. It makes me think of things like the 1966 Ken Loach TV play “Cathy Come Home” or the urban homelessness writing of our own times. The availability of work, accommodation, food and tobacco are all very different in the two cities. The role of charity, repressive laws and the pawn shop in the lives of the poor are different too. The main thing that both cities share is that they provide a life of wealth, ease and comfort to some but a life of incredible hardship to others.

The book contains Orwell’s trademark cynicism and eccentric left-wing politics. There are passages which include short political rants about the things that bother him, ranging from the oppression of hotel staff to the legal plight of beggars. He argues that most jobs are pointless and hence so is the work ethic. He suggests that the middle classes always side with the rich and fear the working class (with whom they should have common cause) simply because the middle-classes never socialise with anyone who’s poor.

It’s in part a polemical book but fortunately it’s only mildly so. To have made political argument out of all the descriptions of injustice and suffering would have been heavy-handed. These are after all the sorts of situations out of which Dickens would made such desperate melodrama. A book like this could very easily have turned out miserable and maudlin. In fact it’s very affectionate. Orwell’s descriptions of the colourful characters he meets are remarkably endearing. He’s very impressed by the fortitude with which the poor face their lives and their lot. In keeping with his Socialist credentials he portrays them in a very positive light. He also demonstrates the novelist’s enthusiasm for garnering material from his encounters. He’s fascinated by the people he meets and the stories that they have to tell. The truth of their tales is often far less important than the tales themselves. Here we see an Orwell suited to both of his future careers as a novelist and as a wartime propagandist.

I don’t know much about Orwell’s life but from the text he sounds to me like a member of the middle-classes. This raises a question in my mind. How was it that he managed to end up as a down-and-out? Nowadays it’s not that strange for a middle-class author, journalist or sociologist to intentionally spend the summer with down-and-outs and then write a book about it. Sometimes it’s a piece of class-tourism or poverty-tourism, the sort of thing that’s criticised in the lyrics of the Pulp song “Common People”. And Orwell does indeed seem to slide remarkably easily into the world of the poor working class and the vagrant. And then he slides out again remarkably easily so that he can publish this book. He never mentions whether he has any family who might have helped him but he does have a middle-class friend who helps him out with money whenever he asks. And he asks surprisingly rarely considering his dire poverty.

But Orwell doesn’t present his plight as intentional. He says that he simply ran out of money accidentally one summer and so slid into poverty. This sounds rather unconvincing to me and I suspect there may be a bit more to it than this. The biggest clue Orwell gives is when he alludes to a fear of social embarrassment restricting what he can do when he is poor. Perhaps it was this fear that made it hard for him to ask for help. And there’s something else. Orwell’s combination of anger and apathy in this book reminds me very much of Gordon Comstock in “Keep the Aspidistra Flying”. Comstock descends into poverty as a result of his hatred of middle-class society and values and his desire to do anything other than have a “good job”. I can’t help wondering whether those antisocial motivations of Comstock’s were also Orwell’s.

There are very few expletives in this book to disturb those who are disturbed by such things. The publisher notes that all surviving versions of the book are Bowdlerised and the many expletives in the original text are now lost. They are presumably replaced by a dash or something. Note also that readers with no knowledge of French might find the Paris section slightly confusing as not everything is translated.

The reader is Antony Higginson. His voice is a pleasant rich slightly nasal baritone. He reads well and he neatly performs the Irish, Scottish, Cockney and Parisian accents of the character voices. He really shouldn’t attempt to sing though. The oddest thing about his reading is how he presents the deleted expletives. To voice them Higginson doesn’t say “blank” like I’ve heard other readers do. Instead he blows a raspberry. This can get a little irritating, particularly when he’s reading out a long heated argument.

I’d recommend this book to those interested in inter-war social history or in colourful characters. I wouldn’t recommend it to those who don’t like stories of poverty and deprivation.

Star Rating: four stars (out of five)

Original Book Text: four out of five.
RNIB Disc Recording: four out of five.

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“Dawn of the Gods” by Jacquetta Hopkins Hawkes

Duration: 11 hours 1 minute
Talking Book number: 408663

This ancient history book was published in 1968 and I expect it’s some sort of classic now. It may also be seriously dated - I’m not sufficiently up-to-date with the field to know. It isn’t exactly a heavy academic book but it’s more serious than other books on archaeology and ancient history from the Talking Books library that I’ve read. They were mainly light popular works such as Magnus Magnusson’s “Introducing Archaeology” (TB 2052) and Margaret Wheeler’s “Walls of Jericho” by (TB 78).

“Dawn of the Gods” deals with the ancient Minoan and Mycenaean worlds. Overall it’s a surprisingly accessible book. But there are still one or two references and terms in the book that may mystify the complete beginner. It will probably help if the reader has a little knowledge of the geography of the Eastern Mediterranean, archaeology and ancient history.

The book tells the chronological tale of the rise and fall of Minoan and Mycenaean civilisation. Archaeology is the main source of information we have about this period and the introduction deals briefly with the famous archaeological digs. The rest of the book is set out as a history of the period with continuous reference to the archaeological finds and the sites from which they were obtained. The printed book included many lavish illustrations of these but fortunately for us the text also contains good descriptions of them. Hawkes makes an excellent job of using these descriptions to evoke the everyday life of vanished and long-forgotton peoples. Only occasionally do her descriptions begin to become a little dry and resemble a museum catalogue or a visitors’ guidebook.

Hawkes makes many value-judgements in the book. For example, she seems to regard the quality of ancient art as a yardstick of civilisation. She spends much time discussing the relative artistic merits of the different finds and interpreting what they might mean for the cultures involved. She also seems to regard the presence of royalty as another important measure of civilisation. She enthuses over rich rich royal possessions while being dismissive of other societies where the wealth was more evenly spread. In none of this is she very unusual. Such archaeological interpretations are quite commonplace.

But in one area her interpretation stands out. Her big passion is the feminist theory of the Earth Mother. For all I know she may have invented it. It’s a popular theory now but at the time it may have been radical and new. It sees certain early civilisations (such as the Minoan) as matriarchal Utopias of art, dance, plenty and sexual freedom. Later civilisations (such as the Mycenaean) usurped the Earth Mother goddess with a Sky Father god and became cruel, barbaric, warlike and artless. Some feminists have taken the theory to an extreme form in which all human civilisation is said to have passed from a good matriarchal phase into an evil patriarchal one. Hawkes seems to find this sort of neo-Jungian thought attractive. At one point she considers some circular and crescent-shaped imagery found in a goddess site. It reminds her of lunar imagery with all the female symbolism which that entails. But she’s able to dismiss such an interpretation as “tempting but probably wrong”. She’s too good a historian than to succumb completely to such an intoxicating theory. For one thing she limits her examination on the Minoan-Mycenaean case. The evidence here is stronger than it is elsewhere and she can make a more convincing case for it. Also she’s careful to make the distinction between the evidence and her suppositions quite clear. This leaves her in a much stronger position than many writers who put forward radical ideas at that time. She’s always going to be subject to criticisms based on the uncertainties of archaeology. She concludes that the Minoans were a peaceful people partly from the lack of weapons in their graves but maybe they just didn’t bury their weapons in graves. It’s always possible to construct alternative theories. But in the end this is an interesting idea with as much significance for modern feminism as for ancient history.

Hawkes has a writing style that’s very readable and conveys her passion for the subject. She distinguishes between the different competing theories without getting lost in the minutiae of the contoversies along the way. She presents the results of archaeological research that is sometimes quite dull and technical in a way that’s both comprehensible and interesting. The result is an enjoyable and informative book in which the lost way of life in Bronze Age Greece and Crete comes across very clearly. It’s certainly not a book without faults but I did feel I learned quite a lot from it.

The book comes from a new section of the Talking Books library. It’s one of the newly-Daisified “Learning and Skills” titles that were previously all on cassette. It’s the first book I’ve read from this section and so many of the comments that I have about the recording may be common to other “Learning and Skills” titles. I mentioned that in the printed form this was a lavishly-illustrated book. It may even have been a coffee-table book. It had large numbers of plates in both black & white and colour. How do I know all this? Because the book is virtually audio-described. The reader tells us which page we’re on every time a new one is started. And all the illustrations have their captions read out. The Talking Books that I’ve read from the library in the past haven’t been like this. They’ve just had their printed pictures, maps and graphs completely ignored. I’m sure that these extra features are vital for students who have to write essays on the book. But they might also be useful for the rest of us. As a reader I always feel cheated when I’m denied information about the illustrations that readers of the printed version can enjoy. It makes me feel like I’ve only read part of the book. In fact the audio description gave me an additional aspect to the Talking Book experience. It made me feel like a printed copy of the book was actually present in the room. It was almost like I could reach out and touch it. The whole experience was more like a friend reading to you from the print copy. It gave me more of a sense of equality with the print reader than I usually get.

Unusually for a book from the Talking Books library there is no single reader. In fact there must be more than a dozen of them on this disc. Every thirty to sixty minutes a new reader takes over, often in mid-paragraph. As far as I can tell these readers aren’t the actors that the library normally uses. They sound more like members of the clerical staff and their readings vary from reasonable to dreadful. They seem to find the pronunciation of proper nouns a particular problem. They stumble over and mispronounce names like “Agamemnon”, “Peloponnese” and even “Mycenaean”. Nevertheless they do a good job in terms of providing information. They tell you when text is in quotation marks. They tell you when Hawkes is providing a cross-reference to a different page. And as I’ve already mentioned they read out all the picture captions and page numbers. You can also find the page number from the “info” button on the Daisy player (along with time elapsed and remaining) though I’m not sure it’s always accurate. Note that the last hour-and-a-half of the disc contains the nothing but the full and detailed index to the book.

I’d recommend the book to those interested in archaeology, ancient Greek history or feminism. I wouldn’t recommend it to those without such interests.

Star rating: four stars (out of five)

Original book text: four out of five.
RNIB Disc Recording: three out of five.

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“Ashenden: or the British Agent” by W. Somerset Maugham

Duration: 9 hours 45 minutes
Talking Book Number: TB 640

This is the second of Maugham’s books I’ve read. I enjoyed his novel “The Painted Veil” (TB 1248) when I read it about a couple of years ago but it didn’t really allow me to get the hang of him. Even now I’m not really sure what to make of him. I’m aware that he has a great reputation as a novelist. That’s usually something I associate with highbrow and difficult books but Maugham’s are surprisingly ordinary and contemporary. I chose this title because it was described as a collection of short stories. In fact it turns out to be a spy novel. Each chapter tells a separate but sequential story about the adventures of British spy called Ashenden. I have to admit that I haven’t read a lot of spy fiction. For some reason I usually end up reading women’s fiction. I guess that’s why I found the masculinity of the writing in this book a little unfamiliar.

The novel is set during the First World War. That’s not a period I tend to associate with spy stories but I believe it has a reasonable tradition. Mata Hari is after all one of the most famous spies of the period. Indeed she’s a character who would be eminently suitable to appear in the book. As Maugham tells us in the introduction he worked as a spy himself during the First World War. His protagonist Ashenden is likewise an author-turned-spy but Maugham is adamant that the book is a work of fiction. Nevertheless it’s hard not to speculate about how much of the book is based on anecdotes from Maugham’s career.

I suspect this was an influential book on the spy genre. I can see the way that later writers such as Ian Fleming must have been influenced by it for there is much that is Bond-like here. For instance, Ashenden is rather cold in his feelings toward women. He’s sent off on jobs by a superior called “R” and takes international trains across Europe. He’s a professional spy with a set of contacts. There are fellow agents, enemy agents, double agents and so on. I wouldn’t say he’s “licensed to kill” but he does get other people killed with great regularity. He never seems to do the killing himself (I don’t think he has the stomach for it) but he knows that his actions will result in the deaths of others. He’s well-placed socially with a liking for the finer things in life. In fact, he’s an unmitigated snob. He looks down pitilessly on all the common people he encounters. This classism is augmented by a few doses of mysogeny and the odd bit of racism. Nowadays we often try to justify such things as being a normal part of the social attitudes when the book was written. In this case it’s a bit more specific to the character. Ashenden’s chauvenism is at least as central to his character as Bond’s is. His personality is a result of his traditional and socially-superior upbringing rather than the majority of the society around him. In this he represents the retention of the traditional social order in a world where values are rapidly changing and the old world is falling apart around him.

The book was published in the twenties and the writing style does now feel a little dated for a spy novel. Nevertheless it’s still perfectly accessible. Maugham concentrates mainly on events and action and the pacing is generally good. The dialogue is rather stilted but that’s mainly because the characters are drawn largely from the upper classes. There is even a certain amount of dry humour and a satirical touch or two in maugham’s presentation of the characters and the situations. That’s balanced by a sad, cruel, tragic streak that flows through the work. This is not a heroic tale. The First World War was a war without heroes. Ashenden may be of the officer class and spend his time well behind the front line but the killing fields still leave their mark.

When I read “The Painted Veil” it didn’t occur to me that Maugham wasn’t heterosexual. But as this book is more closely founded in Maugham’s own experience the homosexual aspects are clearer. Not that it’s in any sense a work of Gay Fiction. There is nothing explicitly homosexual in its contents. But the descriptions of the relationships between men and women, and indeed men and men, indicate to me a closet gay viewpoint. In the end I find this to be a major aspect of the book. The sadness of the war is also the sadness of trying to conceal ones heart and live a lie in a straight world.

This recording of the book is rather old and it’s read by John Richmond. It seems I was quite lucky to get him. There are fourteen volumes of Maugham’s work in the library and most of them are read by the notorious Robert Galdwell. Richmond is still very much a reader of the old school and his performance is dry, stilted and unemotional. But it isn’t anywhere near as bad as Gladwell’s. At least this book isn’t the sort of contemporary novel that’s ruined by such archaic readings. Richmond even makes a stab at the character accents thought he results aren’t all that great. Fortunately he’s mainly spared too much embarassment by the fact that the majority of the voices he has to do are those of upper-class colonel types.

I’d recommend this book to those interested in early spy fiction. I wouldn’t recommend it to feminists.

Star Rating: three stars (out of five).

Original Book Text: three out of five.
RNIB Disc Recording: two out of five.

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“Ten Days that Shook the World” by John Reed

Duration: 16 hours 40 minutes
Talking Book number: TB 13218

I’ve always found it hard to get accessible books about the Russian Revolution. So far I’ve managed to find one or two titles in the Talking Books library which cover it rather tangentially. It forms the backdrop for Boris Pasternak’s semi-autobiographical novel “Doctor Zhivago” (TB 1553) but that book actually spans most of the first half of the twentieth century. A general history of the whole of the Great War is provided by John Keegan’s “The First World War” (TB 12483) but this book touches only briefly on the Revolution. Both of them are a good read in their own right but neither taught me very much about the Revolution itself.

“Ten Days that Shook the World” was a lucky find for me when I was hunting through through the on-line catalogue. I’d heard the title before but I didn’t know too much about it. It turns out that the book is a historical classic and it’s the basis of an Eisenstein film. The story is that of a very brief but decisive period during the Russian Revolution which is told in very great detail. It’s a popular tale with many communists, some of whom take this book to be the definitive account. The author was a left-wing American journalist who was working in Petrograd at the time.

The RNIB edition starts with a reasonably interesting hour-long introduction by the eminent historian A.J.P. Taylor. He presents the book from his own political perspective and highlights well-known historical objections to some details of the book. The introduction was comissioned a long time ago when the Communist Party of Great Britain still held the copyright to the book. Taylor tells an amusing tale of their refusal to accept the introduction he wrote. Only now the book’s out of copyright can that introduction be included.

“Ten Days that Shook the World” is much better-written than the usual history book. Its colourful descriptions capture the atmosphere of the Revolution wonderfully and there is a sense of being in the middle of tumultuous events. Russia is slowly changing into a strange and alien place. Reed and his fellow journalists wander through the streets of a city where the pattern of ordinary people’s daily lives is breaking down. Unexpected revolutionary activities are breaking out everywhere and they find themselves conversing with strangers right in the middle of the action. The text is surprisingly similar to descriptions of counter-revolutions and popular unrest given by modern journalists. It also resembles my own experience in Beijing during the early days of the Tien an Men protests.

Reed effectively captures the atmosphere of political meetings. He spent a lot time in halls packed with half-asleep unshaven red-eyed delegates engaging in interminable debates. He was also an avid collector of newspapers and pamplets from both sides of the conflict. The book contains many extended quotes from both of these sources. This can get a little dull and repetitive at times but they do help in understanding the political situation. The three and a half hours of appendices at the end of the book contain even more quotes. Some provide fresh interesting material but others are just repetitive. They’re probably only worth reading if you were as fascinated by the rest as I was. At the beginning of the book there’s a helpful summary of the large number of political groups in the story. They were all busy competing for control over the various administrative bodies or taking to the streets to seize power. Their Russian names can be quite confusing if you haven’t taken the summary in properly and it might be advisable to bookmarking it.

Reed had indentity papers to assure him safe passage in Russia as a foreign journalist. They were issued to him by the Petrograd Bolsheviks. As a result he probably received better access to and treatment from pro-Bolshevik organisations than from anti-Bolshevik ones. The majority of the book covers the activities of the Bolsheviks. Reed’s left-wing preconceptions and prejudices could only have been reinforced by such a situation. But his independence is still greater than that of many modern journalists. Those who are “embedded” into an army or revolutionary group on which they report are in a far more restricted situation than Reed was. Their movements are controlled and their information limited. They are continuously fed with the viewpoint of the organisation in which thay are embedded. Even the most impartial of them cannot help but produce highly partisan copy. Reed on the other hand was free to go almost anywhere and interview almost anyone. His reports come from both sides of the Revolutionary divide. When it comes to the great and dramatic events his journalistic instincts and skill allow him to make what sounds like fair and dispassionate coverage.

But that’s not the whole story. Reed was certainly in a position to write a completely neutral and impartial account of the whole Revolution but he chose not to. “Ten Days that Shook the World” is in fact a highly partisan book. The colour and character of the text is a result of an emotive prose style which biases much of the book heavily towards the Bolsheviks. Sneering descriptions of Mensheviks are contrasted with heroic descriptions of Bolsheviks. Quotes from Bolsheviks always display their commitment to justice. Quotes from their enemies always reveal weakness and self-interest. The book is brazen in its advocation and support for the Bolshevik cause. It’s a polemical work. Pro-Bolshevik arguments are incorporated into the body of the accounts and they form the backbone of the historical analysis. The actions of Bolsheviks are defended against criticisms often levelled at them. Accusations such as the Bolshevik looting of the Winter Palace and mistreatment of the Women’s Batallion are given extended refutations using Reed’s eye-witness journalistic evidence. I have to admit that although these accusations are supposed to be very famous I’d not heard of them myself. In some cases I found it hard to work out what an accusation was and I had to try and figure it out from its refutation.

In the introduction A.J.P. Taylor raises the question of whether this book is a history book or just a piece of journalism. Reed certainly seemed to believe he was writing a history book which is why he mixes historical analysis in with his accounts. Taylor on the other hand believes the book to be no more than a historical document to be analysed by later historians. This device allows Taylor to recognise the importance of Reed’s work without accepting its left-wing viewpoint. For Taylor this is simply an eyewitness record of the Revolution and it doesn’t have the analysis, accuracy or impartiality that a work of scholarly history would require.

Taylor also claims that Reed couldn’t have been a participant in all the events he describes. As a foreign journalist his access to certain of the key events would have been limited. Some of his eye-witness evidence must have been hearsay. Where his account differs from other sources Taylor regards his writing as romanticised. Taylor isn’t impressed by Reed’s attempts to refute the contrary versions and he questions Reed’s accuracy as a journalist. This raises doubts about the book’s value as a historical source. Unfortunately Taylor doesn’t give much more detail about these alternative stories than Reed does. Of course Taylor was limited by the space available to him for the introduction. And Reed can’t have wanted to give coverage to anti-Bolshevik tales he thought dubious. But the consequence is that without more information it’s difficult to make a judgement or come to a conclusion. I can only say that Reed’s account doesn’t strike me as obviously erroneous or fallacious. But a book like this should never be taken as Gospel on its own. It has to be a jumping-off point for further reading.

For me there were a number of surprises in the book. Revolutionary Russia turns out to be a far more modern place than the land of feudal serfs and Dickensian squalour I’d been expecting. It reminded me of today’s developing world with its oppressive and unstable regimes, rich elites and the subjugated masses. In that sense the book still seems surprisingly relevant. There’s none of the Stalinism, tyranny and extermination of my Orwellian preconceptions. Instead Reed captures the spirit prevalent at the start of the twentieth century when socialist revolution was associated with democracy, freedom, peace and hope. In those days many saw the extraordinary events in Russia as a beacon to the world. An obscure and margainalised political faction came to power against overwhelming odds and huge opposition. All the strategies used to isolate, weaken and control them proved futile. In hindsight it still seems hard to believe. For those living at the time it must been an incredible shock. The book is like a revolutionary instruction manual. It’s both inspiring and intoxicating. For consevatives and capitalists it should serve as a warning.

There’s one small mystery. Reed continually makes reference to a sequel volume he was preparing. It was to be called “Kornilov to Brest-Litovsk” and it was to contain everything he omitted from this book. I can’t find any reference to it anywhere and I can only assume that is that it was never published. Reed didn’t live very long after the publication of this book and I suspect that he never finished it. That’s a shame as it would have allowed the reader to find out more about the themes that Reed cuts short. It would also make it easier to discover what happened next.

The reader is the same Steve Hodson whose reading of “The Weirdstone of Brisingamen” was a disappointment. He reads the introduction to this book in the same slow dull unemotional style and I even had to resort to speeding up my Daisy player. But the rest of the book is read quite differently. Hodson uses a phoney American accent to read it all “in character” as if it were dialogue. His strange transatlantic accent has numerous errors and inconsistencies but overall the effect is remarkably pleasing. It’s rather like the author reading out his own book. It’s emotional, passionate, fairly lively, quite listenable and even entertaining. Not only that but he doesn’t do a bad Russian accent when the occasion demands.

I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in an exciting book about politics, Russian history or the Russian Revolution. I wouldn’t recomend it to those looking only for an unimpassioned, impartial history.

Star Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

Origainal Book Text: four out of five.
RNIB disc recording: four out of five.

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“Bluebeard” by Kurt Vonnegut

Duration: 8 hours
Talking Book Number: TB 7499

The RNIB Talking Books Library has only two books by Kurt Vonnegut. It’s a shortfall that I hope will soon be rectified. Vonnegut is an excellent if unorthodox author. His most famous novel “Slaughterhouse Five” (TB 1172) is the other title to be found in the Library. This book “Bluebeard” is a rather hard book to classify. Vonnegut calls it a “hoax autobiography” and indeed it is presented as a rambling memoir of a fictional character. But it’s not structured like a memoir in the conventional sense. For one thing it’s far from chronological. For another it includes a diary of the fictional events that take place during its writing. In some ways its structure resembles that of Angela Carter’s “Wise Children” (TB 9107) which I reviewed in August 2006 or Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day” (TB 8107) which I reviewed in November 2006.

As far as the subject matter of this book goes it’s supposed to be a satire on the commercial Modern Art market. The fictional writer of this fictional memoir is after all a fictional Abstract Expressionist painter. But the scope of the book goes way beyond that. Even in the author’s note Vonnegut goes so far as to explicitly broaden it. He claims that the book is about the over-commercialisation of all trivial human activities. In fact Vonnegut is using this fictional life as a very broad canvas to explore his favourite themes. Wealth and poverty are considered, both of which have been experienced by the protagonist during his life.

There’s also Vonnegut’s usual anti-war message derived from his experiences in World War Two. He talks about genocide and takes a dig at the American post-war miracle. He considers the change in the United States during the twentieth century from an idealistic to an Imperialist nation. He talks about Fascism and the reaction to it in democratic America. There’s a feminist strand to the book. In the context of the anti-war message it’s war itself that becomes the oppressor of women. Most of the themes are intricately intertwined and they twist and turn in quite unexpected ways. A simple analysis of themes is rather hard. And then again the book is a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of a grumpy old recluse and a moving description of his emotional life.

The writing style is quite deceptive. It’s very folksy and colloquial, more like a chat than a traditional memoir. The book appears at first to be written by someone with no more than average writing skills. There’s an inability to keep to the subject or present things in a coherent order. This is all a piece of artifice intended to deceive the reader. It is part of the conceit that the fictional author has never written a book before. The ordinariness of the narrator’s voice and his seemingly random presentation of information draw you innocently into what seems to be a simple homespun narrative. You’re tricked into being unprepared for what lies beneath.

