The Sleeper and the Spindle by Neil Gaiman

The Sleeper and the Spindle by Neil Gaiman

(HarperCollins, 2015)

Read by Julian Rhind-Tutt, Lara Pulver, Niamh Walsh, Adjoa Andoh, Peter Forbes, John Sessions, Michael Maloney, Sean Baker, Jane Collingwood, Clare Corbett, Allan Corduner, Katherine Kingsley, and Daniel Weyman

This title is a nominee in the 2016 Audie Awards: Young Adult Category

From Goodreads: “A thrillingly reimagined fairy tale from the truly magical combination of author Neil Gaiman and illustrator Chris Riddell – weaving together a sort-of Snow White and an almost Sleeping Beauty with a thread of dark magic, which will hold readers spellbound from start to finish.

On the eve of her wedding, a young queen sets out to rescue a princess from an enchantment. She casts aside her fine wedding clothes, takes her chain mail and her sword and follows her brave dwarf retainers into the tunnels under the mountain towards the sleeping kingdom. This queen will decide her own future – and the princess who needs rescuing is not quite what she seems. Twisting together the familiar and the new, this perfectly delicious, captivating and darkly funny tale shows its creators at the peak of their talents.”

As a mad-for-audio person, it’s anathema to read a book by Neil Gaiman if an audio read by the author exists. He’s a masterful storyteller, and hearing his actual voice as well as the voice of his novel simultaneously is a true pleasure.

So it’s a mark against a Gaiman audio when he’s not the narrator. Unfair? Sure. But he’s the one who spins delightful cosmoses as he narrates, so he can’t blame me.

Now I’ve set forth my prejudices, you’ll understand why this perfectly good full cast audio of The Sleeper and the Spindle didn’t make my heart sing. The cast is fine, there’s nothing wrong with them. They take joy in being ominous and drawing you into the darkness, which is as it should be. But they’re not Gaiman.

The story itself is exactly as dark and gleeful as a Gaiman reinterpretation of the Sleeping Beauty story should be. Trolls, witch/queen hybrids, spiders that weave even while everyone else sleeps – it has it all.

Armchair Audies 2014: Narration By Author

I listened, I considered, I posted, I judged. Now I'm gonna give the rundown of who wins (IMO) this year's Audie Award for best Narration by Author or Authors. 

The nominees:

I realize I didn't do a post back in October when I listened to David Rakoff's narration of his Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish (Random House Audio/Books on Tape, 2013)
I did review it on Goodreads, though, so I'll reiterate: Lots of fun to listen to Rakoff's narration of his novel. A few of the characters broke free of the rhyme scheme and took on some life, and in general I was delighted and impressed with what he made language do to serve the story and his couplets.

I did write here about the others - Billy Crystal, Shirley Jones, Grace Coddington, Valerie Harper, and Neil Gaiman.

And as I said before - sincerely believing that my bias towards fiction isn't skewing my opinion too much - the celebrity books aren't the winners here. Crystal's is the closest - his narration is funny and fluid, well worth the time. The other three (Coddington in particular) are fine if you were already interested in the subjects, and generally competent, but nothing to go out of your way for.

Rakoff has a deserved sentimental bump here. He read the book in his last days, and that is apparent in his well-trained, familiar, wry voice. It still captivates and it's delightful to let it wash over you. But that wash, combined with the rhyming couplets that lean towards cleverness rather than content, keeps this from being a real story-telling experience.

Gaiman, though, as I noted, is the gold standard of authors narrating their books. He sustains tension and mystery and wonder and pain throughout, entirely transporting the listener to the wonderful world he created.

The two who might wrest it from Gaiman are Crystal because of his celebrity and gift with character voices, or Rakoff because of his tragic early death and beloved but failing voice. But going purely on 'this is the best narration from open to close,' Gaiman should win the Audie.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

(William Morrow, 2013)

Format: audio via Audible (read by Neil Gaiman)

From Goodreads: “Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.

A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Laneis told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark."

Unlike the rest of the world, I thoroughly enjoy Neil Gaiman. (In case my dry tone doesn’t convey, I know that the rest of the world agrees.) Ocean is his new novel for adults, although the story primarily takes place when the narrator is a young boy. We get cats magical and sometimes malevolent, a clearly malevolent nanny who once was a worm or perhaps an evil spirit, and a strong family of witchy women who may not be as straightforward as they appear.

