Books on CD
The Lodger
Charles Nicholl
Read by Gareth Armstrong
Isis Audiobooks, unabridged, 8 CDs,
8 hrs 45 mins, £24.99
In 1612, the Court of Requests at Westminster – a kind of 17th-century ombudsman – was making its way through a totally unremarkable case involving a squabble over an unpaid marriage dowry. One of the witnesses, however, was very remarkable indeed, “a certain Mr Shakespeare”, who lodged with a French immigrant family.
This tiny deposition provides the only surviving record of the great dramatist’s spoken words. It also provides Charles Nicholl with a terrific starting-point for a study of Jacobean London in all its captivating complexity, including the hat-making work of Shakespeare’s Huguenot landlady, which may lie behind some of the recurring metaphors in his late plays. Gareth Armstrong’s conversational, uncomplicated reading gives us the feeling that we’re peering through a crooked, cobweb-encrusted window and catching a glimpse of the man himself – a real treat, given his famously obscure life story.
My Name is Red
Orhan Pamuk
Read by John Lee
Faber Faber, unabridged, 16 CDs,
20 hrs 30 mins, £39.98
Daily life in Istanbul 400 years ago is the material from which the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk constructs this fable-cum-murder-mystery set among miniaturist painters at the court of the Ottoman sultan.
My Name Is Red is narrated by a dozen different voices, among them two recently murdered people, a dog, a tree, the author himself, even the eponymous crimson pigmentation; a challenge of characterisation which fazes reader John Lee not one whit as he leads us on a merry dance through a supremely unreliable narrative.
If you’ve tried to read Pamuk’s masterpiece and failed, here’s your chance to actually enjoy it. It’s still as foggy as a rainy day on the Bosphorus, but a lot more fun. Rather like sitting in a waterside cafe in Ortaköy as the colourful, baffling, beautiful, brutal world of Turkish cultural history slips past. Just one quibble: at 40 quid, you’d think it would come in a decent box instead of a squishy square of cardboard.
Gilead
Marilynne Robinson
Read by Tim Jerome
Hachette Digital, 7 CDs, 8 hrs, £19.56
The word most often used to describe Robinson’s Pulitzer prize-winning cult novel is “serene”. In an audio incarnation, this translates as “very, very slow”. At first, indeed, it’s positively funereal as the Reverend John Ames, a third-generation Iowa preacher who’s on the brink of death, begins a letter to his seven-year-old son.
Quite a challenge for reader Tim Jerome; sensibly, however, he stays calm and lets the narrative breathe, so that once you adjust to the stateliness of the pace, you begin to appreciate the sheer beauty of the prose. Ames’s grandfather knew John Brown and lost an eye in the Civil War; his father was a pacifist who absconded (temporarily) to the Quakers in protest at the old man’s fiery Christianity; meanwhile, back in the present, there’s trouble at the house of a neighbouring pastor whose son, Jack, seems to have his eye on Ames’s young wife. Gilead is about fathers and sons, about forgiveness, about small boys and cats and that old-fashioned thing called grace. Packaged in a brisk little box which proves that cardboard can be a good thing, this is a recording to treasure.
Grumpy Old Rock Star
Rick Wakeman
Read by the author
Random House audio, unabridged, 6 CDs, 7 hrs, £16.99
So outlandish are the anecdotes in this rollicking recreation of the life and times of prog-rocker Rick Wakeman that at times you wonder if he made it all up, from the yarn about smuggling KGB uniforms out of Cold War Russia to the stuff about having a chunk of Che Guevara’s grave in his garden shed. Considering the po-faced portentousness of Wakeman’s music at its most full-flown – orchestras and choirs were de rigueur for the one-time Strawbs and Yes keyboard player; he even staged a few concerts on ice – he’s a surprisingly amiable presence. His reading style is outrageously OTT, but there are plenty of chuckles and even a few out-loud laughs. I feared I’d never last through seven hours of GORS. In the end, I was genuinely sorry when it was over.
The Girl Who Played with Fire
Stieg Larsson
Read by Martin Wenner
Quercus, 6 CDs, 8 hrs, £16.99
If you’re familiar with the first volume of Stieg Larsson’s unbelievably gripping Millennium Trilogy, The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo, you’ll want to know that the second volume, The Girl Who Played with Fire, is now available. If you aren’t familiar with the first book, go and get it at once. This volume is even more mesmerising than the first: and ever since Kenneth Branagh’s Wallander wept buckets on the telly, nobody finds the Swedishness of it all in any way strange. So why are you still reading this? Hello?