One of the tricks Vonnegut uses is his technique of teasingly presenting stories in parts. You gain only a vague idea about events that have happened and form opinions based on them. But later you’re provided with extra details that show the matter in a whole new light. It’s a carefully constructed attempt to cause the reader to re-evaluate his or her ideas. Disorientation is also used to the same effect. Vonnegut juxtaposes the homely and the nightmarish in a disturbing and uncomfortable way. There’s a thorough mixing of real and imaginary characters which increases this sense of disorientation. All the while Vonnegut’s technique is continually hidden from view by his narrator’s mask. What he’s doing is far from overt and never obvious which is the very thing that makes it so effective.

There is certainly a resolution to the book - more than one in fact. Secrets are revealed, relationships formed and lives justified. For me it was a wonderful and a deceptive read but I found it a hard book to pin down. I don’t really think I can do justice to it in this review. Its eccentric style certainly won’t please everyone, and I expect opinions of it will vary wildly. Vonnegut’s books usually take a while to sink in to me and I’ve left this one to ferment in my mind for a couple of weeks before I started writing this. It may be a coincidence but I also had nightmares all the time I was reading it.

The reader is the wonderful Garrick Hagon. He made an excellent job of reading a commercial version I have of Asimov’s “I, Robot” (TB 14229). The RNIB version of that is read by William Roberts and I haven’t heard it. I presume Hagon’s American accent is real since it’s so consistent and believable. His character accents and voices are equally good. It’s an assured and confident reading which is clear and at the same time emotional. It’s ideal for this sort of book.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who likes intriguing and disturbing fiction. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who wants a comfortable read.

Star Rating: Five Stars (out of five).

Original Book Text: five out of five.
RNIB disc Recording: five out of five.

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“See it my Way” by Peter White

Duration 10 hours 16 minutes
Talking Book number: TB 11932

The most famous blind man in Britain must be the disgraced and unlamented David Blunkett (don’t get me started). But the second-most-famous blind man in Britain must be Peter White. Blind people will know who he is. Even some sighted people will probably know that he’s the BBC’s disability affairs correspondent, or rather he was at the time this book was written. He’s probably got a new job title now given the rate at which the BBC is ineffectually re-organised. This book is his celebrity autobiography. It’s a genre that’s popular with many readers because we’re a nosey bunch and we like to find out the ins and outs of other people’s lives.

White’s book tries to answer a number of questions. One is the inevitable “What’s it like to be blind?” question which is mainly going to be of interest to sighted readers. The typical sighted reader is probably going to be amazed that a blind man can tie his own shoelaces, let alone be a BBC journalist. The only thing about blind people that sighted people are usually interested in is their blindness and it leads to a lot of the ghettoisation that blind people experience. Nevertheless blindness is a subject that White can’t easily ignore. It has been both an obstacle and an opportunity that’s shaped the course of his life. So he provides a fair amount of information on the effects that it has had on his life. He also describes the methods he has used to cope in a world that makes it far from easy to do so. I’d pretty much been expecting this sort of thing as main piece of White’s work I’d heard before was his “Blind Man on the Rampage” program on BBC Radio 4. That made a pretty good stab at describing of what it’s like to be blind for the sighted listener. Fortunately in this book he manages to avoid dwelling too much on the subject and instead he manages to cover many much more interesting topics.

Another question that’s implicit in most celebrity autobiography is the question “What’s so special about this person?”. It usually refers to whatever it was that made the person stand out, make it to the top and become a celebrity. It’s the question about how one person made it in a world where most of us don’t. Usually it’s just the question about how an ordinary person got to be famous. Inevitably this book also has to deal with the question about how a blind person got to be able to live an ordinary life as well as a successful celebrity one. White goes into this in reasonable detail, talking about his skills and aptitudes in different fields (or the lack of them) as well as aspects of his personality that allowed him to succeed where others have failed.

This leads on to what turns out to be the central and most interesting question in the book: “What’s it like to be Peter White?”. His well-known public persona as White the Bloke is quite a grumpy and argumentative one. At one point he even mentions seeing Robin Day as his broadcasting role model. But in this book he comes across as quite a sensitive and defensive individual. When he talks about his memories of the past he’s very self-critical. He looks hard at his own personality and actions in an attempt to explain the things that have happened to him. He examines his own merits and demerits every bit as much as those of the people around him. What stands out is that his focus is not on ability but on personality. Events are explained in terms of his own developing personality and those of the people around him. Through this approach he puts into practice the maxim that disabled people are people first. He ascribes his successes and failures, triumphs and disasters to who he is rather than what he is. It’s this more than any thing else that gives the book its human warmth.

The book’s structure is that of a conventional chronological memoir. The first half deals with White’s childhood, his rebellious schooldays and his unhappy time at university. This inevitably brings up the Special Schools versus Integration debate since anyone of White’s age had to go down the Special School route. The second half of the book goes on to deal with his family and professional life. Here we see him becoming involved in journalism and disability politics. The writing style he uses will be familiar to anyone who’s heard him broadcast. It’s written in his usual chatty feature-writing style that’s the mainstay of his radio journalism. His stock of amusing anecdotes is welded together to form what is really an extended version of his Radio 4 work.

The ending of the book is rather sudden. White is about to embark on a new broadcasting project in the late eighties when the book just stops. Even more mysteriously, the book was actually published in the late nineties. Admittedly there is a brief introduction set in the nineties but a whole chunk of the story is missing. I’d always though that celebrity autobiography either went up to the time of writing or stopped at a pivotal point so that the reader has to wait for the next thrilling volume. This doesn’t do either and it frustrates me as I’m a reader who hates unfinished stories almost as much as spoiled plots.

I ought to mention the personal aspects of my reading this book. I’m not blind but I am visually impaired and that puts me in a curious position. I come to a book like this looking for things to identify with, common frustrations with and discriminations from the fully-sighted world. But I find that the experiences White has had due to his blindness are more intriguing and alien to me than they are familiar. In fact, I’ve learned quite a bit about being blind from this book. The disadvantage of this is that I can’t fully appreciate how well White portrays the blind experience. It would be interesting to read a review by a blind reader in order to judge His effectiveness in this area. On the other hand the book has helped me to see my visually-impaired status, and indeed my life as a whole in a more positive way.

At the same time there is something else I found awfully familiar about this book. White’s description of his whole experience of school, authority, girls, friends and living in general is surprisingly and disturbingly recognisable. This is despite the big difference in our disabilities which should have made our lives very different. I suspect I know what the reason is. It’s the fact that White makes his childhood and indeed his whole life seem surprisingly ordinary. Peter White is clearly and self-avowedly working class and this seems to have led to a set of life experiences surprisingly similar to my own. From a working-class childhood he moved through what amounts to a Grammar School, a couple of Universities for which he was emotionally unprepared and a life he didn’t really know how to fit into. The closest I’ve come to any of this before was with the fictional working-class protagonist of David Nicholls’ novel “Starter for Ten” (TB 13695). It’s all a far cry from the traditional celebrity autobiography. Before the recent outbreak of talentless wannabes it was mainly those who went through the public school and Oxbridge system who sold us their life stories. Books like Stephen Fry’s autobiography “Moab is My Washpot” (TB 11490) are certainly interesting but they’re from a class that I can’t relate to in any personal sense. But a book like White’s provides some reassurance to me not only that blind people can succeed but that working-class people can succeed too.

The reader is Peter White himself. I think this is another of those commercial audiobooks that the RNIB have obtained the rights to use. I’m usually suspicious of authors reading their own work since most authors make poor public speakers. But when the author is a performer of some sort it usually works out all right.
White’s reading style will be familiar to those who have ever heard him broadcast. The delivery is that of a standard BBC broadcaster though his accent is a working-class southern one. His character voices are quite good and obviously have an extra degree of authenticity with him reading.

I’d recommend this book to those who enjoy inspiring autobiography. I obviously wouldn’t recommend it anyone who doesn’t like Peter White.

Star Rating: Four Stars (out of five).

Original Book Text: four out of five.
RNIB Disc Recording: four out of five.

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“The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro

Duration: 7 hours 53 minutes
Talking Book number: TB 8107

This is the second Ishiguro I’ve read. About a year ago I was sent “An Artist of the Floating World” (TB 6620) which is set in Japan and describes an elderly painter coming to terms with his past. This book shares many themes and techniques with that one but the setting here is quite different. This time we’re in England and the story deals with a middle-aged English butler called Stephens. While driving to Cornwall to meet an old colleague he reminisces about the events of his life. I believe it’s another of those books that they ended up turning into a film. The story does indeed seem quite filmable although I’m sure the format must have been changed in the process.

It’s the “Upstairs, Downstairs” relationship between masters and servants that provides the central symbolism. The unfairness and inequality of the situation is clearly presented but it’s nicely implicit and never overstated. None of the characters involved actually finds the relationship exploitative. But the book raises questions about the nature of service. Stephens is the archaetypical servant in need of a master. His status is defined solely by his master and he lives to serve. He’s part of a servant class and his master is part of a master class. But his problem is that the time period in which the book is set is the nineteen-fifties. By this time the system of master and servant has had its day. Even his late master has now been replaced by a new American employer. Inevitably there is nostalgia and hindsight looking back to events during the heyday of the system before the Second World War.

The book has a political strand to match its social one. Much like in “An Artist of the Floating World” Ishiguro is just as keen to examine the political change wrought by the war as he is to look at the social change. Many political ideologies from the inter-war years underwent a process of disillusionment in the cold light of the post-war world. Views that were socially acceptable and even fashionable during those inter-war years ceased to be so once the Second World War was over and the Cold War begun. The fact that Stephens’ new employer is American symbolises the political change that has taken place in the world. Like the social system of master and servant, inter-war politics have had their day. In both books Ishiguro explores the way that these perceptions were changed and he does it in a very personal way. His theme is the changed social status of those who were caught up in inter-war politics. The change in attitudes has left many people who were formerly respected in a situation where their pasts mean that they are disapproved of, ostracised or simply left behind. They are now old men who have to find a way of living with their pasts and somehow have to face the future.

The way the book is presented is in the form of Stephens’ diary as he makes his car journey westwards. At the same time it’s a first person monologue given by him to the listening reader. The technique is impressively done. The voice of Stephens as narrator is very distinctive and consistent, much like Wodehouse’s archaetypical butler Jeeves. He comes across as very polite and reserved, lacking in a sense of humour and even a little shy. His professional reserve means that his feelings are always hidden, often even from himself, but the intimacy of the monologue form reveals that he is far from emotionless.

Much of the book is taken up with the rambling recollections of Stephens’ own life. There are almost enough of them to build into a complete memoir or perhaps that film script. His memories are not always presented in chronological order but this helps us not to prejudge him. Initially it’s only his role as narrator which provides us with clues to his personality. But as time goes on our first impressions are slowly rounded out and developed into something rather different. Ishiguro’s trick here, much like Alan Bennet’s, is to present a character and then slowly reveal his past so as to change our opinions of him. The details of his recollections, the descriptions of his own actions and the reports of people’s reactions to him all combine to change those first opinions. His frosty behaviour becomes understandable and he starts to engage our sympathy when we become aware of his unspoken feelings and the reasons behind his actions. The inner man and his relationships gradually become clear. Some of his recollections are quite poignant and not without pathos. In the end this allows a surprisingly sentimental narrative to develop which is both moving and sad.

I won’t say any more. Revelation is a major part of the book’s structure. There is a poignant joy in discovering all about Stephens and his past. The book’s resolution is slightly ambiguous but there certainly is a resolution and the ambiguity is an opportunity for the reader to reflect. It’s a good book and would make a good introduction to Ishiguro.

The reader is Michael Tudor Barnes who provides impeccable butlerish tones throughout. He sounds a little like the BBC presenter Robert Robinson. Barnes’ character accents aren quite good, though on one occasion he does forget them.

I’d recommend this book to those who like poignant, well-written novels. I can’t think of anyone I wouldn’t recomment it to.

Star Rating: Five Stars (out of five)

Original Book Text: five out of five
RNIB Disc Recording: four out of five.

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“Pilgrim's Progress” by John Bunyan

Duration: 12 hours 2 minutes
Talking Book number: TB 792

This is a book I’ve wanted to read for a long time. That’s not from any piety on my part. It’s from growing up with an interest in fantasy literature before the fantasy boom of the eighties. I ended up reading or wanting to read a lot of myths, legends and religious stories. And this is a very famous piece of Christian allegory, possibly more famous than Narnia. It’s a source of many names and expressions that are popularly used such as The Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, Beulah Land and The Voice of the Turtle. The RNIB synopsis calls the book “the dream allegory of Christian's flight from the City of Destruction towards the Celestial City”.

In at least one sense it’s a fantasy novel. The world that Christian passes through is the now standard pseudo-mediaeval one. It’s been used by everyone from Tolkien to Terry Pratchett. Christian’s journey passes through a landscape which is recognisable as quintessentially English. It’s the English countryside of the seventeenth century. The journey itself with its strange places and encounters with bizarre people reminds me a little of Lewis Carrol’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (TB 13087). There are classic elements like instructional and prophetic dreams. There is a journey through a fantastic landscape towards a goal of great significance and encounters with hostile denizens bent on stopping you. In this regard it did make me think a little at times of Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” (TB 14529, 14593, 14660).

The book was published in the seventeenth century and it is written in Restoration English. The language is close enough to Shakespeare and the King James Bible to be recognisable, and indeed being later is slightly closer to modern English. I found it perfectly understandable but rather dry. It turns out that Bunyan has a penchant for verse (one of the poems in this book was turned into a hymn) but generally he’s much better at prose. The book itself is over-long. Bunyan cannot help digressing from allegorical narrative to long laboured passages of dialogue which try to explain everything. This ends up as tedious sermonising and referencing everything to scripture. There are many technical arguments justifying Bunyan’s particular form of Christianity which by and large are rather unimpressive philosophically. At one point we are even treated to theological riddles.

The spiritual significance of the many encounters en route isn’t hard to follow because everybody and everything has a name indicative of their allegorical role. Characters have names like Evangelist, Mercy, Littlefaith and Sloth. Places are called things like the Valley of Humiliation or the Hill Difficulty. This trick of identifying everyone and everything so clearly makes the interpretation of the symbolism quite easy but I’m sure that my lack of Biblical knowledge caused me to miss out on some of the significance. The technique that Bunyan is using is familiar to me. I recognised it from from the C.S. Lewis novel “The Pilgrim’s Regress” (TB 11218) which I read a year or two ago. That was a book in which Lewis allegorically described his own conversion in a similar way. I can now more fully appreciate what Lewis was trying to do and I can also see how derivative he was being stylistically.

In theological terms this is an extremely Protestant book. Indeed it’s also Puritan, a form of Christianity that can sound odd or archaic to some nowadays. The puritan faith of Bunyan is certainly arduous, avoiding sin at every corner, and the journey in the book is equally so. The Way is surprisingly hard and cruel by today’s standards. Emotionally the book is an odd mix of positive and uplifting feelings with a surprising amount of anxiety. This is, after all, faith where you fear the one you love. The puritanism includes a hostility to sex and and enthusiasm for celibacy which can sound a little odd to us. It goes beyond a simple opposition to casual sex and promotes chastity itself as a virtue. The anti-Papist elements are another aspect that can sound rather odd today. They read like Chaucer’s anti-clericism but in the modern world where post-reformation reconciliation is all the rage it’s a little strange to hear angry voices raised against Popery. At least it is in the part of England where I live.

I must say I found the personality of the protagonist a little surprising. Christian is set up to be an essentially exemplary moral figure despite his occasional weaknesses. Yet he seems a very hard person. His obsessive concentration on the Way and on his own personal salvation seem from my point of view to reduce his charity. It’s not that he has no concern for his friends and relations, other pilgrims and those in error. But in things such as in his attitude to his wife and children his emphasis on personal salvation often comes across as slightly selfish. I would have expected more concentration on prosteletysing to achieve the salvation of others and less on his own personal future.

When I compare this book with the Gospels one thing that I notice is that it seems surprisingly martial. Jesus’ parables were generally peaceful and domestic. In contrast this allegory involves fighting the good fight. It refers more closely to Old Testament scripture with its wars and battles than to New Testament self-sacrifice. Perhaps it’s something that originates from the historical context in which the book was written, not long after the English Civil War. Indeed there is a certain sinister and paranoid atmosphere which pervades certain aspects of the novel and which may derive from the fact that this is the period of witch burning.

Surprisingly it’s a book of two halves. Everybody says it’s all about Christian’s journey to the celestial City. In fact that takes up only the first half of the book. There are then some “Conclusions”, “Objections” and “Answers”. These turn out to be just a set of prosteletysation tips. Then part two is the sequel. Christian’s family undergo the self same journey in an attempt to follow him. There’s a certain amount of redundancy in this repetition of the route, though some of the encounters are different and a few things have changed in the intervening time. The most interesting aspect to this is to see how the sexual attitudes of the time cause Christian’s wife to have a rather different time of it than her husband did.

In the end I found that the book doesn’t really function well as a fantasy story, at least not by today’s standards. But on the other hand it is a very interesting piece of historical religious writing. It gives a good insight into the thought of Bunyon and those of his contemporaries who shared his faith. It’s a very different world-view from the modern secular one or even a modern liberal Christian one and it’s an interesting read for that alone.

The reader is Eric Gillett. It’s an early RNIB recording and Gillett is an old-fashioned and possibly elderly reader who makes hardly any attempt at character voices. He sounds a little like the English Jazz musician Humphrey Lyttleton. But he’s far from the worst of those old-fashioned readers and in some ways it’s appropriate for this sort of book. A jaunty colloquial modern reading might be rather strange.

I’d recommend this book to zealous Protestants and students of theology. I wouldn’t recommend it to those who’ve run out of Terry Pratchetts.

Star Rating: Three Stars (out of five)

Original Book Text: three out of five.
RNIB Disc Recording: three out of five.

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“’Tis, A Memoir” by Frank McCourt

Duration 14 hours 04 minutes
Talking Book number: TB 12516

“Angela’s Ashes” (TB 11434) was Frank McCourt’s best-selling memoir of his poor Catholic childhood in Ireland. I read it a few years ago and I often refer to it when making comparisons in reviews. It seemed to start an outpouring of writers recalling similar poor upbringings. At the end of the book Frank emigrates to America. The second-to-last chapter ends with the question “Isn't this a great country altogether?”, the country in question being of course the United States. The last chapter is made up of the single word “’Tis” which inevitably became the title for this sequel.

Here we have the story of Frank’s American odyssey during the fifties and sixties. He makes his way in the world and makes a new life for himself in New York. The subject matter, the poor American immigrant making good, is conventional fare and this time McCourt doesn’t seem to have spawned a swarm of imitators. In a lot of ways it’s the inevitable story of the American dream. America is a country which has always treated poor immigrants very badly. Those who stick it out and succeed always have stories to tell about the improvement in their lives from initial poverty to final comfort. We don’t get to hear from the immigrants who fail. They either have to leave and return to the old country or they have to remain as Americans who are too poor to write books.

“’Tis” fulfils the requirements of a sequel very well. For a start it follows on chronologically. It also includes many of the same characters and uses the same writing style. The narrator’s voice is once more that familiar colloquial first-person present-tense Irish patois which sounds like a chat with an Irishman in a bar. McCourt uses repeated phrases in place of pronouns which in an American context sounds surprisingly like Damon Runyon, an author sadly neglected by the Talking Books library. McCourt also repeats his technique of using his young naive self as a writing tool to expose injustice and social inequality. New York is a confusing and hypocritical place, something that’s subtly highlighted by young Frank’s surprise and incomprehension. He’s an innocent and usually lost for words, almost the exact opposite of the wise and skilful writer the author has now become. The evocation of his former youthful viewpoint is a neatly-pulled-off piece of artifice and guile.

There are inevitably differences between this book and its predecessor. During his unhappy childhood in a stifling and oppressive Ireland Frank dreamed of making a new life in the America he saw in the movies. But the reality is different from his dreams. His New World turns out to be a hard and lonely place. He’s shy and diffident in an alien society. The innocent at home is now the innocent abroad and the tale has suddenly become much more commonplace. He wants to succeed in the big city and become accepted and successful but he finds it very difficult to be treated as an American. He finds that the only thing he’s allowed to be is an Irish-American. He’s continually ghettoised into New York’s large Irish community. Escaping the bad old Irish Catholic world was one of his reasons for leaving Ireland behind but now he’s in America he can’t find a way to join the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant world. He ends up caught between the two, envying the rich and beautiful people he sees every day. They’re the ones who’ve already made it or the ones who don’t even have to try. His frustration is evident. The charming child has now become an angry young man. At times he even becomes embittered by it all and starts to whinge on about his troubles. This can all make his train of thought rather less endearing than it was before. It’s an effect which is exacerbated by one of the curses of modern publishing: the book is twice as long as it needs to be. Some passages are told at far too great a length or are simply irrelevant to the narrative.

Frank’s problems as an immigrant start to diminish as the book progresses and he gets older. He becomes a settled American living through the sixties. The book even has a little material on his life in the seventies and a single chapter on the eighties, but the story really peters out once the sixties are up. It’s partly a result of his moving out of poverty. It was the poverty which made his childhood and youth so intriguing and strange to a lot of modern Western readers, myself included. But as time passes and he becomes better off his life becomes more like ours. Any problems he has in later life just don’t compare with those of his early years. The more American he becomes the less there is to say. As young Frank grows up and becomes increasingly similar to the author writing the book the devices that are the basis for that writing become less and less useful. Those youthful innocent eyes wouldn’t be any good for describing the world as seen by today’s successful author and raconteur. But there is a development concerning Frank’s father which is worthy of note. During Frank’s childhood his father had always been an inadequate and usually absent figure. Consequently Frank’s feelings towards his father had mostly been ones of anger and disappointment. In this book the adult Frank develops a number of his father’s bad ways but remains completely naive to the fact he has done so. It’s the author who subtly indicates the similarity and makes it apparent to the reader.

All this sounds very critical but It isn’t meant to be. “’Tis” isn’t a bad book at all. The problem is that it’s impossible not to compare it with “Angela’s Ashes” and the latter is a better book. It has more focus and builds to more of a climax. But most of the things that made it so fascinating are still present here. There’s a warmth and sympathy that fill both books and make them an absorbing read. It’s hard not to care about such a generally likeable protagonist and not to be be concerned about his predicaments, his family and the people around him. It’s the character of young Frank himself that concentrates the mind on the narrative. The author’s subtle background messages are a pleasant addition to the read.

It’s not essential to have read the first book before reading the second. “’Tis” does stand on its own and makes enough back-references to its predecessor that it’s easy to follow on its own. Mind you, I’m not quite sure why anyone would want to read them out of sequence. If you like one you’ll probably like the other and in any case you’d probably want to start with the better book. There is what you might call a third book in the series. It’s “A Monk Swimming” by Malachy McCourt (TB 12369). Malachy is one of Frank’s brothers and it seems the family writing franchise is now expanding as Malachy tells his own family tale. I have to express doubts about whether Malachy’s writing style will turn out to be as good as Frank’s. Nevertheless I’ll be taking a chance on reading Malachy’s book simply because I’ve developed enough of an interest in the characters now to want to know more.

For visually impaired readers I ought to mention that Frank’s eye condition does get some more coverage in “’Tis”. It’s in no way central to the story but it does impact on it and there is a little information about his search for a diagnosis and treatment.

The RNIB versions of “Angela’s Ashes” and “A Monk Swimming” were read by John Cormack but surprisingly the reader of “’Tis” is Frank McCourt himself. I think this may be a commercial recording that the RNIB has somehow obtained. McCourt’s reading isn’t bad but it isn’t as good as Cormack’s. McCourt reads in his own Irish Brogue which is a subject of discussion in the book itself. It’s more flat and monotonous than Cormack’s performance and McCourt’s character voices are not very well distinguished. It’s fun to hear him singing the musical snatches, though. I’ve noticed that some of the actors used on RNIB Talking Books don’t attempt to sing any songs in the books they read. I suspect it’s because those particular readers know that they can’t hold a tune.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who enjoyed “Angela’s Ashes” or who likes that sort of poverty memoir. I wouldn’t recommend it to those who just want to hear about the rich and famous.

Star Rating: four stars (out of five).

Original Book text: four out of five.
RNIB Disc Recording: four out of five.

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“Fictions” by Jorge Luis Borges

Duration 6 hours 8 minutes
Talking Book number: TB 6541

This is a book of short stories by Argentina’s most famous writer. I thought that I’d originally read it back in the eighties but it turns out that the book I read back then was called “Labyrinths”. That too was a book of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges. Some of them were the same as the stories in this one. Perhaps all of them were the same. I’m not sure.

