Recent books on tape
Charlotte Moore
It is hard to avoid The End of the Affair these days, but for anyone not sated with Graham Greene's examination of faith and faithlessness, I recommend Michael Kitchen's reading. The timbre of his voice does justice to its intelligent, drab intensity. This rather unvisual and eventless novel transfers well to audio; you feel as if Ben- drix is talking inside your head, which is an interesting if uncomfortable experience.
The subject matter of Vikram Seth's An Equal Music overlaps with that of The End of the Affair. In both the narrator is gifted, solitary, passionate, destructive, obsessed by a woman who is set apart — for Seth's Julia, by her deafness, for Greene's Sarah, by her faith, which is almost as much of an affliction. Both men are almost like stalkers as they zigzag through London in pursuit of the beloved. Both are trapped and stunted by their jealousy, but both are granted a kind of resolution through loss. Seth resorts to a corny way of breaking the deadlock — the bequest of a dead bene- factress — while Greene's conclusion is more subtle. An Equal Music is delicate and thoughtful, and it is read carefully by Alan Bates, but it is curiously uninvolving, and all but devoid of the humour and scatty energy that characterise A Suitable Boy. Some of the relevant music — a few bars here and there — is included, which is helpful for ignoramuses like me, but must be irritating for a truly musical person.
Turgenev's First Love is a small master- piece, an agonisingly exact description of the transition from boyhood idealism to adult awareness. Rose Tremain, in The Way I Found Her, covers similar rites-of- passage territory, and her Lewis Little is as sensitive and complete a portrait of an ado- lescent boy as one could hope to find. David Troughton, who narrates the Tur- genev, wisely eschews accents, whereas Samuel West, Tremain's reader, gamely but misguidedly takes on the Scottish mother and Valentina, the Russian femme fatale. The effect is to expose the weakness in this largely admirable novel. The entirely believable Lewis is enmeshed with Valenti- na in a plot which makes one expect to be told, 'And then I woke up and it was all a dream.' West's accents, unfortunately, enhance the ludicrousness, though he con- veys the stickiness of a passion-filled Parisian summer very well.
Roddy Doyle reads A Star Called Henry himself, and there are many episodes as improbably dramatic as Tremain's dénoue- ment, but Doyle gets away with it, and more. Henry, the Dublin slum child who bears a charmed life, is the 20th-century cousin of ancient Irish heroes like Cuchu- lain or Finn MaCuil. Doyle uses folkloric traditions to make imaginative sense of recent history, and the result is most palat- able.
In Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd also subjects historical facts to the alchemical workings of the creative imagination. Hawksmoor is a modern detective pulled into a 17th-century tangle of architecture and Satanism. Ackroyd's London is a dark, unstable maze constructed on half-hidden layers of plagues and crimes. Derek Jaco- bi's superb reading sends shivers down the spine. I cooked as I listened, and found myself taking care not to stir my mixture widdcrshins.
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. Read by Michael Kitchen. Chivers. Unabridged. Six cassettes. 6 hours 27 minutes.
An Equal Music by Vikram Seth. Read by Alan Bates. Orion Audio, Abridged. Four cassettes. 6 hours 25 minutes.
First Love by Ivan Turgenev. Read by David Troughton. Cover to Cover. Unabridged. Two cassettes. 2 hours 40 minutes.
The Way I Found Her by Rose Tremain. Read by Samuel West. Chivers. Unabridged. Ten cassettes. 12 hours 19 minutes.
A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle. Read by the author. Random House Audio Books, Abridged. Four cassettes. 6 hours.
Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd. Read by Derek Jacobi. Chivers. Unabridged. Eight cassettes. 11 hours 19 minutes.
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