It all weaves a strong web around the reader, and Gaiman’s superb narrative skills only add to the spell. He really is the gold standard of writers narrating their own work, and I’ll always go for audio when I’m looking at a new Gaiman. (Or rereading one from my pre-audiobook-obsession-days.) (As long as it's not illustrated.) So although this wasn’t my very very favorite of his (that would be Anansi Boys), there is everything good here to recommend it. With everything he does, jumping from genre to genre and all kinds of concepts, there is always something just so very Gaiman about his work that guarantees I’ll be absorbed and enchanted.

Ye Gods

Three God novels today. Well, not entirely, but that's what the titles claim. 

I wasn't at all sure about Lyndsay Faye's newest, The Gods of Gotham, when I started it. Set in New York City in 1845, in the midst of the potato famine and the resultant mass influx of Irish into the city, I was just a little put off by the 'let's analyze the ethnic interrelationships' of it all. But I gave it a chance. (Well, I returned the print version, but then I checked out the audio narrated by Steven Boyer, and was absorbed entirely.) It's not just that Boyer's voice - just tense enough, with a sweet, sad note that suited Tim Wilde's story perfectly - made the story better, though this is one of those cases that I recommend audio if you're at all an audio person. But once Faye's scene is set - Timothy is shoe-horned into a job as a copper star, the new police force for the city, by his larger-than-life brother Valentine - the novel really takes off. A blood-soaked ten-year-old girl fleeing the brothel where she was raised literally runs into Tim after the end of his patrol, and through the tissue of her lies, a truth emerges: the unmarked graves of nineteen carved up child prostitutes ('kinchen mabs' in the flash vernacular that pervades the book, most of which is incorporated without a lot of blatant translation exposition.) As Tim re-imagines his job to involve not just the stopping but also the solving of crimes, he runs alongside and sometimes afoul of a variety of well-drawn characters - the minister and his lovely daughter, the mob of newspaper sellers, the Irish being courted by Valentine's Democratic Party, Val himself, with his many moods and vices. It's a rich and complex world, well worth visiting, even as it evolves. 

I first read Neil Gaiman's American Gods about six years ago, and I was immediately on board with his vision of Old World deities fighting to maintain their place among the powerhouses of the modern age, with technology's wunderkind doing his best to stop Odin from bringing his forces together. Our hero, Shadow, is released from jail a few days early to attend his wife's funeral, and thus begins a journey that gets just a little crazier every step of the way. Anyway. During my Armchair Audies work, I often saw the 10th anniversary edition of American Gods mentioned - a full cast audio, revised and updated by Gaiman - and it took the prize for audiobook of the year. So I got it, and listened, and yep, that would be one well-deserved prize-winner right there. The cast is clearly having a lot of fun playing leprechauns and trickster spiders and carbon-copy men in black suits, and why wouldn't they? They have such an immersive text to work with. It's fully capable of enhancing twenty hours of your life.

I am still captivated by Laurie R. King's Mary Russell series, and The God of the Hive is absolutely no exception. I've read ten books in the series over the past five months, and my appetite for Russell and Holmes is still so strong that I'm beginning to experience anxiety that King has only published two more so far. That'll take me into next month, but what then? How will I slake my desire for all things Holmesian? (That's not a real question. There are a plethora of options, including the first novel by the aforementioned Lyndsay Faye, but I don't know that anything will really satisfy in the same way.) So, at this point, Russell and Holmes are married, and have been through trials across the globe. They are recently returned to England, where they meet (in The Language of Bees) Holmes's son by Irene Adler. Damian is a bit older than his stepmother, but his relationship with Holmes is far newer. He brings trouble along with his presence in their lives - for himself, his wife, and his young daughter.  Holmes and Russell, of course, jump into the fray, and as this book opens, they are on separate - and dangerous - journeys to protect the various new members of their family. They both meet with new associates who they hope will become allies, as they progress together via cryptic messages and their sure knowledge of how the other is likely to act. There is whimsy and wit and a certain amount of ripping apart of the known to get to even deeper truths. Have I mentioned I love this series? I love this series.