Twenty years ago my mind had disappeared far into the depths of philosophical abstraction. I was keen to find a literary version of the principles I had been studying in my philosophy degree. “Labyrinths” fulfilled what I was looking for. At the time it seemed to me quite a simple book. But reading “Fictions” now I find it is far from simple. It is crammed with obscure literary and philosophical references. It’s a very intellectual book and it’s densely filled with complex and original ideas. Something which would sustain many writers through an entire novel is dispensed with in one paragraph of Borges. The book consequently requires a degree of intellectual effort to follow and understand. It’s a good book but it’s not an easy book.

The settings of the stories are varied. Some of them resemble fantasy stories, as people in pre-industrial societies go about in worlds which are strangely magical. Others are stories told by one person to another in a twentieth-century Argentina where things are not quite as ordinary as they seem. Some are stories about mysterious books which fascinate the characters to the point of distraction. There are strange and rare editions of ordinary books and ordinary editions of strange and rare books. Between their pages lie the answers to the most fundamental questions of literature, philosophy, theology, history and the occult. All the stories in one way or another deal with these sort of erudite questions and make some point or other about an idea that intrigues Borges.

A curious premise common to several of the stories is the idea of discussing fictional books. Writers such as Stanislav Lem and H.P. Lovecraft have also used this idea but Borges brings to it a scholarly learning and a librarian’s love of books. He intermingles the real and the fictional in such a charming and fascinating manner that the distinction between the two starts to blur. In the end it becomes debatable whether there is any meaning in such a distinction at all.

The format of these stories is Gothic. I hesitate to use that term as it has changed its meaning in recent years. I’m not talking about castles and wolves in mediaeval Germany. I’m not talking about modern horror tales of blood and gore. Closer to the mark are other New World writers of the American Gothic like Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. This is the sort of Gothic that tells stories within stories. There are tales here of encounters with bizarre people, secret research into forgotten mysteries, the disclosure of ancient memories and the discovery of forbidden books. There are worlds so strange and unnatural that they contain “transparent tigers and towers of blood”. But in the end our own world is no less strange than all these fantastic ones. The surrealism of Borges work is a mask for his post-modern philosophy of transcendental idealism. His revelations are heretical and his Gothic existential. Our comfortable everyday world is challenged and shattered. Things are no longer the way most people believe them to be. Things that most people believe in can no longer make sense. Only in this way can these be called horror stories. The most horrifying things in Borges are ideas.

These sort of stories do not generally have much in the way of narrative. They are closer to puzzles than tales. There is usually just a brief fictional description of a male protagonist and his situation at a particular place and time. Then an exploration of how that state of affairs came into being turns into the unravelling of a mystery.
The writing style Borges uses is erudite and reserved, almost academic. It’s a formula that can easily lead to very dry fiction and it often does with weak writers. But Borges combines an atmospheric and evocative sense of place with a disquieting sense of concern that absorbs the reader in the mysteries he is revealing.

There’s an introduction to the book at the beginning by Anthony Kerrigan, the editor and translator. It seeks to explain who Borges was and what his writing is all about. I wouldn’t worry too much about it though. It’s rather pretentious and it isn’t particularly helpful.

The reader is David Banks. He reads in a way which is a little reserved and stilted but not distractingly so. In fact, this sort of reading provides a slightly portentous effect which can enhance the horror a little. It’s not a bad style for a book like this but it might have been nice to have had a little bit more emotion in the reading.

I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in intellectual literary fiction. I wouldn’t recommend it to those just looking for stories of gauchos.

Star Rating: five stars (out of five)

Original Book Text: five out of five
RNIB Disc Recording: four out of five

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“Intimacy” by Hanif Kureishi

Duration: 3 hours 35 minutes
Talking Book number: TB 11498

“I wanted to have a child, not marry one.”
- a frustrated wife in a feminist joke.

This is a very short book. It’s so short it could almost be a short story. It’s apparently classified as a “novella”. Its protagonist, like Kureishi, is now a middle-aged writer. He is contemplating leaving his wife and family, a theme which brings various books to my mind. I’m reminded for instance of Alan Sillitoe’s unpleasant and tedious novel “The Death of William Posters” (TB 7). There seem to be an awful lot of books on this leaving-your-wife theme. Perhaps it tells us something about those people who get to be writers.

There are only two other Kureishi books in the Talking Books library and I’d already read both of them. “The Buddha of Suburbia” (TB 12081) is quite famous and often said to be a fictionalised account of Kureishi’s youth. “The Black Album” (TB 10511) was written a little later and so far as I know it doesn’t have anything to do with his own life. It’s mainly concerned with the state of British Islam. Both of those books were fairly good. All three are set in Modern London which seems to be Kureishi’s favourite setting. But this London is a more alienating place than before. The writing style also shows a change. The conventional narrative structure of the previous books has been replaced by a stream of consciousness. It’s the thoughts inside the protagonist’s head that make up the entire text. There is incredibly close contact between the mind of the reader and the mind of the protagonist all the way through this book. We know all his most intimate thoughts, whether we want to or not. It’s essential when using a technique like this that the author makes his protagonist likeable, or if not likeable then at least interesting. It also helps if we slowly get to discover lots of fascinating things about the man and his past.

None of this is the case. The man is a bore. It doesn’t take us much more than five minutes to learn exactly how tedious he is. He’s a sullen cynical selfish character who spends all his time in grumpy whinging and pointless self-absorbed self-recrimination. His thoughts about where his marriage went wrong veer between irrelevant idle speculation and the pointlessly bitter analysis of trivia. It’s only the hope that there might be some surprises to come that give us any relief as we pursue him through the text. But he’s a man without surprises. Even his past is totally uninteresting. He’d make an annoying character for a bit part in a story, let alone the protagonist. He’s about as nice as Howard Kirk in “The History Man” and as interesting as an amoeba. There’s no chance of sympathetic identification with him. You feel sorry for anyone who comes in contact with him. You wonder how his wife has stuck him for so long. Perhaps this book should have been called “Inadequacy”.

As for the story itself, this is anything but a love story. For all his speculative protestations of love our hero seems to be completely incapable of the emotion. You might call it an unlove story except for the other missing ingredient. It isn’t a story. There’s no narrative at all worth mentioning. Nothing happens that you couldn’t have predicted at the end of the first paragraph. And there’s no resolution at the end of the book since there isn’t anything that needs resolving. The protagonist doesn’t do anything interesting. Nor does anything interesting happen to him. He just agonises. Even Hamlet, that arch-introspective-procrastinator manages to kill everyone before the final curtain. I simply can’t find any reason in the text why I should care. Nor does the text give any clue why the protagonist needs to be so immature and unlikeable. I have a horrible feeling that some of this may just be unintentional. Kureishi may actually have believed this book to be about a normal believable interesting protagonist doing normal, believable and interesting things. I do hope not. I also hope that there isn’t supposed to be anything autobiographical about the book. If there is I have to feel seriously worried about Kureishi and anyone associated with him.

If it counts as a redeeming feature, Kureishi still shows his ability with a good turn of phrase and sarcastic comment. I’d quote some of them if the book had made me interested enough to want to remember even a word of it. There are the usual sexual references and some expletives but even they don’t manage to liven it up.

The reader is Raymond Sawyer. He’s a fine choice for reading Kureishi and makes a perfectly good job of it. The voice he uses for the text is an effective neutral southern one with an appropriate mild London accent. He makes a reasonable job of the character voices too.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who doesn’t have anything else to read or anything better to do. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone with any choice.

Star Rating: One Star (out of five).

Original Book Text: One out of five.
RNIB Disc recording: four out of five.

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“Stars of the New Curfew” by Ben Okri

Duration 5 hours 59 minutes
Talking Book number: TB 9863

I haven’t read an awful lot of African literature. In fact, I can’t think of anything I’ve read before by a Black African writer. The only books I’ve come across with any similarity to Okri are Doris Lessing’s “Mara and Dann” (reviewed in March 2006) and V.S. Naipaul’s “In a Free State” (reviewed in May 2006). They both depict sub-Saharan Africa with something of the feeling Okri brings to his work. As usual I don’t actually know anything much about who the writer of this book is. The blurb tells me that he once won a Booker prize but that’s not an awful lot of help.

The book itself is a collection of maybe half a dozen short stories of wildly differing lengths which are set in some sort of modern African state. One of them takes place in Nigeria but it isn’t really clear in which country the others are set. It could easily be an imaginary generic African country. The corrupt politicians and ubiquitous soldiers, the insecurity and crime, the heat and the dust, the poverty and injustice all sound like a hundred different modern African locations. The legacy of colonialism remains in the form of rusting monuments, collapsed buildings and faded history. The forest has overtaken the past and driven it into dusty obscurity. The days of European imperialism seem as irrelevant now as do the remains of the statue in Shelley’s “Ozymandias”. In fact the Orientalist settings conjured by the Romantic poets do have some similarities to Okri’s Africa. They both have a feeling of abandonment and a sense of lost glory.

There is a supernatural aspect to Okri’s work which isn’t quite the same as anything found in European or North American literature. The commercial so-called fantasy genres are based on such a materialist world-view that they contain nothing at all like Okri’s stories. The closest we get is in tales of hallucination and nightmare or maybe in Gothic ghost stories. But Okri’s world is closer to Voodoo than Victoriana. It’s an African way of thinking which once led to a Caribbean cult which in turn was diluted down into a Hollywood cliché. But this is the real thing. It’s a bit like Hunter S. Thompson’s surrealistic drug-addled world in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” (TB 11134). These are stories told from the perspective of poor Africans for whom traditional magic and spirits are a part of everyday life. The narrative is suffused all the way through with a supernatural atmosphere instead of just using magic as a twist at the end, a deus ex machina or a bag of conjuring tricks. But at the same time these are very ordinary stories about very poor Africans. Bizarre and fantastical events don’t actually take up too much of the text. Most of the things that happen in the stories are realistic and even rather dull. For Okri the ordinary world isn’t a place that requires magic to make it extraordinary. His ordinary world is a place that is already magical and extraordinary.

This is a book which doesn’t always make for comfortable reading. As a writer Okri is clearly on the side of the poor and he’s cynical about the rulers and the rich. His African society is hard, brutal and unforgiving. Those who might have the ability to do something about the suffering in his world simply choose to ignore it. A combination of poverty, corruption and heat-induced lethargy has left most of his poor characters resigned to the mis-use of wealth and power. Their energies are wasted on trivial and unproductive activities. Despite their intrinsic resilience they seem to have become impotent and unable to improve their lot. Many seem to have been dehumanised by their sufferings and in general they aren’t portrayed all that sympathetically. His male protagonists also display the ignorant misogyny which is traditional in much of African society. It’s occasionally challenged by the narrative but it might still be offensive to White Liberal readers. I suspect that if Okri had tried to remove this attitude from the book he would have created a strangely inaccurate picture of African society.

Okri’s writing style is terse. Events and dialogue take up most of the text while adjectives and descriptive passages are rare. I’ve come across this style before in William Trevor’s short stories. Hemmingway is also said to use it. It’s a technique that works well in the short story format where there isn’t room for the long descriptive passages so popular in the Victorian novel. Okri takes full advantage of this style. He produces a rather disorientating effect by omitting many of the descriptions of mundane details that would normally help to locate and anchor a scene in the reader’s mind. At the same time he enhances the surreal aspect by describing all the odd, bizarre and strange details. Narratives aren’t really the main purpose of the book though. Most of the stories have a tale of some sort within them but the real point of the stories is to tell us what Okri’s Africa and its people are like and to tell us what he feels about it all. In case anyone cares, there are one or two swear words in the book as well as a few sex scenes.

The reader is Jonathan Oliver. He reads the text in a deep, sombre, gravelly voice and a clear, neutral English accent. What he does with the dialogue is a bit disappointing though. Instead of using African accents for the characters he gives them all English regional accents. I counted only one or two instances in the entire book where a character is given an African voice. This is a bit of a shame as African voices would have given the recording much more atmosphere. On the plus side, Oliver’s delivery of the dialogue is at least a reasonably emotional one.

I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in modern African writing or in supernatural fiction. I wouldn’t recommend it to those seeking an uplifting and inspirational read.

Star Rating: three stars (out of five)

Original Book Text: three out of five.
RNIB Disc Recording: four out of five.

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“Fasting, Feasting” by Anita Desai

Duration: 6 hours 43 minutes
Talking Book Number: TB 12050

As usual I don’t know anything much about the author of this book, though this is the second one of hers I’ve read. The first one was “Games at Twilight and Other Stories” (TB 3359) which was a pleasing collection of short stories for the foreigner and it depicted life in modern India. “Fasting, Feasting” is a novel, or perhaps you could call it two novels since it’s divided into two largely separate parts. The first part tells the story of a young woman growing up in modern India. The second part is about the time spent by her brother in the United States and it’s only about half the length of the first part. On its own it would probably qualify as little more than a short story. Overall the book tells the tale of an ordinary lower middle class Indian family as they struggle to keep up appearences. Over the course of a few decades they get on with all the businesses of life that are required by Indian society.

The book does have a narrative of sorts but it’s certainly not a very strong one. Not much happens to the family, and certainly nothing very unusual. The point of the book is not really to tell a tale but to evoke Hindi life, something that it succeeds in perfectly. It allows foreigners like me to have some idea what it must be like to be South Asian. The presentation of the family and its members is extremely sympathetic and they are at once familiar and recognisable. They could be any family anywhere. In contrast the differences between Indian and European life stand out strikingly. Most things feel so familiar and ordinary that anything which is different about India and Hindi culture are immediately noticable.

In the early part of the book some of the main characters are children and there is a certain sense of it being like a childhood memoir. However, it’s not the ever-popular story of grim childhood suffering. It’s not a poverty novel like “Angela’s Ashes” (Frank McCourt, TB 11434) or a racism novel like “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” (Maya Angelou, TB 5720). For one thing, the family isn’t even poor. They’re not rich either but they’ve got enough money to get by. Racism and sectarianism don’t form any real part of the story in India and even in America there isn’t much in the way of a race theme. But the characters are deprived in a different way. If they go without things it’s simply a result of the society in which they live and the people they are. Conservative Indian culture places huge restrictions on what people can say and do. The family in the novel seems in no way unusual in respecting tradition and being concerned at what people might think of anyone who steps out of line. Even when their son comes to America he isn’t free. His socialisation during his Indian childhood means that being Hindi is in his blood. It’s who he is. He’s as unconsciously constrained by his cultural values as he would have been if he’s stayed in India.

The social constraints arising from conservative Indian culture are probably at their clearest in the context of gender politics. In many ways this is a feminist novel. But it’s no whining Dickensian polemic like Monica Ali’s “Brick Lane” (TB 13604) with its world of weak submissive female victims and their patriarchal male overlords. Desai’s writing portrays a warmth and sympathy for characters of both genders. The plight of Indian women isn’t a result of a particular group of oppressors. Rather it’s the traditional society that’s at fault. Conservative upbringing and social compulsion leave women (and men) trapped in roles that many of them find completely unsuitable.

One theme that runs all the way through the book is the passing of time. Characters are easily embarrased by events but more often than not they’re just bored with the lack of them. The book’s scenes are not clearly located in time and a mixture of present-tense and past-tense passages are used to create a sense of dislocation in time. It’s a world of unfulfilled desires. Passions like romance which would be the cornerstone of any similar western story are largely absent from this one. The conservative society that’s evoked is a static and peaceful one.

The writing style is very accomplished. American English is used for the author’s voice which is neutral and uncritical of the subject matter. It’s a third-person telling that’s not charged with heckling emotion. This understatement is what gives the tale its power. To complement this there is good, believable dialogue. It does a lot to define the characters and their relationships and it provides a lot of the emotion in the book.

Curiously the book isn’t read in an Indian voice. The reader is Di Langford who read “Gothick Devon” and “Gothick Cornwall” which I reviewed in January 2006. She reads this in the same received, slightly schoolteacherish tones that she used for the Gothicks. It’s a clear voice and easy to follow. It’s not without emotion and at least it’s female. It’s far from stilted but the very Englishness of it makes it rather out of place. Fortunately the Hindi and American character voices are nicely done and are quite a compensation.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who’s keen on family tales or stories about India. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who wants a rip-roaring plot.

Star Rating: Four stars (out of five).

Original Book Text: four out of five.
RNIB Disc Recording: four out of five.

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“The Wild Cherry Tree” by H. E. Bates

Duration: 6 hours 45 minutes
Talking Book number: TB 641

I like H.E. Bates. Really I do. I’d read four of his books before I started on this one. They were “The Darling Buds of May” (TB 753), “My Uncle Silas” (TB 9782), “A Moment in Time” (TB 752) and “The Vanished World” (TB 1002). I had enjoyed all four of them and so I was quite looking forward to reading another.

“The Wild Cherry Tree” turns out to be a collection of ten short stories. They are mostly domestic tales of romantic relationships set in or around the nineteen-sixties. I call them tales but in reality they are not exactly narratives. Not a lot actually happens in them. They are really just descriptions of situations in which characters find themselves at a particular time. They concentrate on evoking the place and time of the setting rather than telling a story.

I have to admit that I had certain expectations before I started to read this book. I was looking for Bates’ traditional themes of botany and summer ripeness that are so prevalent in the other Bates books I’d read. His usual setting is one where a nostalgic rural idyll from the past pervades everything. He celebrates the joy of life and the beauty of nature. He creates a feeling of happiness and a sense of wonder and presents everything from a positive uplifting viewpoint. A few poignant and bittersweet feelings of loss might possibly creep in but they don’t upset the world of timeless bounty. In fact, their contrast enhances it.

But this book is very different and it’s certainly not what I had expected. It’s much darker than the usual H.E. Bates fare and the settings are surprisingly much more urban. Most of the stories are set in the grim sixties world of commuting, flats, beach holidays, dinginess, poverty and broken homes. Those halcyon days are gone for good now. Almost everyone miserably agrees that food, drink and nearly everything else are now only a shadow of their former selves. We don’t get the glory of a lost past here. Instead we get the tragedy of the dead time of modernity that’s followed it. Bates evokes feelings of hopeless regret, abandonment, sadness, loneliness and even alienation. Lovers are far too shy for their own good and their relationships are all invariably doomed. The rural and botanical themes are still present but they are often only used negatively to depict passing and decay. There are still plants that symbolise the characters but it’s done in an over-obvious and heavy-handed way. Bates just doesn’t seem to have the skill with these darker themes that he does with his usual uplifting material. It’s a shame that this book isn’t more like Daphne du Maurier’s “The Apple Tree” (TB 6114) with which it shares both style and form. But Du Maurier manages to turn the darkness in her book into a sense of horror in the way that she is always so expert at. “The Wild Cherry Tree” isn’t in that league. Instead it reminds me of William Trevor’s short story collection “Lovers of their Time” which I reviewed in February 2006. Both suffer from the problems of repetitive style and structure which means that the stories slowly become more and more boring and predictable as you become aware of the formula being used. In the end “The Wild Cherry Tree” just feels bitter and leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.

There are a few mild sex scenes, mainly serving to reveal that Bates was a tit man. I’m hoping that “A Breath of French Air” will redeem my faith in him.

The Reader is Anthony Parker who manages to sound disturbingly a bit like the classic British comedy actor Leslie Phillips. His character voices aren’t bad, though they are a little overdone and slightly eccentric. He reads rather too slowly with some big pauses but this can probably be corrected quite easily using the Daisy player controls. For some reason I couldn’t be bothered.

I’d only recommend this book to people who actually like this sort of miserable tale. I wouldn’t recommend it to people who enjoy H.E. Bates’ usual work.

Star Rating: Two Stars (out of five).

Original Book Text: two out of five.
RNIB Disc recording: three out of five.

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“The History Man” by Malcolm Bradbury

Duration 10 hours 45 minutes
Talking Book Number: TB 2936

I heard a rather good BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of this book a few years ago. It was broadcast on Monday mornings and some listeners wrote in to complain about the sex scenes. I think there may have also been a TV version once but I never saw it. Essentially it’s a portrait of a radical academic at a fictional university in the early seventies. The book portrays everything in a very negative light and cynically captures the politics and culture of the times. The fictional setting of the book is the English south-coast town of Watermouth and there are allegations that this town is in fact Brighton. There are also allegations that the academic in question (Howard Kirk) is based on the famous sociologist and broadcaster Laurie Taylor.

My own interest in the book stems from events in my own life. I attended two redbrick universities as a student in the early eighties, a decade later than the book is set. One of those was the Brighton-based University of Sussex. The other was the University of York, and the University of Watermouth seems to me to be very like a composite of the two. A lot of the modernist architecture and also a fair amount of the university culture are easily recognisable from my own personal experience there. Bradbury makes extensive use of evocative period detail which allows the town of Watermouth to be readily be identified as Brighton. As for Laurie Taylor, he was professor of Sociology at York when I was a student there but I never personally met him. I cannot comment on the authenticity with which Howard Kirk resembles him, but by the eighties Laurie Taylor’s only reputation was for his informal teaching style. Perhaps he was mellowed by the later seventies, for in the book Kirk is very much an anti-hero. He’s a callous, arrogant, manipulative, power-crazed, selfish, hypocritical and destructive womaniser. He’s pretty much a symbol of what Bradbury saw as being wrong with the Left in the early seventies.

I found this an uncomfortable book to read. Bradbury uses a very odd writing style to create a sinister sense of alienation throughout the book. The present tense is irritatingly used from start to finish in a way which impedes the sense of dramatic flow. No indication of characters’ thoughts, feelings or emotions is given. Instead the minutiae of their actions are described methodically as if being seen by an entomologist through a microscope. Or rather, being seen by a sociological researcher doing field work. Wet weather, urban decay and modernist architecture are also made use of as themes to enhance the alienated feelings here. All we get to humanise the Kirks are the two chapters near the beginning which give their biographical background and mercifully use the perfect tense. It’s the only point where any details are given about Kirk’s mind and motivations. Even then his justification of himself is presented so satirically that it’s quite impossible to sympathise with him. The details of his marriage are quite central to the book and are used to further assassinate his character. Merely by sympathising with his poor wife you end up hating him. A sneering and sarcastic tone is used to describe most of the people, things and events in the book. In the end an alienated writing style like this which starts out looking like a reasonably interesting idea only finally makes for a rather poor read. Alienating your reader with every sentence is a decidedly heavy-handed technique, while the telling of the tale is rather dull and slow as a result of the excessive concentration on the tiny details.

One thing that’s odd about the book is that it’s not exactly clear what it is that Bradbury is trying to object to. If it were Laurie Taylor or some other individual, that would merely be petty and vindictive. And the book is presumably supposed to be broader than that. So what exactly is its intended target? Is it the Left? Is it 1972? Is it Sussex University? Is it Bradbury’s own student days? The problem is that hardly anything in the book is presented positively. The times, the architecture, the people, the place, the politics, the society all come equally under Bradbury’s bitter gaze. Even sociology itself seems to be a target of the attack despite the fact that the language of the attack is itself sociological. I don’t know Bradbury’s biography but I assume something must have given him this universal axe to grind. But what it means is that instead of the book being an attack on something in particular it’s almost an attack on life in general. It’s a book that feels hopeless and suffocating. There’s no way out. The only trouble is, it’s not clear what there’s no way out of.

On the plus side it’s actually a rather good story. We get to follow Kirk’s Machiavellian ways moving events forward in an intriguing manner and his arrogant brinkmanship is at times breathtaking. But the pacing of the narrative is all wrong. Most of the book is far too slow yet the climax is skipped past between two chapters and only referred to in hindsight in the last chapter. If this is a stylistic device it’s an unsatisfying one. The dialogue is quite absorbing and seems fairly realistic with a little swearing thrown in. There is quite a bit of nudity and quite a few sex scenes though these are not given in much detail. They’re mainly there to provide more opportunities for dialogue. Overall it’s a book that begs to be dramatised, and unusually for me I actually found the BBC Radio 4 dramatisation better than the original book.

The reader is Malcolm Ruthven. He’s got quite a rich deep male voice with just an overtone of the sombre and funereal. In a book like this that isn’t bad. It even enhances the sinister alienation. He brings out the sarcasm in the text fairly well and his character voices are quite lively and even a little emotional. But the voices and accents are at the same time rather odd. He’s not particularly good at voicing the female parts, though some come out better than others. He’s also not particularly good at the regional accents. They vary between quite good and rather poor. They also seem to come and go almost at random. Strangely, they seem to improve slowly as the book progresses. I can’t work out whether Ruthven performs the characters in the way he thinks they should sound or whether he can’t maintain an accent for very long.

I’d recommend this book to those who like dark anti-radical satire. I wouldn’t recommend it to those who still have nightmares about their own student days.

Star Rating: three stars (out of five).

