Armchair Audies Category Report: Solo Narration - Male

The Audies are this week! You know what that means, dear readers: much Armchair Audies posting about them now, but then I'll shush a bit for a year. (Ha. I will not.)

Here's the slate of nominees for Solo Narration - Male:

BEING THERE Jerzy Kosinski Read by Dustin Hoffman (Audible, Inc.) Read the review
THE ABSOLUTIST John Boyne Read by Michael Maloney (Tantor Media) Read the review
BEAUTIFUL RUINS Jess Walter Read by Edoardo Ballerini (Harper Audio) Read the review
THE END OF THE AFFAIR Graham Greene Read by Colin Firth (Audible, Inc.) Read the review
THE TAO OF POOH Benjamin Hoff Read by Simon Vance (Tantor Media) Read the review

Now, I've already commented on each of these separately (Being There, The Absolutist, Beautiful Ruins, The End of the Affair, The Tao of Pooh), so I won't go too much into it. But I'll say this: we're looking here for "distinction in audiobooks" here. And for me, one of those parameters is, do I think this is more compelling than the text alone would be? Another: does the narrator do so good a job that I start looking for more narration by him (or her, but that's n/a in this category) and pick up audiobooks I wouldn't necessarily have looked at otherwise?

Beautiful Ruins succeeds magnificently on both scores. I actually started this book on paper, and didn't

get very into it before the library due date, so I returned it. But it was part of The Rooster competition, so I went back to it in audio, and oh, baby. It's grand. Ballerini brings such life to Walter's text (which I should have given a fairer chance, as it's quite magnificent and you should read or listen to it if you haven't already.) So Ballerini is my pick for the win, and it will be a very well-deserved one. (It's also up for Audiobook of the Year, and I'm expecting it to take that, too.)

2nd place: Maloney reading The Absolutist. It's a great book, very well read.

Then Firth reading The End of the Affair, then Hoffman reading Being There, and finally - and I know this is a shocking thing, but the book: blah and Piglet: gah - Vance reading The Tao of Pooh.

(Sorry, Simon Vance! You're still my #1 audio crush! Read different things and I'm there.)

In Russia, Books Read (to) You

The House of Special Purpose by John Boyne
(Blackstone Audio, 2013)
Format: Audio download via AudiobookJukebox.com's review program (narrated by Stefan Rudnicki)

From Goodreads: "From the author of The Absolutist, a propulsive novel of the Russian Revolution and the fate of the Romanovs.
 
Part love story, part historical epic, part tragedy, The House of Special Purpose illuminates an empire at the end of its reign. Eighty-year-old Georgy Jachmenev is haunted by his past—a past of death, suffering, and scandal that will stay with him until the end of his days. Living in England with his beloved wife, Zoya, Georgy prepares to make one final journey back to the Russia he once knew and loved, the Russia that both destroyed and defined him. As Georgy remembers days gone by, we are transported to St. Petersburg, to the Winter Palace of the czar, in the early twentieth century—a time of change, threat, and bloody revolution. As Georgy overturns the most painful stone of all, we uncover the story of the house of special purpose."


What? Another Boyne audiobook? Didn't I just do one of those? Yep, and I was pretty taken with it, so when I got the chance to listen to this one, I grabbed it. And what did I say about Boyne last time? He loves to explore people in crisis and identity and the difficulty of changing your role in the world. And history. And boy, howdy, does he do it this time, too. This time, his subjects are the Romanovs and WWI and an unassuming kid named Georgy who ends up leading, for a time, a pretty extraordinary life. 

That extraordinary time - working in the Winter Palace as guard/companion to young hemophiliac Tzarevich Alexei while still a teen himself - marked Georgy for the next five or six decades as he and his wife make a life together in Paris and later in London, where he worked for years for the British Library. (This is what we call a clue to the fact that we should side with this guy. He delves into books.) And he's pretty great - intuitive, intelligent, devoted, often swept along but never without trying to analyze his place in the flood. His wife is more of a cipher, but since Georgy loves her, that's fine. Their grandson is the most dynamic character, a spark who weaves in and out of the narrative whenever it's in the present day.

