Recent audio books
Charlotte Moore
The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills (read by Greg Wagland, Isis Audio Books, 6 cassettes, 6 hours 45 mins unabridged) is a novel — possibly the only novel — about fencing. Not glamorous fencing with swords; fencing with wire and wooden posts. Two Scottish fencers, Tam and Richie, are the beasts who need restrain- ing. Their lives, monotonous as a stretch of wire, are punctuated by brutal events as swift and sudden as the driving-in of fence posts. At first it seems that their foreman, the narrator, civilised in his Englishness, will be both their restrainer and their judge, but faced with the obdurate rituals of Tam and Richie he is as grass in the wind. Magnus Mills draws up a self-referential world of impenetrable illog- ic, like a comic Kafka. Greg Wagland's crescendo-free rendition allows this brilliantly structured novel to speak for itself.
In Triangulation (read by Sean Barrett, Isis Audio Books, 6 cassettes, 10 hours unabridged), Phil Whittaker uses maps rather as Magnus Mills uses fences. Three young employees at the Directorate of Overseas Surveys work on 'triangulating' Tanganyika. Plodding, stay-at-home John does it all from his desk; unreliable, sexy Laurence goes out there and lives it. In theory both men love Helen, who is strug- gling to escape from her oppressive father and from the frustrations of being an intel- ligent young woman in 1959, but this love- diagram falsifies the true map of their emotions. Really, John loves (and hates) Laurence, Helen loves (and hates) Lau- rence, Laurence loves (and hates) himself. Triangulation shares much with Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day in its concern with a particularly English kind of repression and false interpretation, and in its sense of the poignancy of paths not taken, but John, the main character, is such a competent study in dreariness tinged with malice that I soon didn't want to hear any more about him. This is an intelligent book, but where- as The Restraint of Beasts is gloriously con- trived to the point where the contrivance is what it's all about, Triangulation is con- trived in a way that weakens the emotional clout it is undoubtedly meant to have. Sean Barrett delivers the male voices successfully, but he makes poor Helen sound silly.
I was looking forward to With Your Crooked Heart by Helen Dunmore (read by Janet Maw, Isis Audio Books, 6 cassettes, 8 hours 40 mins, unabridged). I love the fleshiness of Dunmore's prose, her similes that are at once sumptuous and exact. I was surprised to find how poorly her qualities translate to audio. This was partly due to the choice of reader. Janet Maw's voice is delicate, ladylike, almost prissy, which would be fine in a different context, but to me felt like Sir Cliff starring in Wuthering Heights. There is another problem; books on tape need to be driven by action, per- haps because of the slowness of listening. With Helen Dunmore, 'what happens next' is not a strong motivator, because the important things have already happened or will never happen, or happen inside the head or the heart or the loins of one of the very small number of characters.
Drums of Morning (read by Martyn Read, Isis Audio Books Reminiscence Series, 8 cassettes, 9 hours 10 mins, unabridged),Vernon Scannell's account of his first 18 years, is a great success on tape. Autobiographies, by definition, have a sin- gle narrative voice, which makes for smooth listening. Scannell is a poet, but his prose is muscular and unfanciful. He describes the emotional, intellectual, aes- thetic and (to a lesser extent) financial des- titution of his family life with a straightforwardness that makes its horrors all the more imaginable. Scannell's father, a small-town photographer between the wars, was a sadist, his mother a frigid miser. Yet the life-force was so strong in Scannell and his brother that with the help of music, books and girls they manage to break out into the light. Drums of Morning puts the bad old days emphatically in their place, and Martyn Read's narration suits it well.
One of the joys of books on tape is that they allow you an easy fix of less easy authors. There was a time, pre-mother- hood, when I devoured Conrad; Victory had me at fever-pitch, I raced through Nos- tromo on the bus, I wept my heart out over Under Western Eyes. Those days are gone, along with lying in bed all morning and putting the world to rights in the early hours, So Typhoon (Cover to Cover, 3 cas- settes, 3 hours 15 mins, unabridged), well read by Roger Allam, was pure pleasure in three neat tapes, an easily accessed reminder of how capacious an English sen- tence can be.
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