Original book text: three out of five
RNIB disc recording: three out of five

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“Wise Children” by Angela Carter

Duration: 11 hours 13 minutes
Talking Book Number: TB 9107

Angela Carter is one of my favourite authors, though she isn’t particularly famous. Some people will know of her as a feminist writer from the Virago stable. Others may have heard of her as the writer of the short story on which the eighties film “The Company of Wolves” was based. Perhaps some will be aware that she died of cancer in 1992 aged just 51.

“Wise Children” is a novel of which I own a printed copy. I bought it before I became visually impaired but even in those days I was a rather slow print reader. I was also rather good at procrastination and consequently I didn’t get around to starting it until I lost the ability to read print books. The novel was later dramatised on BBC Radio 4 and so I got a chance to hear it in that form. I found the experience in equal parts frustrating, intriguing and confusing. The twin axes of abridgement and dramatisation had left only the bare bones of the story. So I was very pleased to find it in the on-line catalogue and finally get a chance to read the book itself.

“Wise Children” was Carter’s last novel. Her early work in the sixties and seventies was heavily influenced by fairytale and fantastical themes. But she slowly evolved away from that sort of subject matter until by the time of this novel her work had become much more anchored in reality. So this is a tale set in our own conventional world, but at the same time it’s a decidedly odd story. It concerns an eccentric larger-than-life extended theatrical family whose fortunes unfold as the family’s journey through the twentieth century is recounted. Their highly convoluted family tree is full of re-marriages, twin babies, illegitimate births and other complexities. As might be expected, the theatre in all its diverse forms makes a backdrop for the entire book. From Shakespeare to Vaudeville, toy theatres to TV game shows, a wide range of material is covered. There are English theatricals attempting to break into thirties Hollywood. There is the decline of British music hall after the War. There’s conjuring and illusion. Carter has a passion for this sort of thing. It’s the fairytale and fantastical as it exists in our world.

The book is written as if it’s spoken to the listener, rather like the “Talking Heads” programs that Alan Bennet did on the radio and television a few years ago. It’s narrated by one of the characters who’s a member of the theatrical family. She’s a septuagenerian former dancing girl who provides rambling recollections of her own life along with family secrets and the results of her own researches. The result is a book that’s several things at once. It’s part monologue, part memoir and part first-person present-day narrative. Issues and feuds which have bedevilled the family for years are revealed by the memoir in the form of the monologue. Then the present-day narrative scenes allow the problems to reach a climax and finally be resolved. None of this is as complex as it probably sounds and it all flows in a very natural way.

Carter has always had a rather poetic writing style of which I’m inordinately fond. In this novel it’s still present but it’s mixed all the way through with the voice of the narrator. The South London patois of an elderly woman carries us all the way through the book. It’s done in a wonderfully accurate style that creates a feeling of great authenticity and adds to the zeitgeist. Her nostalgia gives colour and tone to the story she’s telling and the narrative becomes infused with her feelings and memories. Significant period details are mixed with trivial ones in her memory, both of which add to the sense of nostalgia. Indeed, the whole book is very evocative. It evokes times past, the experience of being old, being illegitimate, being a twin, being a theatrical, being a Londoner. Emotionally it is as moving as any Carter novel. By turns it’s sad, poignant, bittersweet and heartwarming. At the same time it’s an upbeat, ribald and bawdy tale. As the narrator recounts the past she uses a number of swear words and quite a lot of sexual references. None of them is really used to shock or titillate the reader. Generally they are either slipped in unobtrusively or else used incongruously. In Angela Carter’s world it is always the ordinary that is shocking and the shocking ordinary.

Perhaps it would help if I were to compare this book to another I reviewed recently. “Wise Children” bears some striking similarities to Kate Atkinson’s “Human Croquet” (TB 11062) which I reviewed in March 2006. Both of them tell the story of a family and its secrets in a female first person and in a strong dialect. Both share a number of themes and even a number of events. And both do it very well. The technique used in each case is intoxicating. It manages to suck you into another person’s world, allowing you to understand and feel a different view of life from your own. The most obvious difference between the two books is that for once Carter is the writer whose plot is the more conventional one. There’s none of the weird time-travel stuff in “Wise Children” that there is in “Human Croquet”. The oddness in Carter’s book is all quite rational and the main complexity I found was trying to figure out all the intricate relationships on the family tree.

The Reader is Gretel Davis. She narrates the novel in a voice which sounds exactly like that of an elderly lady with a South London accent. It reminds me a little of the late Pat Coombs and it’s perfect for this book. I think Davis must be making use of her acting skills as I doubt that this is her own voice. The recording is slightly quiet but that’s easily remedied with the Daisy player’s controls.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who likes well-written family sagas. Who wouldn’t I recommend it to? Offhand I can’t think of anyone.

Star Rating: Five Stars (out of five)

Original Book Text: five out of five.
RNIB Disc Recording: five out of five.

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“China Old and New” by John Logan

Duration: 6 hours 32 minutes
Talking Book Number: TB 12407

As regular readers of these reviews will know, I spent a month travelling in China in 1989, visiting both the well-known coast and the obscure interior. Like most foreigners visiting the country, I was fascinated by it. Subsequently and unsurprisingly I seem to have read quite a lot of books about China. A couple of my favourites are “Tibetan Marches” by Andre Migot (TB 340) and “I Stayed in China” by William Gawan Sewell (TB 204). I also quite enjoyed “The Painted Veil” by Somerset Maugham (TB 1248) and some of the books by Pearl S. Buck. And there was also “The Breach in the Wall” by Enid Saunders Candlin (TB 2954), a memoir of a lady who lived in Shanghai in the thirties.

So I’d be an obvious sucker for this book. It’s another memoir in the white-man-in-China style. Logan is a Briton who worked in the interior in the Kuo Min Tang period during the twenties and thirties and went back as a tourist in the Maoist and post-Maoist seventies. So be warned; when he says “new China” he isn’t talking about what we mean by that term now: a country presented in the media as all glass skyscrapers and DVD factories. His “new China” is a traditional Communist state and our modern restructured quasi-capitalist China would be only a coda to his story.

Logan has a very positive outlook and this comes through clearly in his writing. This is understandable; any Westerner who didn’t have a reasonable amount of patience, tolerance and good humour would find China drives them mad within days. He’s clearly very fond of the Chinese people and finds the country as fascinating as I do. One element of his positivity that reads a little oddly nowadays is his good feeling towards the employer that sent him there: British American Tobacco. Yes, his job was to flog fags to the Chinese. It’s an element you have to take with a pinch of salt if you want to continue to be on his side. After all, it’s better than selling them opium.

Logan tells his story in some detail for such a short book. He gives us the bones of his travels and activities along with much history and geography. We get lots of facts and figures, but they’re not usually the ones that we would be interested in. We get things like the details of his flight times. He’s repetitive, giving us some of the facts quite portentously several times. He tells us about the places he’d have liked to have visited but didn’t have the time. It all reads a bit too much like a guidebook rather than his own personal story. The descriptions are so dry, male and unemotional. He occasionally lets himself go and describes something as “unforgettable”, but never tells us why. I’m sure he had plenty of feelings about his travels, but his writing style doesn’t include them. It’s a real shame. I know that I criticised Louisa Waugh for her introspection in “Hearing Birds Fly” when I reviewed it in February 2006, but this is the other extreme. It’s like hearing the travel tales of a dull and unimaginative civil servant. It all reminds me of an excellent short story I once read by Robert Sheckley in which an exotic alien planet is described by one of the few humans lucky enough to ever go there but who is far too boring an individual to tell us anything at all interesting about the place.

One issue that inevitably turns up when someone writes about travel to a country with such alien politics is some discussion of those politics. The various reactions I’ve come across with different authors range from intoxicated admiration through curious interest to contempt. Logan admits that his own politics don’t chime with those of Maoist China but he’s obviously been influenced by them. The result is a curious and arbitrary mixture of Western liberal thought and an appreciation for the successes of Chinese Communism. His ideas (when he occasionally expresses them) are usually fairly evenly balanced between the two, and you get the feeling that he can’t quite make up his mind. He’s impressed by what he sees but all his instincts take him back to our system. Maybe the Maoists would say he needs some re-education.

The reader is Crawford Logan. I don’t know if he’s any relation. I heard a Crawford Logan playing a character on BBC Radio 7 recently so maybe it’s just a coincidence. In this book he reads well in a modern emotional style and a mild and unobtrusive South-East accent. His pronunciation of the Chinese is good (better than mine at any rate). It’s a shame that his voice isn’t exploited by the dry text.

I’d recommend this book to those seeking a nostalgia trip about their Asian travels. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone seeking an entertaining memoir.

Star Rating: One Star (out of five)

Original Book Text: one out of five.
RNIB Disc Recording: four out of five.

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“The Weirdstone of Brisangamen” by Alan Garner

Duration: 9 hours 30 minutes
Talking Book number: TB 5327

When I was a kid people used to talk quite reverently about Alan Garner and his fantasy novels. In those days there was no mass commercial fantasy genre, no Harry Potter or Terry Pratchett. Fantasy novels were few and far between and any that came out were regarded by enthusiasts with a combination of excitement and awe. From what people around me said it seemed that Garner must be some sort of exponent of New-Age Celtic-based high fantasy novels for children. And the book that was mentioned most often was this one. Somehow I never seemed to find a copy in a bookshop or library so I never managed to read it.

Recently I was looking for things to add to my list and I remembered Alan Garner. I looked him up on the on-line catalogue and found that the RNIB has half a dozen of his titles. The other five are:

“Red Shift”: TB 2390
“The Moon of Gomrath”: TB 5082
“Elidor”: TB 5277
“The Owl Service”: TB 5881
“The Stone Book”: TB 13076

“The Wierdstone of Brisingamen” was published in 1960 and it was Garner’s first novel. I’ve heard that he wrote some later ones using the same protagonists. These are two schoolchildren: a brother and sister called Colin and Susan. They get involved in a fantasy adventure in Cheshire at a time which seems to be somewhere between the wars. I believe it’s the time and place where Garner himself grew up. One aspect of the setting that’s unusual is the way Garner interweaves the fantasy world he creates with the everyday one. There’s no popping through a magic portal for a novel-full of silliness and back in time for the last chapter. The only geography that’s used is the realistic twentieth-century Cheshire one. What Garner has done is to intersperse into it a set of fantasy places, people and creatures that lurk hidden in the out-of-the-way locations in the landscape. These fantasy denizens have their own stories which are completely separate from human ones. The protagonists get involved in the diverse plans and agendas of the fantasy characters while still living in a quasi-normal world. In that sense it’s more like horror than fantasy, and at the beginning that aspect is quite well brought out. Not all humans turn out to actually be human. And fear is a frequent reaction of the protagonists when exposed to the scarier elements of the fantasy world.

The geography of the Cheshire landscape certainly plays a big part in the book. It’s almost a character in itself and it takes up more of the text than any of the other characters. Dangerous old mines and dark caves, impenetrable woods and open fields, marshy bogs and steep cliffs all play their part in the story. The landscape and the characters’ movement through it forms the main part of the book’s narrative. In fact, geography ends up playing rather too big a part in the book. The children’s journeys are so long that they take up most of the story and they’re told in such excruciating detail that they quickly become frustrating to listen to. To be fair it’s all described quite well and Garner does his best to maintain the dramatic tension. His main technique is to use the theme of paranoid flight from unseen enemies and he has quite an ability to generate tension out of minor plot events. But the over-long duration of the chases means that they easily get wearing. The thrill of danger can only be prolonged for so long without a rest. It’s unfortunate that Tolkien’s ability to make his journeys interesting means that other fantasy writers include hour after hour of annoyingly dull and uninteresting ones. What would be nice would be less chase and more plot. It almost makes me wonder if Garner was hoping to sell the film rights.

As to the children themselves, there’s something of an Enid-Blighton feel about them. The criticisms of Blighton’s “Famous Five” books are well-known, and some of them apply here. For instance, Susan has a tendency towards stupidity and timidness because she’s only a girl. To her credit, she does show brains and courage at some point, just to prove they’re not all her brother’s prerogative. But at her best she’s rather wet. I suppose you need to overlook this to read the book nowadays, but it’s all a bit uncomfortable for the modern reader.

The description of the children’s involvement in the story is a rather odd aspect of the writing style. Although they take part in almost every scene, very little detail is given as to what’s going on in their heads. Their thoughts, emotions and so on are rarely described in the text. We often have to rely on their speech and behaviour to give us a clue as to what their feelings might be in any given situation. This gives us a rather strange perspective on things. We’re left outside the children and rather emotionally distanced from them. Instead of following and caring about them, we find ourselves in a book where an ensemble of bizarre characters and creatures wander into view for our entertainment and then vanish again. The task of identifying with the protagonists is made difficult enough by those long journey sections of the book which contain little in the way of plot development or character interaction. When you add in the alienating effect of the writing style, caring about the children becomes almost impossible.

The biggest problem with the book is probably in the field of originality. There may not have been so much of a problem when the book came out since that was well before the commercial fantasy boom. But since all those fantasy books came out we’re now in a world where most of this is recognisable and cliched. But I don’t think that’s the only reason for this book’s lack of originality. Garner is apparently well-known for drawing heavily on that collection of Welsh legends: “The Mabinogion”. In this book those references are quite blatant. But I was surprised by the number of elements taken from Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”. The result is so saturated with well-known fantasy imagery, plot and reference that it has a tendency to verge into parody. The clichés sometimes come across as unintentionally comic. I can’t see any adult reading this book nowadays without having the feeling that it’s all rather dated and derivative.

As for the plot, I suppose there is a certain amount of rationale to it. But here you don’t get the impression that it has any sort of consistent underpinning that you get in something like Tolkien’s world. So when yet another strange fantasy character or piece of magic turns up as a deus ex machina to save the day you start to wonder whether any of this really makes sense or whether it’s just a kaleidoscope of Garner’s previous reading. The plot resolution is vaguely adequate in terms of the fantasy world’s flimsy logic, but is abrupt and unsatisfying. Now many of these criticisms can probably be levelled at the bulk of commercial fantasy that’s come out in recent decades. But then much of that is pulp fiction. I suppose I’d expected Alan Garner to be better than that.

The reader is Steve Hodson. His character voices are good. He can certainly do the Cheshire accents. At least I think it’s Cheshire. I’m a Southerner myself so I can’t easily tell my Yorkshire from my Derbyshire. The main problem with the reading is that Hodson’s delivery is rather slow, laboured and unemotional. It is clear and distinct but in a children’s book it all sounds rather condescending. Worse, it probably adds to the slowness of the plot in some sections. Unfortunately you can’t speed up the recording using the Daisy controls without ruining the dialogue.

I’d recommend this book to children looking for just another fantasy novel. I wouldn’t recommend it to adult readers. I don’t think I’ll be ordering another Alan Garner myself.

Star Rating: one star (out of five)

Original Book Text: one out of five.
RNIB Disc Recording: three out of five.

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“Gather Together in my Name” by Maya Angelou

Duration: 5 hours 15 minutes
Talking Book number: TB 5903

About a year ago I read the first volume of Angelou’s autobiography: “I Know why the Caged Bird Sings” (TB 5720). I rather enjoyed it and put this second volume on my list. I suspect Angelou and her writings are famous, possibly as a result of the American Civil Rights Movement. But I have to confess I don’t really know anything about the significance of any of this. All I know about Angelou is the first twenty years of her life, and that’s rarely enough to judge someone on. So I’m reading this simply as the text rather than in any sort of historical or political context.

The first volume of Angelou’s autobiography deals with her childhood as a black girl in the Deep South during the depression. It’s no picnic, and indeed no “Little House on the Prairie” (Laura Ingalls Wilder, TB 13366). It’s not in the tradition of the American feelgood autobiography, where hard-working God-fearing folk triumph over adversity. Angelou’s family life is dysfunctional and racism is a huge surrounding reality. As a book it’s more in the territory of such things as “The Color Purple” (Alice Walker, TB 13312). That sort of material can easily make for a depressing read but Angelou’s book certainly doesn’t. She manages to convey a marvellous sense of her own innocence along with an intimate confessional portrayal of her experience that make you immediately sympathise and identify with her. As a result, instead of the mawkish polemics of the Victorian social novel we get the softer, subtler social criticism of books like “Angela’s Ashes” (Frank McCourt, TB 11434). As author she isn’t judgemental. She doesn’t need to be. The racism and injustice she experienced speak for themselves. We don’t need her to condemn them for us to be offended by them. All she needs to do is describe them. So she’s poor, Southern, black and unhappy but at the same time she’s a likeable, friendly, honest and interesting guide to a life and a place which I hope are a lot different nowadays.

So what do we get in this sequel? It’s a rather different sort of book. It makes me think of things like “Tales of the City” (Armistead Maupin, TB 14068) or “On the Road” (Jack Kerouac, TB 12211). The major change is the change to the protagonist. She’s all grown up now and instead of the innocent child’s-eye view of a bizarre and sometimes hostile world we have a different and more adult form of innocence. She’s a stranger in a strange land now that she’s a young adult in California just after the second world war. But it’s not California that’s the strange land; it’s the adult life she’s trying to lead. She’s a person who doesn’t fit in easily under the best of circumstances and now she’s struggling to find a place in a society that’s rejecting many of its members, both black and white. She’s eccentrically and erratically trying out all manner of lifestyles and activities. Her innocence means that she’s never really aware whether she’s trying something that’s utterly normal or extremely strange, highly respectable or rather sordid. In consequence she ends up doing things from both ends of the spectrum, sometimes at the same time. She fails miserably at some of her chosen activities and as a result she gets frustrated and sad. But with others she succeeds and goes on to new and yet different adventures. All the way through she maintains her intelligent and introspective approach as well as her likeable streak. Through everything that happens we continue to care.

Stylistically the innocence of the book is maintained by the continuous use of an of-the-time viewpoint. Despite the use of the past tense, it is as if this were a contemporaneous account rather than a memoir written much later. The viewpoint she uses is occasionally interrupted when she comments from an abstract point of view that must really be her later self. But when she does this it doesn’t disrupt the nature of the tale because she doesn’t get personal and bitter about her disappointments. These musings are no more than abstract contextualisations and serve mainly to explain the social and political context of the time for the reader.

It isn’t essential to have read the first volume to read this one. Angelou gives enough clues about previous events to make it clear what’s going on here. If you started with this one you’d still have an enjoyable read. But if you did that you’d be missing something important. Part of the joy of this book comes from familiarity with who the character is. And if you miss out the childhood background story you inevitably miss out on one of the elements of her personality. Lack of this element would probably make reading this book less emotionally rewarding.

The language of the book isn’t black English. Angelou is well-read in white literature and uses it as the basis of her writing. But of course the text includes constant description of the many ordinary African-American things in Angelou’s life. For the white reader this juxtaposition produces an interesting effect. The black experience in white society becomes surprisingly easy to understand. And at the same time it also comes across as strangely exotic and incongruous. The dialogue in the book is properly African-American and contains some swearing (including the N-word). There is also a fair amount of sexual material as Angelou is very candid about her sex life and sexuality. After all, she’s a young woman at this point and men are inevitably an important aspect of her life.

The Reader is Maxine Howe. She reads the book in a good African-American accent from the southern states and in a modern emotional style. She reads the chapter numbers in a different accent though, so I suspect the African-American voice is not her real one. I can’t be sure because I’m not greatly familiar with African-American speech, but I do spot the occasional pronunciation that doesn’t sound quite correct to me. But the book itself makes reference to the difference between Southern and Californian accents, so the accent used may be a specific one (or a composite) that I’m unfamiliar with. The thing I found most surprising about the recording is the speed at which the book is read. Southern speech is notoriously slow but Howe piles through it all at breakneck speed. Also it’s recorded a little quietly for easy reading. But both of these can be simply corrected by judicious adjustment of the Daisy player controls.

I believe the next volume of Angelou’s autobiography is called “Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry like Christmas” (TB 6399) so I ought to get that put on my Talking Books list.

I’d recommend this book to those interested in African-American writing or just intriguing autobiography. I wouldn’t recommend it to those seeking a tale of apple-pie America.

Star Rating: five stars (out of five).

Original Book Text: five out of five.
RNIB Disc Recording: five out of five.

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“Monty: My Part in His Victory” and “Rommel: Gunner Who?” by Spike Milligan

Duration: 6 hours 34 minutes
Talking Book Number: TB 9777

I reviewed the first book in the series of Milligan war diaries back in February 2006. Since then I’ve been waiting for a gap in the RNIB Talking Book catalogue to be filled so I can carry on with them. Finally it has, though at the time of writing this title isn’t on the on-line catalogue or in the New Book Guide. Until it appears there you can use its TB number to order it from customer services. It contains the second and third volumes of the diaries on one disc.

The first book, “Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall” notably didn’t get very far into the story, and consequently there wasn’t a lot of action. That’s remedied here where the life of Milligan as an active British soldier in North Africa is provided. As you might expect, life in the Royal Artillery isn’t quite like the “rum, sodomy and the lash” of Nelson’s Navy. Rather it’s a mixture of boredom, excitement and tea. The characters we get here are better defined than they were in the first book and we get more of a sense of the camaraderie of the war. These are ordinary young men of the forties thrown together in extraordinary circumstances. We also get an image of what the fighting in the desert campaign was like for those ordinary soldiers. In fact, for most of the time we don’t get much else. The world of the soldier is very insular and Milligan gives us the war from that point of view. The flow of the major war events that are the backdrop to this tale aren’t given much time in the book. When they are included they seem rather unclear and jumbled, much as they must have seemed to the ordinary soldiers involved. This is certainly no military history and the war seen from Milligan’s head is far from the stuff of regimental records. The diary format means that the events of Milligan’s life are given in roughly chronological order but they have a strong sense of feeling erratic. There isn’t a great deal of overall narrative flow imposed on them.

In fact there isn’t a great deal of narrative flow to the book at all. The result is if anything even more zany and eccentric than the first book was, with frequent and abrupt comic asides and an arbitrary blend of surreal silliness with the memoir. All of this is mixed together more completely than it was in the first book, and at times the result almost verges into a stream of consciousness.

Milligan takes a little time to express his appreciation for the beauty of the North African landscape as he passes through it. I’m unfamiliar with the Arabic names of the locations but that doesn’t matter because there is no real travelogue here. It’s not that sort of book. In a lot of ways it falls into the traditional school of post-war anti-war fiction exemplified by such books as Richard Hooker’s “MASH” and Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22” (TB 6418). Milligan makes his anti-war stance clear enough and makes sure the absurdity of war comes through in his writing. But unlike the other authors, Milligan is a writer whose genius is an observation of the absurdity of everything. So Milligan’s war is only as absurd as everything else in his bizarre universe.

There’s plenty of dialogue reproduced in this book. I suspect some of it may be taken from the diary he kept at the time, but I’m sure some of it had just stayed lodged in his memory. In one aside he comments on how vivid his memories of that time are. The dialogue is a mixture of army banter and Milligan’s own unique brand of schoolboy quipping. His comic talent seems to have been infectious and the men around him seem to have ended up joining in with, or at least tolerating his silliness. There’s more swearing and bawdiness in the dialogue than before, presumably a result of the men being away from the social confines of Blighty and being subjected to the shock of enemy action. There are more sexual references within the narrative too, these being given in bawdy squaddie style. This time we even get a few details of Milligan’s life as a young lothario, though he is slightly coy on this subject. And there’s Milligan’s use of now-outdated racial terminology and stereotypes which inevitably are slightly uncomfortable on today’s ear. Milligan was never one to confine his work to the politically correct and his language reflects the speech and attitudes in the time he was living. There is also a lot of World War Two jargon used, most of which Spike explains well enough but you do need a little concentration to remember it if you’re not familiar with British Army life.

I gave a list of the other volumes, all of which are available in the Talking Books library, in my previous review so I won’t reproduce it here. Now I just need to put the next part on my list. It’s “Mussolini: his part in my downfall” (TB 9772).

The reader on this disc is Spike himself. I believe this is a commercial recording that the RNIB have somehow got permission to use. It is read in Spike’s usual quirky manner. This works better with the comedy material than the rest and overall it creates a very lively and entertaining listen. It’s certainly useful to have Spike’s interpretation of the rhythmic and musical elements as well as accurate representations of the accents and voices. Note that this was recorded a long while after The Goon Show and Spike’s voice sounds appropriately older. The main drawback with this recording is that Spike’s voice doesn’t always sound completely clear and I’m sure I missed some of the text. I’m not sure whether that’s due to the quality of the recording or whether Spike’s voice doesn’t have the clarity when narrating that it does when he’s performing.

I’d recommend this book to lovers of surreal humour and those interested in the ordinary soldier’s war. I wouldn’t recommend it to those looking for military history. I might even get it for my dad.

Star Rating: four stars (out of five)

Original Book Text: four out of five.
RNIB Disc recording: four out of five.

To read or leave comments, click on the word “comment” (below).

“India Britannica” by Geoffrey Moorhouse

Talking Book Number: TB 4939
Duration: 9 hours 1 minute

I haven’t read much about British India before. Most of the Indian fiction that I have read is post-1946 and written by Indians themselves. There’s very little reference back to colonial days, almost as if the British Empire in India never happened. But on a general level I’ve often wondered how things like the Raj came to be. How were the European Powers in the nineteenth century able to take over the rest of the world without the level of bloodshed that traditionally accompanies such things?

When I reviewed “The First Vietnam War” in May 2006 an interesting discussion arose about the colonial era. One contributor recommended a new book called “A Few Good Men” by Aravind Adiga, about the Indian Civil Service. It sounded rather interesting but it doesn’t seem to be accessible yet. I couldn’t find it in the on-line catalogue but I dug around (now I’ve finally figured out how to look for non-fiction books by genre) and came up instead with “India Britanninca”.

This book is described in the RNIB blurb as “a social history of the British rule in India”. That sounds very narrow but in fact it’s much more than that. It’s a general and rather informative history of the whole setting and period. The material covered is wide-ranging despite it being a fairly short book. It covers many topics including social customs, military events, education, governance, women's’ rights, farming, industry, race and caste.

The book begins with a nice autobiographical piece giving an image of the author’s inter-war childhood fascination with British India. I’m sure others will recognise this in themselves. I do, and I wasn’t born till long after Independence. Perhaps it’s a result of the influence of Kipling, who did so much to popularise the country over here and of course gets covered in the book.

After this introduction the book goes on to resemble the recent popular hit “Nathaniel's Nutmeg” by Giles Milton (TB 12609). There’s discussion of how the East India Company came to be trading profitably in India while at the same time attempting to exclude most other European powers. Then the book moves into telling about the way that the Mughal Empire collapsed and left a power vacuum that the British Empire filled as it slowly nationalised the holdings of the East India company.

One interesting viewpoint that is expressed here is that developments in nineteenth century India are a result of similar developments at home. So the small-scale industrialisation that took place in India mirrored the large-scale industrialisation in Britain. And consequently if Indian industrial working conditions were bad, that wasn’t because Indians were treated differently from Britons as a result of India’s colonial status. Rather it was because Indians were treated in just the same way that Britons were in England’s dark satanic mills. Similarly there were the snooty superior Victorian middle-class attitudes and religious sermonising of the time. These did much to alienate us from our many subject peoples overseas. But they were simply the attitudes that we applied to our own poor in Britain and they were transported lock stock and barrel to the colonies. What the Indians had to complain of in the nineteenth century was only what Dickens and his contemporaries had to complain of at home.

The main point of the book seems to be an attempt to assess the rightness or wrongness of the British presence in India. Did we govern well or badly? The intentions of the writer at first come across as even-handed, describing both those British actions that aided Indian development and those which harmed India’s economic or cultural integrity.

But as we read more it becomes clear that there’s a different agenda. British intentions are clearly represented as more philanthropic than greedy, and where they fall short of modern standards this is justified as being no worse than other policies of the time or of Indian history. Or it’s suggested that cruel or short-sighted actions are the fault of single individuals rather than policy. Or it’s suggested that British actions were understandable as a result of native provocation. It becomes apparent that this is a revisionist history and largely an attempt to justify the Raj. And it’s very successful. As one who knows little of the history, I found Moorhouse’s arguments very convincing. I even found it amazing that there was any sort of Indian independence movement at all. Reading this book I found it inconceivable that such well-treated natives could possibly desire anything other than to serve their colonial masters.

Of course this is silly. The problem arises for exactly the same reason that it does in “The First Vietnam War”. The author is attempting to refute a received view that I do not know. Consequently he can present it to me in the way most suitable for him to refute it. He makes a far better and more plausible job of it than Dunn did, but it still leaves me with only half the story. What’s missing is some sort of Indian perspective. It’s a picture of the British Raj from the British point of view and is excellent as such, but without the counter-perspective of the Indian Nationalist view it’s incomplete. Saying that, it’s still a fascinating book and well worth a read.

The reader, Ian Craig, is a disappointment. He reads in a fairly modern, emotional style and an ordinary southern accent. But his deep voice is dull and funereal
which makes concentration rather difficult. Furthermore, his various accents (French, Scottish, Indian etc.) are atrocious. On the other hand, he’s not the worst reader the RNIB have used and it’s quite possible to ignore him and enjoy the book.

I’d recommend this book to anyone seeking an introduction to British India. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to Indian Nationalists unless they’re after an argument.

Star Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

Original Book Text: four out of five.
RNIB Disc Recording: two out of five.

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“Among the Russians” by Colin Thubron

Talking Book Number: TB 6886
Duration: 11 hours 1 minute

Colin Thubron is undoubtedly one of my favourite travel writers. I’ve read a mere three of his travel books so far but they’ve easily been enough to convince me of his merit. In addition to this one I read “In Siberia” (TB 12439) about a year ago and “The Lost Heart of Asia” back in the nineties. Sadly, the second of these isn’t in the Talking Books library. I don’t think it’s even available as a commercial audiobook. It was the last book I read in print form before I became visually impaired so I remember it quite fondly. Both “In Siberia” and “The Lost Heart of Asia” deal with Thubron’s travels as he journeyed through the former Soviet Union in the nineties. He spent much time observing the declining post-Soviet land and commented on its poignant state. So I was intrigued to see what he made of travelling in the Soviet Union proper when he went there in the eighties, almost a decade before it was toppled. There wasn’t much freedom of travel then, of course. There wasn’t even complete freedom for Russians to travel within their own country. But for foreign tourists there was a loophole. If you brought in your own car and stayed at campsites you weren’t restricted in the way that most visitors to the country were. You didn’t have to have a fixed itinerary or be part of a group. So Thubron did just that. He spent several months driving around the country, meeting Russians and trying not to arouse too much KGB suspicion. This is of course the book of that trip.

Being a Thubron book this is by no means a guidebook. Thubron is never trying to tell us where to go and what to see. Admittedly he does end up in famous places like Moscow’s Kremlin and Leningrad’s Hermitage. But he’s just as interested in ordinary out-of-the-way unexotic places where the sights are just as interesting but the ordinary people are much easier to meet. The Russia he’s after is that of Russians themselves, not that of the tourist guide.

The Russian people are the real focus of this book. He’s got a number of contacts arranged from back in England for him to meet. These are usually, but not always, dissidents. There is a certain cold-war espionage feel to these encounters. But the rest of the time he ends up talking to people he happens to meet along the way. He speaks passable Russian and manages to gets into conversations with all manner of different people, smuggle himself into events and get invited back to people’s homes. He reports these conversations as dialogue and there’s often a certain sense of journalism about them. He approaches the conversations in quite a mild, questioning and understanding way. His intention is to listen rather than to preach. It leads people to tell him all manner of things that they’d never tell me, even if I did speak more than a mere handful of words of Russian. People seem to befriend him, get drunk with him, take him out places. People like him. They open up to him, telling him about their lives and their troubles and their belief in or frustration with the Communist state.

As far as the structure of the book goes, the material is divided into four topics. Thubron writes about history of the places he visits. He describes the things that he gets to see. He reports his conversations with the ordinary locals. And he wanders off into musing on the significance of it all. This is all fairly conventional and he jumps quickly and frequently between these topics to keep the pace lively. His writing style is surprisingly poetic for a travel writer, whether he’s describing the exotic or the mundane, the beautiful or the ugly. The consequence is at once very visual, vividly painting images of what he sees, and very emotional, imparting a strong sense of his feelings into the descriptions. He has a very dry and black sense of humour which runs through it all, but at the same time his writing is quite sad and wistful. He sees how heavily history hangs in a place like Russia, a country where everything seems to be in the past. At times it almost feels like he’s exploring a graveyard of a country and interviewing its dead.

The issue of the personality of the travel writer always ends up being significant. Louisa Waugh’s (in “Hearing Birds Fly” which I reviewed in February 2006) was intrusive as a result of her blatant self-absorption and introspection. Thubron is almost the reverse of this. He tries to keep himself out of the picture and we know very little about him. We become familiar with a few of his personal interests. For instance, he knows a lot about literature and architecture but almost nothing about pop music. Mostly we become familiar with his attitude to Communism. He knows a good deal about it and seems fascinated by it. But he’s not a Communist. He’s far too much of an individualist for that. In fact, he’s very critical of what he sees. His sadness for Russia and its history is also a sadness for the state the Soviet Union around him is in. At the same time he’s far from an Anti-Communist. He might spend some of his time meeting dissidents, but he isn’t smuggling in banned books or encouraging them into counter-revolution. His dislike of what’s happening is only that of the ordinary people he meets whose daily lives are hampered by a system that isn’t working.

But things start to happen with Thubron’s personality as the book progresses. In some ways his outlook is a little like Graham Green’s, in that he does tend to look at things rather blackly. It sometimes feels like he’s half-enjoying and half-hating the Kafkaesque world he’s intentionally chosen to holiday in. As time goes on his ennui and exhaustion start to manifest themselves. He becomes paranoid about the intermittent surveillance he’s under. He becomes intolerant of any naive or overly-optimistic Russian he meets. He starts to lose his ability to simply listen to those who are unaware of their poverty and unable to believe foreigners might be richer. He can’t hold his tongue when he meets Russians who proudly think that everything in their country is the best in the world. He starts to lose his cool and he knows he’s losing it. In the end he finds himself fleeing exhausted from the Russia which only weeks before was keenly trying to enter.

The reader is Frank Duncan, whose reading is rather strange. He’s an old school reader and a little slow and elocutional in his delivery. Nevertheless he makes a passable job of it. He’s far from stilted and even injects a little emotion into the work. His character voices and foreign pronunciations are good. And of course he’s very clear. But his tones are rather camp and twee, creating a rather distracting effect. In the end I had to tune him out in my mind to enjoy the book properly.

I’d recommend this book to those who enjoy imaginative travel writing. I wouldn’t recommend it to party officials.

Star Ratings: five stars (out of five)

Original Book Text: five out of five
RNIB Disc Recording: three out of five.

To read or leave comments, please click on the word “comments” below.

“The Other End of Time” by Frederik Pohl

Publisher: Recorded Books Incorporated
Duration: 11 hours (approximately) unabridged

I was given this audio book on tape by a friend of mine who found it in a fleamarket. Fortunately without the fleas. It’s a modern science-fiction novel written by an old hand at the genre, and it was produced in audio form by an American publisher that I’ve never heard of before. This copy seems to have come from British ex-public library stock. What struck me as odd about that is that in my local public library I’ve never come across science fiction amongst the audiobooks. To be honest, I’ve never come across anything other than half a dozen shelves of Catherine Cookson and Frederick Forsyth there. I wonder where the libraries are that cater for this sort of taste. Even the RNIB doesn’t seem to have a particularly good stock of science fiction. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure where you can buy science fiction audio books. British retailers usually have romance, thrillers, crime and all the latest best sellers along with a handful of classics. But science fiction? Almost never. Maybe the American market for science fiction is larger and it’s able to support this sort of thing.

Frederik Pohl was apparently a very famous science fiction writer in the mid-twentieth century, though I’d never heard of him before. Surprisingly, he’s quite well represented in the RNIB catalogue with seven titles present. They are:-

“Man Plus” (TB 3215)
“Gateway” (TB 3316)
“Beyond the Blue Event Horizon” (TB 3959)
“The Years of the City” (TB 5749)
“The Coming of the Quantum Cats” (TB 7394)
“Heechee Rendezvous” (TB 7774)
“The Annals of the Heechee” (TB 7997)

“The Other End of Time” doesn’t seem to be in the Talking Books library. As it turns out, it’s the first volume in one of those trilogies that publishers apparently insist on nowadays. When I first discovered that the book was part of a trilogy I’d feared that given Pohl’s age he might not have survived to complete the trilogy. But in fact he did finish it all, though as far as I can tell only the first volume exists as an audiobook. What’s the point of that? Why did they only record the first volume? Maybe the company that produced it were intending to record the rest only if the sales of the first volume had been good enough. Whatever the reason it makes for a frustrating read. On the other hand, I suppose I should be grateful that at least it was the first volume that I got. There’s always a risk when I get hold of books unexpectedly like I did with this one that I’ll only get to read the second or third volume of a trilogy. The thing for the potential audiobook reader to bear in mind that this first volume is inevitably far from a complete story and that’s all you’re going to get. The ending of the first volume brings some events to a close but in other ways is a cliffhanger. If a lack of resolution is a problem to you, you may want to avoid this book and try one of the ones from the RNIB Talking Books instead.

So what sort of book is it? It’s not Space Opera, though there is certainly some astronomy in it. Essentially it’s a gumshoe story, or at least it starts out that way. A character has a job investigating some sort of mystery and gets involved in a science fiction plot. It’s set in an economically depressed future America, which is presented nicely and is quite believable. So far so good. The problems with the book start to occur when the plot takes off about a third of the way through. There’s an incarceration scene which goes on for so long it manages to last for most of the rest of the book. All the main characters are incarcerated together and kept in close proximity. They spend their time arguing, plotting, planning, scheming and trying to understand, cope, survive and escape. All the time they are being secretly watched by their mysterious captors. What it reminded me of most was those trashy TV shows “Big Brother” and “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me out of Here” (in the U.S. I think it’s called “Survivor”). Not that I’ve personally watched such shows you understand. But from what I’ve heard about them they seem to consist of roughly what most of this book consists of. Furthermore, this sort of incarceration scene is such a science fiction cliché that it’s even parodied in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” (TB 1172). And in consequence I found that part of the book about as dull as you’d expect a house full of grumpy people to be. Then, right at the end of the book, just when you’ve given up hope, the plot finally starts to move forward and the book becomes interesting again. This last part is all too short as it races towards the cliffhanger. If the book was half the length and most of the middle was removed it would be much improved.

Having to get the science right is one of the banes of science fiction writing. It’s a bit like the job of having to get the clues right in a murder mystery - people are going to notice if there’s something wrong. A lot of science fiction fails because a big feature is made of the science elements and then they turn out to be inaccurate. Some writers take huge liberties with the science they use, and they sometimes get away with that if the book has other merits. But science fiction writers who make their novels interesting only because of the science they use had better get the science right.

In this particular book, Pohl makes surprisingly good use of the science. He gets it right and it’s very up to date. It’s also explained quite well for the lay reader. But the corollary of this is a problem of lack of imagination in the work. Pohl’s accuracy in the science of the book means that much of the scientific detail is rather predictable. That’s a shame. But on the other hand there is some imagination shown in the way that the social, political and philosophical issues are dealt with. None of it’s groundbreaking stuff but there are one or two ideas I’ve not come across before.

As to Pohl’s writing style, it’s fairly pedestrian but it is certainly competent. My interest was just about maintained even through the long incarceration scene, though it was certainly stretched at times. His characters are less wooden than those in a lot of science fiction, though they’re not exactly vibrant. It’s not great fiction but it’s not quite pulp fiction either.

The reader is George Guidall, whose friendly American baritone is clear and pleasant to listen to. His voicing of the different parts involves accents from a variety of foreign and even non-human characters, and he does them fairly successfully. It’s not as emotional a reading as some of the modern RNIB ones but that’s probably sacrificed for the extra clarity.

I’d recommend this book to hardcore science fiction fans. I wouldn’t recommend it to the general reader.

Book Rating: Two Stars (out of five)

Original Book Text: two out of five.
This Cassette Recording: four out of five.

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“The Prince of Pleasure and his Regency 1811-20” by J. B. Priestley

Talking Book number: TB 1169
Duration: 9 hours 45 minutes

This is not really a biography of Prinny. It’s a book about a decade. As Priestley says: “The age is more important than the man”. The book is almost a companion volume to Priestley’s “The Edwardians” (TB 1469). Each takes a reign of about a decade and discusses Britain in quite general terms during that period, progressing at a rate of one year per chapter. The monarch’s story is covered but so are diverse subjects such as science, art and politics. I get the impression that Priestley chose the decades in these two books because they both illustrate the theme of transition. For Priestley, each of these decades is a comparatively short period during which an era of some sort is transformed into a contrasting one. So the Regency period in the early nineteenth century is the time when eighteenth-century Britain is turned into Victorian Britain. And in its turn the Edwardian period at the start of the twentieth century is the time when Victorian Britain is transformed into the modern post-Great-War world.

I preferred “The Edwardians”. It felt more complete and satisfying as a book. For one thing its theme of transformation was more clearly expressed. Its description of the collapse and death of Victorian society (which for him was over even before a shot was fired in the Great War) portrayed a powerful transformation of a society into something that is almost its opposite. In contrast his description of the demise of eighteenth-century society is full of fiddle and compromise. Many of his transitional events occur outside of his chosen Regency time period. Either such events have already happened in the preceding decades or they don’t occur until the Regency is actually over. And the change involved is often less thorough and far-reaching in this book because the ensuing Victorian world is much less of a contrast to its eighteenth-century predecessor that was the case with the Edwardian transition. In the end Priestley has the Regency less as a pivot of two ages than as a cultural interregnum, full of incompatible contrasts and social confusion.

Another way in which this book feels inferior to “The Edwardians” is that Priestley has difficulty in sticking to his chosen one-year-per-chapter arrangement that worked so well in “The Edwardians”. Many of the themes he wants do discuss in this book don’t fit so neatly into this arrangement and we find him darting backward and forward to tell stories that span several years. One reason for this is that this book is more about telling stories than “The Edwardians” is. He spends less time on giving us ideas and more on giving us biographies. Some of this material is about the Regent but there is also a lot about the authors and poets of the period, who get a much larger amount of coverage in this book than in the other.

Part of the point of this sort of history is the theory. In “The Edwardians” it’s a nice theory about things falling apart, and Priestley seems successful in expounding this idea in the diverse fields he covers. But in this book there isn’t really such a strong unifying theme and instead we get an odd set of maverick theories, some amounting to no more than what Priestley calls his “personal prejudices”. There is of course his famous socialist perspective, but otherwise these theories are mostly his own assertions about the lives of famous people and about the nature of human relationships and sexuality. Some of it is very pre-postmodern, delving into biography and Jung to explain this or that foible of the famous.

He does some of this analysis with the Prince, though his main objective there is some sort of revisionism. Preiestley wants as far as he can to exonerate the Regent from his reputation for callous indifference to his people and instead paint him as a weak-willed frivolous individual too ineffectual to care about or help his subjects. It’s the sin of omission rather than cruelty. To some extent this sort of revisionism extends as a theme throughout the book. The Regency is a very popular period of British history, so much so that there are now whole ranges of cheap romantic fiction devoted to it. Even in America. A result of this popularity is that there are quite a lot of myths about that time, and Priestley seems to feel it’s his duty to dispel them. Hence the slightly explicatory and revisionist feel of this book.

I’ve been painting this book rather blackly, but it’s not all doom and gloom. This is actually quite a good book. Its scope is very broad (duchesses to chimney sweeps, poetry to mining) and it would be hard for anyone to find nothing in it that interested them. It makes no assumptions about previous historical knowledge and so it would make a good place to start reading about the Regency. Priestley’s writing style is of course good. It’s far from pompous. In fact it’s clear, interesting and quite chatty. And fortunately in contrast to a lot of today’s writing, it never descends into the patronising mind-numbing oversimplicity that characterises a lot of modern documentary broadcasting.

The printed book is apparently lavishly illustrated. In the preface Priestley tells us that details about the period’s fashions, furnishings and so forth are not included in the text. Instead they are shown in the illustrations and explained in their captions. Rather a loss for us, then.

The reader is William Jack who gives us a clear but not a very modern reading. He sounds a little like a traditional BBC Radio 4 newsreader. Fortunately he manages not to sound stilted and injects a little life into the text, but for me a bit more emotion would be appreciated.

I would recommend this book to those interested in an introduction to the Regency period. I wouldn’t recommend it those seeking a biography of the Regent.

Star Rating: Three Stars (out of five)

Original Book Text: three out of five.
RNIB Disc Recording: three out of five.

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“Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson

Duration: 11 hours 58 minutes
Talking Book Number: TB 1836

The green movement tends to divide people. Points of view range from that of the zealous Friend of the Earth to the most cynical of industrialists. Nowadays most of us seem to have some sort of involvement with it. Recycling seems to have taken over from the Anglican communion as a weekly feelgood activity. My own point of view is annoyingly maverick, possibly as a result of my having a science background. I tend to want to know the facts and figures behind the headlines, and those writing headlines usually don’t want to give them to you because they cloud the picture. Of course, there are books about this sort of thing, hardly any of which I’ve ever read. They’re not the sort of thing that tend to become accessible. They don’t usually become blockbusters. But I noticed “Silent Spring” in the Talking Books catalogue, and my wife assured me it’s a classic of the green movement.

Over the past few decades there has been a massive shift in public perception concerning the green movement. It has moved from radical hippiedom to state orthodoxy. Green ideas are so familiar nowadays that we take it for granted that spraying pesticides over crops is probably not a good idea. But it appears that when Rachel carson was writing this book in the early sixties people thought the practice was perfectly safe. Carson uses its pages to make a campaigning case against pesticides and herbicides on the grounds of their potential danger to the environment and to man. From what I’ve heard, this book was partly responsible for launching the Green movement as we know it today. People were shocked by the book’s descriptions of death, destruction and carnage in the natural world and the dire warnings about what might happen to us. Its campaign against the casual use of dangerous chemicals apparently contributed to the shift in attitudes away from their casual reckless use in the fifties to today’s food paranoia and environmental anxiety.

Now there’s a serious time warp here. This book is over forty years old. Not a problem with some books but with this one there is. Much of the material is of historical interest but the situation described in the book may be very different from the one today. That may be the book’s legacy and achievement. The problem is knowing how much change there has been and in which areas. I guess we still use some pesticides and herbicides now but whether they’re the ones Carson describes and whether they’re applied in the same way and the same amounts I have no idea. So I don’t know whether to be paranoid about my supermarket asparagus or whether I can feel we’ve all been saved thanks to Carson. The outrage and fear the book engenders are rather displaced if you don’t know whether the world being described still exists or not.

On the other hand, it’s very well written and it’s a great read. Carson puts great passion into her writing and makes the science and her arguments both clear and interesting. Technical detail takes second place to stories about real communities affected by chemical spraying. This is a book for the layman, not the expert. As far as my inadequate knowledge of chemistry goes, it sounds accurate enough though. I understand that counter-arguments have been produced since it was written (mainly by the chemical industry, I would imagine). But be aware that the book doesn’t include them and is a very one-sided work. It’s polemical and essentially journalism.

Perhaps I ought to declare an interest. I have an allergic eye disease which was either caused or exacerbated (take your pick) by the antiseptic preservatives in eye drops. Those preservatives are a chemical variant of some of the substances that Carson was campaigning against - the chlorinated hydrocarbons. As a result of the ensuing allergy I have to maintain my environment free from certain chemicals found in many personal and household cleaning products. Those too are are a chemical variant of some of the substances that Carson was campaigning against. Most of the sorts of products that I can safely use are marketed as “green” in one form or another. So inevitably I feel a little personally that maybe if more manufacturers listened to this book my life would be a little easier.

The reader, David Brown, is excellent. The accent he uses is received pronunciation and is very clear.
He has a rich warm baritone voice which displays a remarkable amount of emotion and passion for a Talking Book recorded in the sixties. This reinforces the passion of Carson’s writing.

I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in the green movement and its history. I wouldn’t recommend it to the chairman of ICI.

Star Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

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“The First Vietnam War” by Peter M. Dunn

Duration: 17 hours 40 minutes
Talking Book Number: TB 6282

I know who started the Vietnam war. His name was Douglas Gracie and he was a General in the British Army in India. How did he start it? By his bungling and authoritarian re-introduction of colonial rule into a Vietnam freed by the Japanese at the end of the Second World War. The population were so incensed by his own personal incompetence and cruelty that they en masse decided they’d be better off under the communists. No I didn’t know any of this either. But apparently it’s the received view of historians in this field. So says Colonel Peter Dunn, the military man responsible for this book. He devotes its pages to an attempt to clear Gracie’s name and vindicate the actions of the British in Vietnam in 1945.

OK - so why is the book called “The First Vietnam War”? Dunn uses the term to describe the events in Vietnam (properly Indochina at that date) during the second half of 1945. The Second World War was over and the Japanese had surrendered. It fell to a small number of British troops to liberate Indochina because no one else was available and willing. They had to disarm thousands of Japanese troops who were still in the country and arrange for their return to Japan. They had to keep law and order while units from France slowly returned to their old colony. Only once these French units were on the ground in sufficient numbers could the British safely leave. And it was precisely during this period that the Viet Ming (the communists fighting for an independent Vietnam) took the opportinity to launch a resistance movement that had the British fighting their own Vietnam war. Admittedly it was a short and small scale war, but it was the first of the wars that finally lead to America’s humiliating defeat.

Dunn’s book is a military history of these events and I’m at a bit of a disadvantage reviewing it as I’ve not read a lot of books in the genre. I find all the description of what particular divisions, regiments and brigades got up to a little overly detailed and difficult to take in. I find the military perspective means that the social, economic, cultural and other civilian aspects of the conflict are largely ignored. The work is reasonably scholarly, making extensive use of documentary evidence as a good historian should. In consequence the regimental history is complemented by a detailed examination of the administrative processes involved and how they impacted on the international relations which lay behind key decisions. This can leave the text a little dry at times as he considers a swathe of memos, telegrams, minutes and interview notes. But the book is overall fairly readable and the story of the war unfolds as you read.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the book for those unfamiliar with the subject matter is Dunn’s many references to the “large number of books on this subject”. The book is intended to be a rebuttal of these earlier works, and Dunn spends much time on defending and justifying the actions of the British military in Indochina at the time, particularly the actions of allied commander Gracie in Saigon. We are left to slowly pick up a picture of the received view contained in these other books, sometimes by inference, while reading Dunn’s refutation of them. He clearly expects his readers to be familiar with the stuff he’s trying to disprove. Nevertheless with a little patience it is possible to figure out the arguments of the historians on this subject. It tuns out that American military historians have claimed the British were bunglers and that left-wing American journalists have claimed that the British were callous neo-colonialists. Dunn wants instead to paint the British as efficient users of limited resources simply trying to do their jobs as handed down by international conferences of political leaders. The problem with this approach is that the attempt to make the British (including their Indian troops) seem faultless results in a lot of national stereotyping of everybody else. The Japanese are scheming double-dealers. The Vietnamese are disorganised and chaotic. The French are uncontrollable and bloodthirsty. The Chinese are duplicitous opportunists. The Americans are self-serving bullies. Only the British seem to have right (if very little might) on their side. Perhaps this one-sidedness is intended to be seen as balancing the previously-published anti-British books. Perhaps Dunn really believes the British were the only competent good guys in the story. But just reading this book on its own I find it ludicrously partisan.

Dunn isn’t polemical about his politics but they’re not very well concealed. His objections are to left-wing journalists. He takes it as read that the communist governments in South East Asia were bad and their appearence regrettable. But he doesn’t express the same feelings about the colonial system that preceeded them. He’s keen to cite the few connections at the time between the Viet Ming and Moscow rather than the idea that communism might be a system that could appeal to those who’ve been ruled by a foreign elite. He has no time for Marxist history and the idea that no-one was responsible for the Vietnam war because individuals do not make history. Rather he tries to claim that Gracie as an individual did the country a favour by giving South Vietnam three decades of non-communist rule as a result of his taking on the Viet Ming so effectively. I doubt many Vietnamese would see their post-colonial history with its many years of war as an outcome thay would have chosen. He tries to pin the blame for anything that went wrong during Gracie’s rule in Saigon on Mountbatten, the Labour government, American spies, President Roosevelt and almost anyone else in the book. Whenever Gracie receives anything helpful from London it’s cited as “from the Foreign Office” while anything that hinders him is “from the Labour Government”. Politics like these are all very well if you share them, but if you don’t their presence in the book is a little irksome.

Garard Green’s reading on the RNIB disc is as always clear and interesting, something that’s very much appreciated in a technical non-fiction book. He’s gone to great pains with the pronunciation of Vietnamese names. I can’t comment on their authenticity but they certainly sound good. There’s a list of dozens of military acronyms near the beginning which are used throughout the book. You’d need to bookmark this if you wanted to refer to it but I didn’t find that necessary as most of the time I was unsure about one it got explained. I don’t know if Dunn put that in or whether Green was helping me out. I also wonder whether there were any maps in the printed version. My Vietnamese geography only extends to three or four place names and I found it difficult to figure out exactly where the action was taking place.

Overall it’s a book I’d only recommend if you’re a serious military history buff and have already been reading stuff about this period.

Rating: Two Stars (out of five)

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“In a Free State” by V. S. Naipaul

Talking Books number: TB 1832
Duration: 9 hours 15 minutes

I’d come across V.S. Naipaul because my wife had read “A House for M. Biswas” at school and recommended it to me. Unfortunately I can’t find that title on the RNIB catalogue, but I hope it’ll turn up someday. In the interim I’ve read “An Area of Darkness” (TB 1253) and “Finding the Centre” (TB 5346). They were both interesting but both were non-fiction (travel writing) and since the book my wife had recommended was a novel I wanted to try his fiction.

The structure of “In a Free State” is as odd as that of “Finding the Centre”. It’s neither a novel nor a book of short stories. There are, in fact, five stories in the book. Two are a couple of hours long and one is five hours long. There’s also a half-hour story called an introduction and a fifteen minute one called an epilogue. In a sense, none of them can be called stories. Two of them are fictional autobiographies with a first-person narrator giving you their life story. But they’re so turned-in on themselves and claustrophobic that they’re more personal rants than tales. The other three are points in time: short captured episodes in someone’s life. The detail is evocative but the narrative is not strong. You’re left to experience the ordinariness of the life of someone different from yourself.

I say “different from yourself” with some confidence, simply because the characters who are the subjects of the stories are all very different from each other. They’re different races, different nationalities, of different wealths and living in different countries. Naipaul was born in Trinidad and travelled widely, so he has the ability to vividly conjure characters from such diverse backgrounds.

So does anything unite the book? A number of things. For one thing, the book resembles Naipaul’s travel writing. The characters are all on the move and in alien lands and have the sense of being travellers, “In a Free State” rather than at home. Race relations are theme throughout the book. But it’s not Toni Morrison’s theme of anger weighed down by history. Instead the characters circle about each other uncertainly, race being one more thing to alienate them. For there is a strong sense of alienation here. It’s almost like Sartre’s existential alienation where you can watch others but you can’t get emotionally close to them. The characters here may be free but they’re far from comfortable with their fellow man.

In fact, it’s not a comfortable read at all. I only found that I liked one of the protagonists. The rest are so flawed and alienated that I found it a little difficult to care about them. My interest was held instead by the writing style and dialogue, which are accomplished. It’s a book I wanted to like more than I actually liked it.

The reader is Marvin Kane. He reads the book with an American accent, rather odd when so few of the characters are American but not really a problem. He seems well able to do the British and Indian accents. Ironically it’s the African-American voice that’s the weakest.

I’d recommend this book to those who like prizewinning fiction (it won the Booker Prize). I wouldn’t recommend it to those who want a fun read.

Star rating: three stars (out of five)

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“The Screwtape Letters” by C S Lewis

Duration 3 hours 56 minutes
Talking Book number TB 11872

This might be difficult. If it turns out that I don’t like “The Screwtape Letters” then people might mistake my intentions. They might think I’m trying to denigrate Christianity or attack Lewis’ other writings. I really don’t want to do either of those. I just want to review this famous book of his. At least I think it’s famous. My wife has never heard of it. But I do remember the Christians at school and at college talking about it. Certainly Lewis is a very famous writer, particularly now they’ve started filming his “Narnia” books.

Previously I’ve only read one other Lewis book: the peculiar “The Pilgrim’s Regress” (TB 11218). That book was a description of Lewis’ own conversion fictionalised as a sort of John Bunyon fairy tale. It was intriguing and memorable but in the end deeply unsatisfying. And I found it most frustrating that I could never discuss it with anyone because no-one had ever heard of it. So I wanted to try out another of his books that’s a little bit more famous to see whether it’s similar to “The Pilgrim’s Regress” or whether that was just a one off.

What I knew in advance about “The Screwtape Letters” was pretty much only what it says in the RNIB synopsis:

“Screwtape is an experienced devil. His nephew Wormwood is just at the start of his demonic career, and has been assigned to secure the damnation of a young man who has just become a Christian.”

I’d expected the book to include an exchange of letters, but you only get Screwtape’s ones. It’s like listening to half of a telephone conversation. At least Lewis makes it fairly clear by references given in Screwtape’s letters what Wormwood’s are about and which are the bits in them that interest him. Personally, I’d have preferred to have had the chance to read both sets for myself. But I suspect that Lewis decided the sinister effect of Screwtape’s prose might have been watered down with half the book being taken up by the voice of an incompetent devil.

I’d expected the letters to be longer. Books of letters usually contain long letters. But these are very short ones (five minutes or so) and hence there are over thirty of them in the book. This breaks up any sense of dramatic flow or rhythm. Once you’ve got interested in one letter it ends and it’s replaced by another one on a completely different topic.

I’d expected a storybook, or at least something approximating it in the “Letters” format. Both the “Letters” and “Diary” conceits can make for entertaining stories - take Bridget Jones for an example - but the story in this book is extremely thin. There are a few details about the spiritual attacks which Wormwood launches upon the human. These are attacks which mainly seem to involve Wormwood trying to persuade the human to adopt certain courses of action. Very little is told about the human’s personal life and the information is only indirect. We can learn nothing but the scantiest and sketchiest details about who he is and what he does. From what I can tell he seems to be a rather sad young man who lives with his mother during the Second World War. And even an event as major as the war doesn’t manage to impact on the story very much. As for Screwtape himself, we learn almost nothing about him apart from a few references to his early career mistakes and the names of some of his current colleagues. Instead, most of the book is taken over with Screwtape’s musings about Christian theology. I’m sure this is all intentional, pointing out that the details of life we consider important are ones which pale into insignificance beside the larger question of salvation. But the result of all this is that you don’t really end up knowing enough about either the human or Wormwood to care very much about them. And you end up being bored with Screwtape and his pompous waffling.

I’d been hoping that this book might resemble Andy Hamilton’s BBC Radio 4 comedy “Old Harry’s Game” with its witty observations on human and demonic frailty. I was disappointed. It turns out that “The Screwtape Letters” is just a book of philosophy, in exactly the same way that “The Pilgrim’s Regress” was. The “Letters” notion is rather wasted as most of the book seems to end up more like a theology textbook or a primer on Christian psychology than anything else. Most of the text consists of Screwtape expounding Lewis’ Christian theory in dry and excessive detail. Perhaps this is what most readers want. I don’t know. But a textbook isn’t exactly what I’d been led to believe this was going to be. It’s not even a textbook of something familiar like bland fireside Anglicanism or zealous firebrand Methodism. Lewis seems to have a strange and rather dodgy philosophy of the human psyche that he’s overly keen to put forward. Disturbingly, Lewis’ Christianity seems rather conservative and indeed almost puritan. This has the odd result of making the sinister feel of his Devils spilling over into his whole conception of Christianity and making salvation seem almost sinister. In the end, I was pleased when the book finished and I was spared having to read any more.

You’ll gather I didn’t like the book, then. In its defence I can say that Lewis’ writing style seems quite accomplished and the book has flashes of inspiration amongst the tedium. But I doubt it will give me food for thought. I found that “The Pilgrim’s Regress” at least left me thinking about the different ideas involved, but then I do have a philosophy degree so I tend to do that sort of thing anyway. In this case I didn’t find myself stimulated at all intellectually, just a bit concerned that poor Mr. Lewis can’t have had a very nice time of it if this is what he went through during his life on earth.

I’m not really sure what this book does and for whom. It’s not really a conversion tool. I’m not even sure it would be much use for the new convert watching out for pitfalls. I suspect that, like “The Pilgrim’s Regress”, it’s an opportunity for Lewis to go into a round of massive introspection and write down all his experiences as if they were some universal truth. He admitted in the introduction to “The Pilgrim’s Regress” that he hadn’t realised when he wrote it that his conversion experience was so unusual. In this book he makes the ironic comment that converts can be distracted from progress towards salvation if they can be persuaded to write a book. I suspect this is little more than a piece of Lewis’ distraction on his own path. Perhaps I’ll have more luck when I finally get to try his “Narnia” books.

The reader is Peter Barker. His voice in this is a bit like a sinister Stephen Fry, which is pretty appropriate for Screwtape. But his baritone is not emotional and inflected enough for me. In a book this dry you need something a bit more lively to stop you getting distracted or nodding off.

I’d recommend this book to students of theology. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else.

Star Rating: One Star (out of five)

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“Cross Channel” by Julian Barnes

Duration: 7 hours 28 minutes
Talking Book number: TB 11040

The Talking Books catalogue claims to have nine books by Julian Barnes, almost all of which went onto Daisy CDs in 2004. That’s quite a respectable representation, so maybe Barnes is more famous than I thought. Or maybe he’s related to someone on the RNIB staff. I don’t think all the books were recorded in 2004 though. “Cross Channel” says it was recorded in 1997. I read Barnes’ “England, England” (TB 11670) a couple of years ago. That was a near-future novel classed as satire was well-written, interesting and strange. So I wanted to try something else by him.

This one is a book of short stories with, as the synopsis says, “a linking theme: the British in France through several centuries”. Sometimes a linking theme makes the stories cliched or samey. That’s what I hated about William Trevor’s “Lovers of their Time”, which I reviewed in Februaury 2006. It’s certainly not the case here. The stories are very diverse - in setting, writing style and almost every other way. In fact they’re so diverse that it’s almost unsettling, a bit like with Brian Aldiss’ “The Secret of this Book” (TB 11313). As you read this it’s hard to believe that all the stories are by the same author. Consequently it’s a little hard to rate or review. The weakest story would probably get two stars and the strongest five. That would make the average about three and a half.

The stories in this book are mostly set in the present or near future, though historical fiction turns up too. There is also swearing, sex and French. It helps if you don’t mind the first two and can speak the last. You can probably get by without it though, rather like you can in France. There’s the linking theme again. Barnes is busy exploring what it’s like to be a Briton in France from as diverse a range of characters and perspectives as possible.

Barnes’ writing is good. There’s no doubt about that. It’s a little quirky but that’s no bad thing. And these tales are well-written. But there’s something a little experimental about them. Perhaps it’s their diversity, but in some ways the book doesn’t feel quite finished. Barnes’ writing is sufficiently good that the stories don’t generally need too much in the way of narrative, which is good because they don’t all contain one. But there’s a certain stop-start feeling to the book (increased by the changes of narrator) which give the feeling that some of these are ideas rather than stories. Perhaps some should have been destined for novels, others for parts of novels and yet others for the filing cabinet. Barnes’ writing is always interesting but here it doesn’t feel very complete.

The readers are Michael Lumsden, Robert Gladwell and Patricia Jones. Don’t be fooled by the listing only giving Michael Lumsden. It’s one of those new-fangles ideas, giving different stories to different readers. In this case Lumsden gets those with contemporary male protagonists, Jones gets those with contemporary female protagonists and Gladwel is left mostly with the historical ones. Jones and Lumsden are pleasant, modern, emotive readers with whom I can’t really find fault. In fact, I like Lumsden’s reading almost as much as I hate poor Mr.Gladwell’s. He’s my all-time most hated reader. One of the first RNIB Talking Books I read was “The Death of William Posters” by Alan Sillitoe (TB 7) and his reading of it was so morbid it almost put me off the service entirely. Mind you, the book is pretty morbid, too. This time I’m a little more used to those old-fashioned stilted readers and I could just about bear him. Saying that, Gladwell’s voice probably did ruin each of his stories for me. I suspect he cost the book a star on my rating scheme. And his stories were the longest ones in the book, probably because he read them so excruciatingly slowly. I do wish the RNIB would stop using him.

I’d recommend this book to those who are looking for interesting writing rather than great stories. I wouldn’t recommend to anyone who doesn’t like the French.

Star Rating: Three Stars (out of five)

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“America (The Audiobook)” by Jon Stewart

Publisher: Time Warner Audiobooks (Abridged edition)
Duration: 3 hours 46 minutes

The full title and author credit for this book are “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (The Audiobook): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction” by the writers of The Daily Show (Jon Stewart: Author and Narrator). It’s a spin off from a satirical American TV show I’ve never listened to (I believe it’s on More 4 at the moment but I can’t get that channel). The closest I’ve got to listening to it is listening to some audiotapes of edited highlights recorded for me by Patty Marvel, an American friend of mine. Patty recently sent me this audiobook on three CDs and I’ve just given it a listen.

The book it reminded me most of is “1066 And All That” by W. C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman, a book which sadly I can’t find on the RNIB Talking Book list. “1066 And All That” is a parody of a British school history textbook from the early twentieth century. Jon Stewart’s book similarly takes the form of a parody of some sort of American school textbook. It seems to go through the motions of teaching the American political system. Since I’m British I can’t comment on the effectiveness of the U.S. textbook parody. And that’s just the start of the problem with this book.

American comedy sometimes translates across the Atlantic. Sometimes it doesn’t. Satire particularly has a hard time. The British think the Americans have no sense of irony (and the Americans think the British have an incomprehensible sense of irony) simply because the two systems of irony do not translate. Which is not to say that American satire can’t be funny in Britain. I’m not alone in finding Michael Moore funny. And I assume Channel 4 (who own More 4) think it worth buying The Daily Show to broadcast to a British audience. But I just don’t get it. I mean, I can follow what’s said and have an idea of what it is about it that’s supposed to be funny. But I get very little in the way of smiles. And I’m no Margaret thatcher with her famously absent sense of humour. I’m a great reader of and listener to comedy. Just not this comedy. One of the few quotable lines is: “The internet combines the credibility of anonymous hearsay with the excitement of typing”.

The degree to which it makes assumptions about your knowledge is odd, at least for me. The book goes to great pains to explain real facts about the American constitution, many of which I know already. And then it makes great leaps of assumption about other facts that render it incomprehensible to me. Maybe it’s assuming I know more about American popular culture or domestic political news than I do. Stewart does seem to assume you know what words like “poontang” actually mean. But it ends up sounding like topical news satire when you haven’t actually heard the topical news. Some comics (such as Rory Bremner) get away with this sort of thing by a judicious mix of included explanation and universal themes. Others do not. This is undeniably one of those that doesn’t.

Another thing that bothers me about this book (and indeed The Daily Show itself) is its political stance. Being British I’m used to a tradition of liberal political satire. But this book is far from being a liberal Michael Moore polemic. It isn’t even neutral and balanced. Actually, it isn’t even consistent. It’s keen on the accomplishments of the civil rights movement but suspicious of further progressive change. It’s cynical about politics in general, which in America nowadays is more a feature of the right than the left. It attacks the many weaknesses of the American political system but still holds it to be better than any other. Perhaps it’s all because “political balance” in America has moved rightwards as a legacy of shock jock culture. The thing that disturbs me is that this maverick centre-right carping seems to have taken over the majority of mainstream of modern American political satire.

One thing I find irksome in the book is the lazy American insularity which you certainly don’t get in Michael Moore’s work. I don’t know if that’s because Moore has made TV in Britain as well as America. But both The Daily Show and the “America” book seem to be naive, ill-informed and arrogant when dealing with other countries. At times this verges on bigotry. And when you live in one of those other countries or consume non-American news about them then the caricatures presented by Jon Stewart end up being rather offensive.

The reader is Jon Stewart, the author himself, along with assistance from other members of The Daily Show. The voicing is a help as it indicates which parts are supposed to be funny, sarcastic etc. As you would expect from a professional performer, Stewart has a good reading voice and reads his own material well. Note that there is a fair amount of swearing used.

I would only recommend this book to Americans. I wouldn’t recommend it to foreign nationals.

Star rating: One star (out of five)

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"The Greek View of Life" by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

Duration: 8 hours 25 minutes
Talking Book Number: TB 292

The non-fiction tiltles that I seem to get from RNIB don’t always turn out to be very new. I once got a travel guide to the Solomon Islands (TB 2298) which was written in the 1970s. It told me all about which accomodation I should stay in and how things might change with independence in 1980. Non-fiction books which are even older seem to get called “classics”. This is certainly a classic; it’s over one hundred years old it’s the oldest of the RNIB’s non-fiction titles I’ve yet read.

With a non-fiction book it’s usual to classify its genre, be it politics, science, history or whatever. That task is a little difficult here - intentionally so - as the author is attempting something slightly unusual. He’s trying to examine Classical Greek thought using concepts prevalent in Classical Greece rather than using our modern day ones. The emphasis of the book is consequently on the unity of Greek thought since the Greeks didn’t divide up their ideas onto distinct disciplines. Nevertheless, for convenience the book is split into four sections: religion, the state, the individual and the arts. These four concepts are considered by the author to be among the most important in Greek thought. Even then these are far from independent ideas and hence the sections of the book do overlap just a little.

When viewed from our modern perspective the book is essentially about politics and philosophy, two ideas for which the Greeks are extremely and justly famous. The book doesn’t make great assumptions about the reader’s knowledge of Classical Greece in these terms, nor in terms of ancient history and classics. In fact, if your knowledge of this stuff is pretty sketchy (like mine is) that’s probably an advantage. The material in the book was mostly new to me and I was treated to a number of things that challenged my preconceptions and misconceptions. For example, I found out about the Greeks considering democracy to be a bad thing and inventing communism. Actually, I was struck by the surprising number of aspects of Classical Greek society that resembled aspects of the Soviet Union. You get the feeling that if the writer had lived another hundred years a fascinating book could have been written about the influence of the legacy of Greek thought on twentieth century politics.

The author draws on many of the Classical Greek writers to illustrate what he’s saying. Extensive use is made of quotations in translation and these are readily understandable and (in the case of Aristophanes) even enjoyable. The author even goes back to the Ancient period of Greek history and makes use of Homer’s writings to make some points about the Classical period. But it’s Plato that’s the biggest influence on the author and the mainstay of the book. The writing style is overall a little dry but it’s not anywhere near as bad as it might have been. In fact the author manges quite well in overcoming the requirement for stuffy prose that was prevalent in the Victorian period. It’s not a difficult read but it is intellectual and academic. If that doesn’t put you off then it’s also fascinating and instructive.

The reader is John Richmond who reads clearly in a traditional unemotional style as is usually the case with early-numbered Talking Books. I expect it was originally recorded on cassette quite some time ago. The voice is perfectly adequate but a more lively voice might have helped combat some of the dryness in the text.

I’d recommend this book to those with an interest in Classical Greece, politics or philosophy. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who wants a book that’s not going to require any thinking.

Star Rating: Three Stars (out of Five).

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“The Darling Buds of May” by H.E. Bates

Duration 4 hours 44 minutes
Talking Book Number: TB 753

This is another of my reviews of books that are too famous to need reviews. I’ve read three H.E. Bates books before this one (“A Moment in Time”: TB 752, “My Uncle Silas”: TB 9782 and “The Vanished World”: TB 1002). They were all pretty good and so I thought I’d better try his most famous one. In this case the fame is based mainly on the fact that ITV did a TV series based on the book in the early nineties. I didn’t actually see it but I must have seen a trailer or something because whenever the charcacters of Ma, Pop and Mariette Larkin appear in the book all I can see in my mind’s eye are David Jason, Pam Ferris and Catherine Zeta Jones. In fact the actors as I remember them don’t look quite like the characters are described in the book but they’re pretty close. It’s not a huge disadventage having the mental image I would have had of the characters replaced by one created by a TV company. But it does mean that in some ways I have had less of an individual response to this book than some of the Talking Books I’ve read. If I’d actually seen the show when it came out I’m sure I’d have spent all the time I was reading this book in comparing the two. That would probably have spoiled it for me so in some ways I’m quite pleased that I never did see it.

If H.E. Bates is anything he’s a master of the feelgood novel. That sounds like a criticism nowadays but there’s such genuine warmth, optimism and love in his work that we’re miles from the cloying sweetness of Disney. His usual image to represent all this is the English summer in the Kent countryside, and he he uses it to full effect here. As a boy I spent time in those Kentish summers (albeit a little later in time) and there’s something remarkably accurate about his evocation. Don’t get confused by the RNIB synopsis that suggests it’s an all-year-round book. This is called “The Darling Buds of May” because all the action takes place during the end of spring and start of summer in a May heatwave sometime in the 1950s.

The story is simply that of the innocent abroad. A shy office worker finds himself in the company of the Larkins, a larger-than-life rural family who delight in all things sensuous: food, drink, sunshine and sex. The Larkins are nothing short of a family of pagan fertility gods, representing a cornucopia of all the good things the countryside has to offer. Their visitor, by contrast, is sickly, timid and naive and represents the dry sterility of urban life. In the end it’s not really the story that matters. It’s the presentation of this rich, seductive life that’s most important. Lots of characters are story threads are left unfulfilled but it doesn’t matter. I heard that for the TV version thay ended up making up a whole lot more story that comes after the events in the book. I wouldn’t be surprised. Like any soap opera, this has the setting and characters pre-eminent. Events are only an excuse for staying in the fictional world and keeping the characters alive.

It’s a very visual book. Bates is always busy describing the appearence of clothes, rooms and suchlike. As with “Vile Bodies” which I reviewed last week, it’s the sort of novel that was inevitably going to be filmed in one way or another. The text reads almost like a rough draft of a screenplay. A real highlight of the book is the dialogue. Bates captures, er, perfectly in Pop Larkin’s words the patois that you find in the area where London meets Kent. It’s where I grew up and I know that form of idiom-rich speech very well.

The reader is Stephen Jack. He’s certalinly not a reader I like. His speech is rather stilted at the best of times and his voices for young women are terrible. “The Weather at Tregulla” (by Stella Gibbons TB 1735) was made even worse than it is by his voicing of the young female protagonist. Equally in this book Mariette sounds like a bad female impersonator and Edith Pilchester sounds like a pantomime Dame. But the real surprise was Pop Larkin. Jack does an excellent version of the Kent-meets-London accent (sort of Sid james with a rural twang) that’s so familiar to me and, in this book at least, makes up for his other failings.

I’d recommend this book to those who enjoy well-written heartwarming tales. I can’t really be sure whether to recommend it to anyone who watched the TV show.

Star Rating: Five stars (out of five)

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“Vile Bodies” by Evelyn Waugh

Duration: 6 hours 45 minutes
Talking Book number: TB 1783

I think I may be reviewing a famous book here. My wife says she thinks they made a film of it called “Bright Young Things”. I’ve certainly heard of Waugh but this is the first of his novels I’ve read and I’d certainly not heard of it before. There’s a certain danger in reviewing famous books you know nothing about. Equally there’s a danger in reviewing famous books you’re ill-informed about. If a book’s famous there’s generally a set standard opinion about it that is commonly known. Equally everyone else will probably have read it and already formed their own opinions. So who’s this review for? Well it’s for those few people who haven’t read “Vile Bodies” yet to help them decide whether to read it or not. And it’s also a chance for everybody else to have an argument with me.

OK. Here we go. “Vile Bodies” is a social satire of the roaring twenties. It’s funny, that sounds such a common genre but when I think about it I can only immediately think of P.G.Wodehouse as an exponent of it. In that sense this is refreshing. It’s the young English bourgeoisie - the “Bright Young Things” - seen not as Wodehouse’s upper class twits but in a far more biting and cynical way.

The writing style isn’t Hemmingway or Tennessee Williams. It’s much more that of the English Victorian comic novel. I’m thinking of books such as ”Three Men in a Boat”. The characters are all comic and so are their names. This is satire in the tradition that runs right down from Chaucer. As the book progresses it slowly becomes more sarcastic and blacker but it remains equally funny. The lives of the young people and their parties are parodied along with those of the great and good, the press, American evangelists, the film industry, motor racing and so on. All of it is surprisingly modern in that most of the satire could still be used of those sectors today. The ending was a bit of a surprise but reasonably effective.

The novel does vaguely have a protagonist in the person of the Adam Symes character and a rough plot in the form of his sort-of romance with Nina. But really it’s an ensemble cast job with a whole set of different loosely-related characters and stories. I’m not too experinced with novels like that and I found it a little confusing trying to follow the exploits of such a large set of characters when you’re often without a real protagonist to anchor yourself on. Nothing is told from the point of view of what goes on in anyone’s head. It’s all dialogue and action, with any viewpoint only coming from Waugh’s voice as author. And then it’s generally sarcastic and implicit.

The pacing is surprisingly fast and an awful lot of ground is covered. The writing style is very visual - I can see why they might have made a film of it - and the dialogue is excellent. Dialogue makes up a great deal of the text and is often left to speak for itself as it brings the characters to life and they’re damned out of their own mouths.

The reader was a real surprise. It’s Peter Gray who read the Willliam Trevor book “Lovers of their Time” (TB 3410) that I reviewed recently. I hated Gray’s reading on the Trevor book and here he’s doing it in exactly the same style. But this time Gray’s camp sneering tones are perfect for the part. I described Gray as sounding like a cross between Kenneth Willliams and Brian Sewell. That sort of voice has exactly the degree of sarcasm needed for this sort of biting novel.

I’d recommend this book to lovers of social satire. I wouldn’t recommend it to people without a liking for black humour.

Star Rating: four stars (Out of five)

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“Mara and Dann” by Doris Lessing

Duration: 19 hours 45 minutes
Talking Book number: TB12605

“I’m hearing only bad news from Radio Africa” - Latin Quarter

This is the first Doris Lessing book I’ve read. In fact, I don’t know an awful lot about her. “Mara and Dann” is a science fiction book, though I’ve heard she writes non-science fiction too. If you’re not a science fiction fan I wouldn’t be too put off by this. The science fiction aspects of the book aren’t all that significant, despite the amount of attention that I give them in this review. The book is more of a travelogue across the vast distances of Africa. The fact that this is a future Africa where the environment is more arid and drought-ridden than it is now is mainly background. The tale concentrates on the experiences of a sister and brother (Mara and Dann, unsurprisingly) as they undertake the journey. The word “vicissitudes” occurs twice in the book and once in the introduction. It’s how Lessing likes to refer to the arduous nature of their journey. The story is as much about the characters’ reactions and emotions as it is about what actually happens to them. I should probably say “the character” because the girl and later young woman Mara is the protagonist and it’s really her story.

As I say, it’s the travelogue nature of the long overland journey that makes the book seem less like a science fiction novel. In fact, it reads more like a fantasy novel or a saga. Then again it’s a bit like Hindi myth or a fairy tale. Or with all the drought and famine it perhaps resembles a Biblical epic. In one sense at least the book is an environmental novel. The prevalence of drought, famine and refugees are key features of Lessing’s Africa (even more so than with ours). The setting is undeniably arid and the level of technology is low (no more than Mediaeval). Yet this future Africa has rather a lot in common with our modern Western society with issues such as heroin addiction and poor urban planning. The atmosphere of the book, at least at the beginning, is rather grim.

The racial mix in Lessing’s Africa surprised me. As far as I could tell, there are very few of the races around that are currently prevalent in Africa. Most of the races in the book seem to be either imaginary or just ones I couldn’t identify. But race is very important in the tale as the characters travel to distant lands and meet exotic peoples. And it was gender as well as racial roles that surprised me. I’d have expected the rather traditional societies in the book to be as sexist as societies have been in historical times. After all, they do keep slaves here and most other cultural aspects seem in one way or another to have reverted to an earlier form. But on a number of occasions women in the book seem to be the equal of men, or at the very least to be less oppressed than one might have expected.

The dialogue is well-written but I found it a little surprising. Since this is Africa I had expected African-sounding dialogue. But instead we get the English of contemporary England. I suspect that this is because everyone would have sounded too foreign if they’d been given African patois to speak. And anyway, since the characters are described as speaking imaginary futuristic languages, I guess that the dialogue can all be seen as translation or something. It’s one of the perennial perils of science fiction.

Lessing’s ideas about culture seemed a little odd to me. The setting she uses, at least in the beginning, is certainly downbeat and depressing. It’s rather like the Bosnia or Afghanistan of recent times. Everyone is cruel and nasty to everyone else. The atmosphere is warlike and dangerous. All this unpleasant behaviour on the part of of her antagonists Lessing blames simply on the drought and famine. Desperate times force people into desperate acts. In considering this we’re forced to think of the Africa of our own times. Certainly it has had more than its fair share of drought and famine, and in this sense the portrayal of such an Africa is almost a cliché. But the drought and famine aren’t associated, at least in the western media, with an outbreak of cruel and selfish behaviour. Rather the people in these disasters seem stunned into submission. It’s in less hard times and in greener parts like West Africa or the Great Lakes that we hear of the cruelty that leads to atrocities.

It was actually the details of the science fiction background of the future Africa that gave me the most trouble. This sort of story used to be called post-holocaust or post-apocalypse, even when the story wasn’t an after-the-bomb one. Everything in the world has got so bad that we end up with a basic 1970s sci-fi cliché. Of course, nowadays the dark future is unavoidably environmental but it’s still the same. It’s an infertile world littered with the useless remnants of our unimaginably luxurious time and it’s become hard to survive in the grinding poverty. In that sense the book can be seen as cliched and anachronistic. It all creates a nice atmosphere and a raison d’etre for the story but it’s a difficult idea to get away with nowadays. It contains its own clichés, such as the bizarre cultural oddity that there is an almost universal nostalgia for technology. There’s a widespread sense of loss for the way things were. I’m not too sure that’s a likely reaction. The Roman Empire was respected after its fall, but not with a sad yearning for the loss of a wonderful way of life. Mind you, the lost technology described in the book is itself a bit questionable. There’s an assumption that technology had got a bit further than it has now, so you get metal and cloth that never wear out. But paper never seems to have been improved in that way. I even found I had scientific problems with the way Lessing imagines the environment and fauna to have changed. It’s not quite my understanding of biology or climatology. OK, I’m nit-picking now, but that’s one of the joys of reading science fiction. Maybe these criticisms are too nerdy to be important, but if you like the science fiction aspects then you might find this a little off-putting.

Doris Lessing is clearly a very good writer. She sensibly concentrates on telling the tale rather than going into the science too much. And she tells a very good tale. It’s not an original story and in the introduction she admits that’s not the intention. But she tells it well and it remains interesting throughout. Like most modern science fiction novels it’s twice as long as it needs to be but that’s usually the publisher’s fault. A thicker printed book costs about the same to make but can be sold for a higher price. Authors nowadays get told to go away and lengthen their work. In case you care, the book has creepy crawlies in it, the odd swear word and a little sexual content.

The book has a good reader. It’s Jilly Bond. Her modern emotional style is nice and the character voices are good. I have no criticism of her at all.

I’d recommend this book to general readers who like a well-told classic tale of travel and overcoming vicissitudes. I wouldn’t particularly recommend it to science fiction fans.

Star Rating; Four Stars (out of five)

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“Tar Baby” by Toni Morrison

Duration: 11 hours 31 minutes
Talking Book Number: TB 7612

A couple of years ago one of my friends in America sent me an audiobook called “Jazz” by someone called Toni Morrison. It was an abridged copy but I gave it a read despite my dislike of abridgement. I was impressed by its avant-garde style and so I thought I’d put another of Morrison’s novels on my Talking Books list. That book was “Tar Baby” and it was a slightly earlier novel. I think it was written about a decade before “Jazz”. When it came and I read it I knew that I was inevitably going to end up comparing the two books. What I didn’t quite realise was how much I was going to end up comparing them. Perhaps it’s because I’m not experienced in reading African-American novels, but I found myself thinking about “Jazz” much of the time I was reading “Tar Baby”.

The setting of “Tar Baby” is partly in the United States and partly the Caribbean. It’s about a family reunion, the relationships of the family members and the consequences of the meeting. One of the first things that struck me about the book is that its writing style is more straightforward than that of “Jazz”. That said, “Tar Baby” does still have a few surreal elements. Morrison’s use of language in the book impressed me and I found the dialogue excellent. It’s as spot-on and naturalistic as it is in “Jazz”. The pacing seemed pretty much OK to me but it could be a bit slow at times. I think it’s at its best around the climactic parts.

One difference between the two books is the way they’re structured. “Jazz” is famous for being written in a sequence of flashbacks while “Tar Baby” follows a more conventional and roughly linear pattern. What the two books share is the way they both deal with the relationships of a set of connected people and slowly reveal the background of each to explain why they’ve done the things that they’ve done. In both of them Morrison uses the technique of jumping in and out of different characters’ heads to give a set of different perspectives on the story. I didn’t find the effect quite as convincing here because there’s a stronger narrator’s voice which detracts from the total immersion in character that “Jazz” has.

Probably the most significant thing about the book is that it’s about the African-American experience, particularly the African-American woman’s experience. Morrison’s world is one where relationships are always troubled. The racial divide gets into everything and makes the simplest things in life difficult and complex. As a result the emotional content of the book is particularly sad and hopeless. Relationships are certainly uncomfortable things here, both in terms of race and gender. In fact, the race relations are probably more central to this book than in “Jazz”, but then I think that’s a result of there being more white characters in this one. The ending of “Tar Baby” has no real narrative resolution which I always find a little disturbing. You’re left with the question “What happened next?”. Morrison seems far more keen on raising questions than she is on providing answers. Although there is plenty of explanation about the characters’ backgrounds and motives to tell us why they do what they do, you’re still left with the question “Why are things as they are?”.

This is where the pain in the novel comes from. Much of the book works on two levels. On a symbolic level the characters become cyphers for socio-political issues. They’re not stereotypes but they represent typical characters in the often-repeated race relations drama of American society. Morrison seems keen for the reader to think about it all and hence she doesn’t tie everything up neatly with a nice cozy resolution.

Overall I didn’t really enjoy this book. It’s very well written but somehow it didn’t really work for me. Morrison is a Nobel Laureate author and held in great respect which I’m sure means that the portrayal of African American society is very accurate. But although I found the book interesting, in the end I found it an uncomfortable and unsatisfying read.

The reader is Cleo Sylvestre who has an odd choice of accent for an African American novel. She’s got an English slightly London voice with a lisp. She’s not too bad at the American accents but I don’t really find them accurate enough to be able to deduce much about the characters from them. One of the problems I had as a white Briton was that I found it a little difficult initially to tell who was white and who black. That can be a problem here as the significance of the novel can be lost. That said, accents are a bonus that print readers don’t get so that’s not much of a grumble. I’m just surprised that an American reader wasn’t available as has been the case for some other books I’ve read. American writing often sounds odd in an English accent and visa versa.

I’d only recommend “Tar Baby” to readers interested in African American literature. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to those who want a comfortable read.

Star Rating: Three Stars (out of five)

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“Human Croquet” by Kate Atkinson

Duration: 11 hours and 42 minutes
Talking Book Number: TB 11062

This book turned up in one of the 2005 New Book lists. I chose it because the “brief description of the book” intrigued me. There were references to forests, a dwindling family, teenagers and a mystery. Also the curious statement that a character “drops into pockets of time and out again”. I first read the book in the summer of 2005 but now I’ve read it again. The original RNIB recording of the disc was faulty and had part of the book missing. This was corrected at the beginning of 2006. If you read it in 2005 you too might want to read it again.

At the start of the tale the book seems reasonably conventional. It’s just a domestic story of a mid-twentieth-century childhood. It revolves around a teenage girl who lives in a fictional town in Northern England. It’s 1960 and she’s sixteen. She’s spent her time growing up with the usual collection of sad childhood circumstances that have been popular in novels since Dickens and before. I found myself reminded a little of “Angela’s Ashes”. It’s not that the characters are grindingly poor but they do seem to be naive as to how their situation might be seen by others. Everything’s normal to them and so it’s normal in the book. It’s partly because the author doesn’t have an axe to grind about the social conditions of the time. This is a recent novel and the 1960s are long gone. There’s none of the typical Victorian mawkishness here. It’s true that the characters in the book are sad but they are happy at times too. There’s even humour in the writing style. The sadness, when it comes, isn’t the pathos of a desperate premise. It comes from a different and more realistic source. It’s simply derived from the ordinary personal issues in the characters’ lives. These events, both trivial and universal ones, drive the emotional content of the book.

The way it’s written is interesting. It’s almost a stream of consciousness. It’s written in the first-person without separate chapters and no distinction is drawn between the author’s voice and the protagonist’s. Her personal thoughts are thoroughly intermingled and jumbled with the narrative text. As a result the story jumps in and out of different scenes without warning. That’s because those scenes are just the storyteller’s memories. The main narrative is also interspersed with whole sections about the past because the story is told partly in flashback. The story will suddenly cut to a section about the characters’ pasts, family history and even local history. The result of all this is a rather dislocated feeling. That turns out to be quite appropriate for a character who feels like she gets mysteriously displaced in time. The language used to tell the story is the chatty style of colloquial Yorkshire speech and the dialogue is impressively down-to-earth and naturalistic. But at the same time the author’s voice is also eccentric and highly imaginative. She uses expressions like: “marmalade the colour of tawny amber and melted lions”. The descriptions of characters and of locations are both well-drawn and there’s a lot of zeitgeist material which evokes the setting well.

However, as the story goes on it becomes apparent that we’re dealing with two books in one. The conventional, even mundane nature of the setting hides something far less ordinary. All the things I’ve talked about so far only give a slight clue as to the oddness of the book. The ordinary domestic setting turns out to be just a framework on which the author hangs a completely different book. Slowly we find that surreal things are happening. Time travel starts to occur. It’s the unintentional and random form of time travel that Billy Pilgrim experiences in “Slaughterhouse Five” and the protagonist naively finds it all quite fascinating. She also finds it hard to cope with and starts to doubt her own sanity. Her thoughts spread from the domestic to the philosophical and scientific. She begins to question what is real. In some places the novel verges on science fiction. Everything slowly gets rather scary as she struggles to understand her increasingly confusing, bizarre and nightmarish world. Yet at the same time the domestic tale and the ordinary life of a teenager remain intact and central to the story. The down-to-earth warmth of the protagonist helps to ensure that the tale is still grounded in a believable world. I was engrossed. I found myself wondering how events could possibly turn out and how situations could be resolved. Yet resolved they are, both realistically and strangely. I’m not completely sure I was convinvced by the ending but maybe I’m just being picky. I’m not actually sure about anything in this book. In fact, I found it quite a difficult novel to review. It’s an intriguing book that raises more questions than it answers. It’s speculative and intentionally self-contradictory. I found that as soon as I could think of anything to write about one part of the book then I would think of another part of the book where my comment wouldn’t be true. It’s certainly a hard novel to classify because it doesn’t stick properly to its genre. Even its emotional tone is confusing. It’s an odd mixture of light and dark. I found it disturbing that my thoughts and feelings became out of line with each other. My emotions ended up surprising me.

The reader Nicolette McKenzie is excellent. She reads in the modern emotional style and uses an appropriate soft Yorkshire accent. She’s good at the other accents too as well as the various voices, and there are quite a range of them here.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who likes a modern domestic tale with a bizarre twist. Or a bizarre modern tale with a domestic twist. I wouldn’t recommend it to people who don’t like their stories getting a bit weird.

Star Rating: Five Stars (out of five)

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”From the Earth to the Moon” by Jules Verne

Duration 5 hours 37 minutes
Talking Book Number TB12586

I like science fiction. There, I’ve admitted it. I can’t say I’ve read an awful lot of it but then I’ve not found an awful lot of it in the Talking Books library. The main authors that have turned up there have been the famous names: H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke and so forth. I’ve read stuff by both of those but I’ve not been able to try Jules Verne until now. This book isn’t very long and apparently it’s an early work. I had a lot of preconceptions about Verne which were mainly drawn from movies I’d seen as a kid. I had lots of confused ideas about camp gentlemen in rocket ships lined with purple velvet. I was keen to see what Verne was actually like.

“From the Earth to the Moon” is more like a television documentary than a novel. It charts the progress of an expedition to send a projectile to the moon in the 1860s. It’s told with a combination of scientific information and action from the story’s adventurous personalities. I was surprised that the science is surprisingly detailed. There are entire chapters containing nothing but facts and figures. I don’t think they’re particularly complex or difficult to follow but all this technical stuff does take up quite a lot of the text. It’s also strikingly accurate - more so than in some more recent science fiction I’ve come across. There are inevitably a few mistakes but the overall feel is very prescient. it’s like Verne is telling the story of the post-war Space Race but setting it a century too early. The presentation of the characters is weaker than that of the science and much more thinly drawn. They’re almost reduced to comic characters. This seems to be a problem in the genre and it lends this book a certain “Boys’ Own” feel. In that it’s like typical tales of Victorian exploration.

One odd feature of the book is that the story of the preparation of the project takes up a surprising amount of the book. If you’re looking for a story that’s primarily about spaceflight you’d better look elsewhere. This book is really about how the project to get a moonshot underway could have been done in the nineteenth century. Verne’s famous anti-war stance is represented here along with curious national stereotyping. As for the ending, I was a little surprised, but then I was probably thinking about what happens in the Hollywood stuff. Verne’s ending is more interesting but possibly less satisfying.

I ought to put in a warning about the introduction to this edition. It starts reasonably enough with some of Verne’s biography. Then it goes on to drop some spoiler hints. OK it’s fairly obvious that a book called “From the Earth to the Moon” deals with sending a projectile from the former to the latter. But the introduction gives us clues about such things as the payload and the launch site which form dramatic questions within the narrative. The introduction includes spoilers for other Verne novels too but it isn’t specific as to which spoilers are for which novel. That at least ensures you can’t be quite sure what will happen in this one. Even more bizarrely, the introduction goes on to become an advert for Eurodisney which has some sort of fairground ride based on this book. There’s a kind of epilogue too listing great dates in the real history of spaceflight, which again ends with a Eurodisney advert. I wonder if this is the Eurodisney edition of the book. if you can figure out how, I’d skip the introduction and read it after you read the story. Or better still, not read the introduction at all.

The reader is Garrick Hagon. I think I’ve heard him before. He has a warm Yankee accent and I assume he was chosen because Verne’s tale is set in America. Hagon is an excellent reader with good character voices and good foreign accents. He’s a pleasure to listen to.

I’d recommend this book to science fiction fans keen to explore nineteenth century writers. I wouldn’t recommend it as a general read because of the quantity of technical detail in it.

Star Rating: Three Stars (out of Five)

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“Washington DC” by Gore Vidal

Duration 15 hours 20 minutes
Talking Book Number TB 326

I’d only read two of Vidal’s classical novels before: “Creation” and “Julian” (TB 1878). I was very impressed by them. I haven’t read a lot of historical fiction as I find in most historical novels that the tension between achieving historical accuracy and filling the requirements of the modern novel is too great. The results often fail in one aim or the other or they just end up being self-contradictory. Vidal’s novels are an exception. I’d found them stimulating and thought-provoking because they interweave religion and philosophy with the lives of flawed characters.

But ancient Persia or the Roman Empire are bound to produce a different type of novel from one that’s set in the modern capital of the United States. “Washington DC” is indeed different. For one thing, its location is so familiar and checkable that the requirements for accuracy become hard to side-step. Fortunately Vidal knows what he’s talking about because he has a background in US politics and the time period of the book is within the author’s lifetime. I found I ended up wondering whether any of the book’s elements are autobiographical. Unfortunately I don’t know enough about Vidal’s own life to be sure. Certainly there are historical characters in the story (something that’s inevitable once you include a real US President among them). I found myself being curious about some of the names in the book. Are they real, historical people? Or perhaps they’re thinly-disguised parodies. Or maybe pastiches of typical characters in that setting. I don’t know a huge amount about mid-twentieth-century U.S. politics so I can’t really be sure. But it’s an intriguing line of thought and indicates that Vidal must have made me interested in the people in the novel.

Another way in which this book differs from the two classical novels I’d read previously is with regard to the form it takes. “Creation” and “Julian” were both biographies and to an extent travelogues. Each has a protagonist whose life is a physical journey and spiritual quest to find or establish the truth. “Washington D.C.” is different. It’s more of a family saga. As time passes the generations shift and the characters from the various families grow to maturity. The youngsters become able to influence events that had previously only been the province of their parents. Some people rise politically, one noticeably in a style reminiscent of JFK. Some wane as others wax. And there’s an extra character: the city itself. Washington has time to evolve and change from a quasi-provincial town with Southern values to today's modern world capital. It’s surprising that all this happens in only fifteen years. But these are fifteen critical years for twentieth-century American politics. They take in the New Deal, The Second World War, the MacCarthy hearings and the Korean War. It’s the years when America itself, like the characters in the book, grows up and takes on its adult role in the world.

Vidal is famously a political radical. His politics are critical of the right but they’re also cynical and he takes pot shots at all targets. In this book he’s mostly aiming to demonstrate that it’s the system that is rotten. He satirises the corruption of Washington but in a comparatively subtle way. Nowadays we are very used to clumsy over-the-top parodies of political greed and ambition. But the image Vidal creates is not one of a world of grand grotesques and pantomime villains. It’s the Washington village itself that takes on the corrupt role. It’s presented as a claustrophobic racist snobbish hothouse where all villainy is simply minor, expedient, unimportant and just the way things are done. Appearance is all-important and lies are second nature to everyone. Virtue in Washington is a luxury few can afford. It’s rather like Balzac’s Bourbon Paris. The revelation is not that any surprising evil is done. It’s rather that grubby characters in a grubby town get up to self-important and petty things that change the face of history.

Vidal’s writing style is of course excellent. He makes extensive use of dialogue to drive the narrative and for characterisation. Enough of the internal life of various characters is given to indicate the degree to which appearance and sham rule everything they say and do. But at the same time they are individual, believable characters, caught up in the Washington world that makes them into what they are.

The reader is Robert Gladwell who is unfortunately one of my least favourite. His received English reading voice is perfectly clear but I find that his slow funereal tones make the lightest book chilling. I think it must have been recorded a long time ago as Gladwell’s style is about as far from the modern emotional inflected style as it’s possible to get. His American accents aren’t bad, though his pronunciation of American place names leaves something to be desired. When I gave this book its star rating I was tempted to give it one star less than the full five simply on account of the reader.

Overall it’s a book I’d recommend to those who like well-written political intrigue novels and American family sagas. I wouldn’t recommend it to patriotic apple-pie neo-Conservatives though.

Star Rating: Five Stars (out of Five)

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“Lovers of their Time and other Stories” by William Trevor

Duration 11 hours
Talking Book Number TB 3410

I was quite disappointed with this book. I’d read Trevor’s “Angels at the Ritz” (TB 2881) last year and thoroughly enjoyed it. “Lovers of their Time” is similarly a collection of short stories and I expected more of the same. In a way I got it. In a way I didn’t.

All the usual William Trevor themes are here: the passage of time, London, Ireland, ordinary lives. However, the feel of the book is quite different. “Angels...” had a poignancy about it that was quite magical. The stories and the ideas were fairly diverse. In contrast the stories in “Lovers...” are quite repetitive. The elements in each story are re-used time after time in quite a heavy-handed way, which is very frustrating in a book of short stories. Instead of the magical wistfulness of “Angels...” there is a dullness brought about by the bitter, sad loneliness of everything. The atmosphere is all tragedy and doom and old age is a nightmare of regret. There was even the odd moment of horror. I found myself looking forward to the relief of the book’s end.

That’s sad. It’s not as if there’s nothing good about the book. Trevor’s writing style is as sharp as ever. His observation is faultless and he captures situations effectively. He writes with a minimum of adjectives (as I believe Hemmingway does). His mid-twentieth century settings come across believably and interestingly. Where he includes events of wider significance than just the domestic (such as the Irish “Troubles”) he makes them meaningful by concentrating on their effects on individuals affected by them. The significance of the passing of time is as usual captured well. It’s a rare story that doesn’t cover someone’s complete biography. And there’s much on romantic and marriage relationships, and even a couple of gay ones which are among the more interesting. But in the end it’s the relentless sadness and morbidity that take over and, at least for me, become the dominant theme of the book.

The reader, Peter Gray, has a curious voice. It’s somewhere between Kenneth Williams and Brian Sewell. Once you get used to it it’s fine and it’s very clear. But it is a little odd to say the least. I’m almost tempted to call it “Lovey”. The accents he has to do, which are mainly Irish, are OK but nothing special.

Despite Trevor’s evident skill in the craft of writing, I would only recommend this book to those who don’t mind being depressed by the futility of life. I wish I could score it more highly.

Star Rating: Two Stars (out of five)

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“Hearing Birds Fly” by Louisa Waugh

Duration 10 hours 11 minutes
Talking Book Number TB 14061

I’ve actually been to Mongolia. No really I have. In the eighties I caught a train which went through the country, across the Gobi desert from Russia to China. Those being Soviet days I wasn’t actually allowed off the train. But I did get an intriguing view of life in a very different world by looking out the train window. And I’ve retained a curiosity about the country ever since. A book by someone who’d spent a year there was bound to attract me.

The subtitle of this book is “A Nomadic Year in Mongolia” which isn’t altogether accurate. I’d been expecting the author to be living as a nomad but in fact the people she stays with are settled in a village and only a few spend the summer months away with their flocks. Nevertheless she paints a clear and fascinating picture of rural Mongolia. The landscape sounds stunning - far more beautiful than my brief glimpse of it could show. The passing of the year reveals how the climate changes drastically with the extremes of season in the Asian steppe. What stands out are the material differences in the way of life there and the way their society deals with the poverty of their situation. Waugh makes every effort to integrate herself into village life. She learns about most aspects of the people’s lives by taking part in them and gives us a rare insight into a very different culture. The travel diary style of her book makes the whole thing very readable and not in the least dry. It’s easy to identify with the author as she performs the daily necessities of Mongol life such as milking, collecting fuel and water. She also takes part in the more exotic tasks of making felt and distilling vodka as well as travelling on horseback and going out with hunters. And she’s also involved in all the village gossip which inevitably makes me think of Ambridge. Despite the alienness of Mongolia there is always a certain familiarity about rural life wherever it happens to be.

I enjoyed this book, but I ought to mention an aspect of it that caused me some irritation. It’s an aspect that’s relevant to all travel books - the character of the narrator. Unlike some travel writers who minimise their own impact on what they describe (Colin Thuberon for one), Louisa Waugh makes herself central to the book. She’s far from a passive observer and this is far from a sociology paper. The book is first and foremost about her experience. It’s a very personal book with raw first-person writing and everything is filtered through her eyes, her feelings and her interactions. When we read about the village, the landscape, the seasons and the villagers what we’re actually getting is her relationship with them all. The character of Louisa Waugh is central to the writing and consequently it’s more a book about her than about Mongolia. In the end you’ll only like the book if you like her.

So what’s Louisa Waugh like? To me she seems incredibly young and naive. She’s rather like a self-obsessed teenager, far younger than her actual years. She’s a very introspective person and she’s constantly going on about her own feelings. She’s very candid and confessional about her emotions on paper and I found the excessive intimacy rather distracting. She faces her self-imposed task of life in the most alien culture she can find like it’s some sort of self-punishing mission. She forces herself to endure poverty, toil and isolation in order to make herself as integrated as possible. The irony is that the harder she tries to become one of them the more she becomes a middle-class Briton abroad. It’s her incongruity in the place that slowly becomes the dominant theme. What for her is a one-year adventure of a lifetime is actually a life of drudgery for the people who have to live like that all the time. There’s a certain amount of Marie-Antoinette playing at being a shepherdess about all this. I ended up thinking of middle-class poverty tourism - the joy of going abroad to see how the other half lives.

Louisa Waugh is actually a journalist. I’d originally wondered who could possibly have arranged to spend such a year in such a place in the nineties. An aid worker? An anthropologist? But this is no “From our Own Correspondent” for she is no professional career-oriented BBC journalist. She submits a few letters to New Internationalist and writes a book when she comes home. This all sounds more like a gap year to me. She even spends her time in the village teaching English as a foreign language, the traditional pastime for the young Briton who hasn’t got their life together yet and who wants an extended holiday.

OK - Louisa Waugh isn’t all bad. I didn’t dislike her as much as I probably gave the impression in the preceding paragraphs. She can write well and her tale is always interesting. Her manner with others is pleasant and easy-going if occasionally a little uptight and reserved. We learn a lot about the lives of the friends she makes in the village, although that may well be a result of the villagers’ hospitality to strangers rather than of Waugh’s ability to integrate. She does have the odd prima-donna-ish moment but fortunately they are very few. It’s not actually too hard to like her but if you don’t you’ll probably hate her. I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and give the book four stars.

The reader is Candida Gubbins. Her voice is fairly clear and the reading is in the emotional and inflected style that’s used for all New Books. She does have a strange accent though. It’s a middle-class London accent with a slight speech impediment and rather childlike tones. It’s probably supposed to be appropriate to the writer. Gubbins is pretty good at her Mongolian accent, or at least I think she is. I’ve never actually spoken to any Mongolians and it all sounded a bit like music-hall Russian to me. There’s a slight difficulty with the alien-sounding proper names. I could never quite remember who was who and the glossary at the front wasn’t much help as it would have been a pain to have to keep bookmarking my place so I could refer to it. But I found it worked OK if I took a relaxed attitude to who was who - the author often reminded me anyway.

I’d recommend the book to those who like modern travel writing done in the style of books like “Driving over Lemons”. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who’s put off by the idea of a writer who could possibly be confused with a spoiled little princess living a fairytale life.

Star Rating: Four Stars (out of Five)

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"Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall" by Spike Milligan

Talking Book Number TB 5376
Duration 3 hours 54 minutes

I’d fancied reading Spike Milligan’s books because I’ve always found his broadcast work amusing and interesting, if a little confusing. So I thought I’d start by reading the first part of his war memoirs. It’s a famous book and I think they made a film of it. The book makes a refreshing change from most of the war memoirs I’ve found in Talking Books. The typical example of the genre seems to be rather dry and poe-faced whereas Milligan’s is laced with his trademark surreal comedy. He starts the book in a writing style which is comedic first and informative second. It gives the impression that his life before call-up was dominated by his sense of humour. But slowly as he spends more and more time in the army the surrealism decreases and the writing style changes, becoming a more conventional account of events. It even occasionally ventures into pathos but never becomes bitter. In fact, it takes on an “Idle on Parade” style and the book remains funny throughout. I for one felt a definite affinity for Milligan’s mischievous character, quite out of place among an officious and class-ridden military. There have been one or two examples of this style of war memoir now but it may have been rather unusual in 1971 when the book was first published.

It’s only a short book and it’s the first of a trilogy of seven books (Is that a heptalogy or something?). This first volume deals mainly with the inactivity and lack of equipment that characterised the first phase of the war for Britain - that “waiting-to-be-conquered” feeling. It’s all rather “Dad’s Army” but with regulars instead of pensioners. From the situation our hero is left in at the end of the first book I get the impression that the action proper will start in the second book. I believe that’s called “Rommel - Gunner Who?”. As far as I can tell the RNIB don’t have that one on the Talking Books catalogue, though they do seem to have all the the later ones. They have:-

Part Three: “Monty - his part in my victory” (TB 6280)
Part Four: “Mussolini: his part in my downfall: (TB 9772)
Part Five: “Where have all the bullets gone?” (TB 6789)
Part Six: “Goodbye Soldier” (TB 10319)
Part Seven: “Peace Work” (TB 10024)

It may be just me but I get a particular sense of irritation with the habit that the Talking Books library has of of having gaps in sequences of books. I’m a Virgo and like reading things from beginning to end. If I liked gaps in the middle I’d read abridged books. I find it very frustrating to get to the end of a book only to find that I can’t read the sequel. I wouldn’t mind so much if the reason for the sequel not being on Talking Books was simply that it hadn’t been written or published yet. In that case I’d simply wait eagerly for its arrival. But Milligan’s war books were written in the seventies. They’re not exactly new. The fact that the later volumes are already available makes me to wonder whether the missing one is actually going to be added or not. Am I going to be waiting in vain for “Rommel - Gunner Who?”.

The reader is Stanley McGeagh who seems well able to do the silly voices necessary for Milligan’s silly characters. I’d recommend the book to those who like Milligan’s humour and don’t mind not being able to get the second part (or who can afford to buy it I suppose). I wouldn’t recommend it for its military history value as Milligan doesn’t seem to do anything of military significance, or at least not in this part.

Star Rating: Four Stars (out of Five)

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"Life on Earth" by David Attenborough

Talking Book Number TB 4369
Duration 10 hours 25 minutes

I’d read David Attenborough’s “Life of Birds” (TB 14196) last Autumn when it was on the New Books list and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I thought I’d go back to the beginning of the franchise and try this. I gather all his “Life..” books are based on TV series which I’ve never seen. Consequently I wasn’t too sure about how well they’d work as audiobooks. I was surprised and very pleased with how they’ve turned out. The lack of pictures is easily compensated for by Attenborough’s excellent descriptions of the animals. They’re easy to visualise and he concentrates on the anatomy and behaviour associated with whatever point he’s making.

I was also surprised and pleased by how much science there is in the books. I’d expected something more like a travelogue, a journey through myriad life forms without much explanation or theory to it. But this is, in effect, a modern version of Darwin’s “The Origin of Species”. It’s not just a description of life on earth, it’s a description of its history. Attenborough’s technique is to highlight particular animals or plants or groups thereof, often those “living fossils’ which haven’t changed for millions of years. He uses these living forms as a link to describe extinct species and hence to describe the process of evolution. He of necessity includes enough environmental science, geology, palaeontology, climatology and chemistry necessary to make the events he’s describing comprehensible. No wonder the TV series ended up as my wife’s A-Level biology revision. But don’t go away thinking this is inaccessible dry science. I’m no biologist but with a little concentration (it moves fairly swiftly) I found no trouble in following it. It’s a lively book and the prose style indicates a fascination with living things that’s infectious.

One consequence of the evolutionary approach is that early life, 300 to 500 million years ago is covered in reasonable depth. And early man gets a whole chapter, more coverage than I’d have expected from a typical zoology or wildlife book. And where the book is Zoology I found it corrects a lot of my misassumptions and childhood confusion on the subject. For instance, I’d always thought that all insects pupate. And I’d never really understood how a termite colony works until now, except in the sketchiest of ways. Attenborough also highlights the diversity of many groups that I’d thought were uniform by giving many fascinating and divergent examples.

Another thing I’d expected was that the book to be out of date. It was published in 1979 and the last 25 years have been full of stories, particularly in the field of palaeontology, that I thought were new up-to-the-minute discoveries. I was surprised at how many of them appear in this book and how little of its contents now disagree with accepted wisdom.

And yes, it contains sex and violence. It contains creepy crawlies too. I don’t like them myself but I didn’t find myself being too squeamish about them. I think that’s because instead of being used for shock value they’re being described and studied with such affection that I got distracted into actually liking them.

The reader Malcolm Ruthven has a pleasant reading voice, vital in non-fiction book. It’s probably better than Attenborough’s and made the listening very easy.

I sound like I liked everything about the book. Maybe I did. I wasn’t sure whether to give it four or five stars but in the end I plumped for five. I’d recomend it to anyone interested in wildlife or biology who’s not already an expert in the field. I would not recommend it to creationists.

Rating: Five Stars (out of five)

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“Gothick Devon” by Belinda Whitworth and “Gothick Cornwall” by Jennifer Westwood

"Gothick Devon"
Talking Book Number TB 12497
Duration 1 hour 51 minutes

"Gothick Cornwall"
Talking Book Number TB 12496
2 hours 28 minutes

These two books came as a bit of a surprise. I’d ordered them ages ago and forgotten all about them. Local history, myths and legends can often be intriguing and I’ve always had an interest in the Gothic. I live in Devon and I’ve got family in neighbouring Cornwall so I thought a bit of local folklore would make an interesting read. I doubt if I’d have ordered a book called “Gothick Northamptonshire”, though that title is also available (TB 12499) along with “Gothick Norfolk” (12498).

The shortness of these books had surprised me when I’d ordered them but I just thought they were very short books. When they came I found out they were Shire Books: those booklets they sell in the gift shops of stately homes about collecting horse brasses and discovering parish boundaries. That’s an odd choice for RNIB Talking Books.

Even more oddly (for RNIB books, not for Shire Books) they’re structured as gazetteers. Each is an alphabetical list of place-names with a short piece of text giving the stories associated with that town or village. The Gothick part comes from the fact that there’s an emphasis on the supernatural: ghost stories, murders, spooky and inexplicable happenings. Actually they weren’t all that inexplicable; I found it quite suspicious that in counties of wrecking and smuggling so many people who came into surprising fortunes attributed their luck to the pixies.

There are certainly some tales in these books but they’re told incredibly succinctly. Most of the entries are just statements of supernatural events or fairy happenings. You get ideas, almost feelings rather than full-blown yarns. But for all their shortness the books do conjure a little of the feeling of being alone on a Westcountry moor when the fog descends. I listened to them indoors in the warm on the evening of a cold winter day. I shared them with my wife and like that they worked well. They were even a little romantic.

The reader for both is Di Langford whose received, slightly schoolteacherish tones served the text adequately and were easy to follow. I’m not sure if they’d have been better served with a local accent, despite the fact that the pronunciation of the place names might have been more accurate.

Overall I’d recommend the books only to those with an interest in Devon or Cornwall folklore or those looking for inspiration to write their own ghost stories.

Star Rating: Two Stars (out of Five)

PS: Thanks to Ray for pointing out that the "Ten Books I Would Not Recommend" was missing from the end of the "Introduction" post. I've added them now.

"Is That It?" by Bob Geldof

Talking Book Number TB 5538.
Duration 17 hours and 46 minutes.

It was twenty years ago today... Well it's just over twenty years ago that Geldof published this autobiography. He wrote it jusy after Live Aid and its theme is his rise from being a Dublin nobody to being the man behind Band Aid. I wanted to read this because Live 8 reminded me (and indeed most everyone) about Live Aid and their memories thereof. I was writing a student dissertation in my parents' living room at the time, and while the greatest concert ever rolled by on the telly I was grumpily drawing graphs of star patterns that had begun to bore me senseless. I had spent the previous decade with the feeling that rock and roll was passing me by and now Mr. Geldof had simultaneously driven the point home in my slow dimwitted skull and reawakened my childhood interest in overseas development. I had always found it unacceptable that some people should be allowed to die for no good reason and haad toyed with vague notions of doing Voluntary Service Overseas before I realised that I didn't know how to do anything useful. I wish I could say that the revelations of the Live Aid day led to my becoming someone who's made a difference. But that was Bob's job, not mine. Unlike most people who wish they could do something, he actually did something. His autobiography tells us how it was that he came to be the one who did.

Bitter Bob

The book divideds roughly into thirds. The first third covers Geldof's childhood and time in dead-end jobs. It covers his unhappy memories of a time when he was in a situation where nothing went like he wanted. He was an unhappy child. It's a bit like "Angela's Ashes" would have been if Frank had been a grumpy sod. Bob's Irish Catholic upbringing wasn't poor but it was the sort of upbringing that has left many people resentful of Irish Catholic upbringings in general. Bob’s bitterness about so much from that time is also a result os his personality. His rebelliousness, reluctance to conform, sarcasm and depressive outlook led to one unhappy child and then one unhappy teenager. His obsesssion with squalour an decay create a lens to view the choking and undynamic Ireland of the time. But there is a second strand to this. The view is far from naive. Geldof uses his adult perspective to see his childhood situation critically. Despite his lack of education (or rather his lack of any willingness to be educated) his intelligence and his grasp of intellectual and academic thought mean that he's able to temper his bitterness with understanding and analysis of what was happening to him. This balances out his moaning as he finds reasons for the actions for others aswell as blaming them. Equally he explains his reasons for being a badly-behaved and unlikeable child. He just didn't fit into his surroundings. This use of a child who is flawed but has his motives explained is a bit like Stephen Fry uses in "Moab is my Washpot". It produces a distancing effect and the adult gets to wash his hands of the child's sins. The kid's got nothing to do with the adult now. It's a way of dealing with the fact that your main character in this part is hard to identify with. The sense of the author's lack of responsibility for his past is a little odd, however. You feel he's struggling to find anything in common with his young self and he seems to be writing the biography of a stranger. Overall this part of the book has a rather depressing feel.

Bigmouth Bob

The middle third of the book deals with his career as lead singer of "The Boomtown Rats", one of the most successful punk bands of the time. Bob becomes a more sympathetic character here and the writer can more readily identify with the adult character. The style of the writing is inevitably rather rockumentary as he covers the rise of the band to the point where gigs and hotel rooms dominate both the text and his life. And being the loudmouth that he is, he take the opportunity to be critical of his contemporaries and rivals. It's not a kiss 'n' tell about who did what to whom in which hotel room. Instead he uses his intellectual skills to criticise the whole punk movement and its supporters and promoters. His enthusiasm for being the outsider and his hostile relationship with the music press gave him much opportunity for criticism of those around him. There's a balance here too. This time it's his ambition that counters his hostility for he was ambitious in an oddly non-personal way. he wanted to succeed for the sake of it and to prove wrong those who said he couldn't. Also in this section we have his developing relationship with Paula Yates and his becoming a father. This softens the Geldof character further. But overall this part of the book is probably most relavent to those who already have an interest in the British punk scene of the time.

Saint Bob

The third part of the book is about Band Aid and Live Aid. The story of those events is generally pretty well known already but Bob recounts it quite readably and from a personal point of view missing from documentary reports on the subject. We get an impression of how he coped organising events on a global scale without any previous experience. The usual stories of the Live aid day and the Band Aid recording day are given of course. But they are complemented by the story of the build-up over preceeding weeks and the follow-up work converting cash into lives. It’s in this part that the writer feels most at home with the character he’s writing about. The bitterness is transformed into a powerful drive to make it work. He’s a man on a mission and he at last feels he’s reached a point where he can accept himself. The character here is the likeable loudmouth we’re familiar with from the media. The book’s title “Is that it?” is simply his question about what to do next after saving the world. Overall this third part of the book should probably appeal to those with an interest in eighties pop and/or development issues.

Like a lot of autobiographies it’s a very emotional book. Bob gives us access to a lot of very personal feelings, including his sexual persona. The frank intimacy is a little uncomfortable at times but the energy carries it along. There’s inevitably loads of swearing which mainly serves to make it sound like your man himself. There’s even some humour. And there’s politics of the maverick sort as Bob lays into all forms of ideology and all manner of politicians. It’s not a heavy read, though some of the descriptions of the dying are a bit harrowing. Mainly it’s written in a chatty style and it’s mostly narrative. But the uncompromising and harranging nature of Geldof means that if you don’t end up liking him you’ll probably end up hating him. One thing it left me feeling, paticularly in view of the “Is that it?” line is that I’d like to read another volume. He’s had plenty happen to him since. There is a “Geldof in Africa” book based on a BBC TV series but I can’t find it on audio. Anyway that’s not autobiographical. Maybe I ought to listen to his music...

The reader of the RNIB disc is Stanley McGeagh. He's either Irish or he's just good at irish voices. He does a variety of them in the book, along with English and American ones that are fairly good. The only quibble I have is that his main narrative voice is a bit flat and monotonous, far more so than his other voices. I guess he may be trying to do an impression of Geldof and as such it's not too bad. It’s probably easier to listen to than Geldof’s own reading voice but somehow it does create a slightly chilling atmosphere to the reading.

I’d recommend this book to those who want to know more about Geldof, Band Aid and all that. It’s celebrity autobiography. To those without such interests I wouldn’t.

Rating: Three Stars (out of five)

Introduction

Hello and welcome to my RNIB talking books reviews. My name is Martin Wykes and I’m a member of the RNIB Talking Books service. We rent our talking books from the RNIB library by post. They come on compressed Daisy CDs (a type of MP3 CD) and we rent a player from them to play the discs on. For more details on the RNIB talking books service including how to become a member and how to support the service, go to www.rnib.org.uk/talkingbooks

This blog has no official connection with the RNIB. I’m simply an ordinary member wanting to give you reviews of the books I’ve read which might be useful in selecting your own. I always find the two sentences the RNIB give too brief to be very helpful, and hopefully what I’ll write is what I’d have liked to have read before deciding whether to order a particular book. I’ve recently been using the on-line catalogue which I’d recommend as a way of ordering the books mentioned here, though of course you can do it by email or phone as well.

Since this is a blog I’m hoping you will take advantage of the reply facility to tell me whether you agree or disagree with my reviews, ask me questions or add your own reviews. You can also suggest associated books for others (including me) to read.

I may occasionally review a non-RNIB audio book if someone gives me one to read. Hopefully this won’t be too annoying - it should be fairly rare but it seems a waste not to include them.

I thought I’d finish this with a list of some memorable books I’ve read through RNIB. I won’t review them since I haven’t read them recently but the list may prove interesting and/or controversial.

TEN BOOKS I WOULD RECOMMEND ARE:

“The Apple Tree” by Daphne Du Maurier (TB 6114)
“In Siberia” by Colin Thuberon (TB 12439)
“His Dark Materials “ trilogy by Philip Pullman (TB 13475, TB13522, TB13535)
“Despair” by Vladimir Nabokov (TB 180)
“England, England” by Julian Barnes (TB 11670)
“Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak (TB 1553)
“Catch 22” by Joseph Heller (TB 6418)
“McCarthy’s Bar” by Pete McCarthy (TB 12537)
“The Honorary Consul” by Graham Greene (TB 2353)
“Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut (TB 1172)

TEN BOOKS I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND ARE:

“The Death of William Posters” by Alan Sillitoe (TB 7)
“Sinning with Annie” by Paul Theroux (TB 2809)
“Wuthering Heights” by Emily Bronte (TB 283)
“Brick Lane” by Monica Ali (TB 13604)
“The Complete Short Stories - Volume 2” by John Bucchan (TB11220)
“The Man Within” by Graham Greene (TB 3458)
“Delta of Venus” by Anais Nin (TB 11516)
“The Winter King” by Bernard Cornwell (TB 11227)
“Action This Day” by Sir John Wheeler-Bennett (TB 706)
“The Weather at Tregulla” by Stella Gibbons (TB 1735)

And finally thanks to RNIB without whom I wouldn’t have read very much!

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