I enjoyed the atmosphere Boyne presented of life in Russia a century ago - it is a world both strange and familiar. I mean, I had a few tidbits in my brain about the Romanov dynasty, the connections to other European royalty, the mysterious princess Anastasia, that weird Rasputin dude. But it isn't something I've read a lot about, and I liked the way Boyne drew them.

Still, with all the good, there was something just a little distancing me from this book. It didn't fully make sense to me until the last line, at which point I thought, "Oh, he just wanted to write that line, so he constructed a novel to support it." Which isn't the worst way for an author to envision a book, but the underlayers in this case weren't quite stable enough. I wish there'd been more to Zoya besides constant tragedy, and that some of the subplots that were clearly intended to provide emotional resonance had been fleshier.

The audio - well, one thing for sure: Rudnicki has a lovely Russian-accented baritone. Unfortunately it was too slowly paced for me - I didn't relish the idea of listening to that deliberate hitting of accents for 15 hours, so I opted for 1.5x speed playback, which was better. (Still slow, though.) His females were all pretty much the same voice, and there wasn't a lot of differentiation between Georgy's narrative and his dialogue, which is one of my audiobook pet peeves. It's not so awful or anything, but it wasn't the kind of narration I was itching to get back to, and combined with a similarly non-itchy book, this wasn't the biggest of successes for me. Alas.

No Thanks for the Memories

The Absolutist by John Boyne
(Doubleday, 2011 - audio Tantor Media, 2012)
Format: Audio CDs via library (narrated by Michael Maloney)

From Goodreads: "It is September 1919: twenty-one-year-old Tristan Sadler takes a train from London to Norwich to deliver a package of letters to the sister of Will Bancroft, the man he fought alongside during the Great War. But the letters are not the real reason for Tristan's visit. He can no longer keep a secret and has finally found the courage to unburden himself of it. As Tristan recounts the horrific details of what to him became a senseless war, he also speaks of his friendship with Will-from their first meeting on the training grounds at Aldershot to their farewell in the trenches of northern France. The intensity of their bond brought Tristan happiness and self-discovery as well as confusion and unbearable pain. The Absolutist is a masterful tale of passion, jealousy, heroism, and betrayal set in one of the most gruesome trenches of France during World War I. This novel will keep listeners on the edge of their seats until its most extraordinary and unexpected conclusion, and it will stay with them long after they've finished."

John Boyne (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, etc.) loves war. Well, okay, that's unfair. He loves to explore people in crisis and identity and the difficulty of changing your role in the world. And history. So war is a great venue for his writing, what with the undiscriminating nature of bullets and the pressure cooker applied to teenage personalities, and all that. Plus loss and sorrow and decades of memory for the survivors.

Another thing about Boyne: like Ishiguro (and my husband and I) he went to UEA in Norwich for a Masters in creative writing. (We were a lot more contemporaneous with Boyne.) Somehow I didn't know that, but as soon as Tristan starts wandering around Tombland and drinking local brews and watching shoppers in the rectangle of awnings at the open-air market, I suspected. It was a lot of fun to revisit those streets with Tristan (I wish he'd made it onto the Unthank Road at some point. Because: a road named Unthank!) 

Okay, that walk down Memory Lane aside (and could I be more literal? R & I were talking just the other day about our early courtship walks along the Unthank Road), there's a lot for the non-Norwichian to enjoy in this novel. Tristan is at once knowable and intriguing, a man struggling with his identity, his actions, his relationship with his family, and his place in the war. He's only 21, but after enlisting at 17 and serving several years in the trenches "over there," his soul is an old man's. But his heart is still as precariously confused and frightened as it was when his father kicked him out at 16 for transgressions that clearly have to do with his unreciprocated feelings towards his best friend. Once he joins the army, he meets Will, whose death eventually leads Tristan to meeting Will's sister Marian in Norwich. The army training camp friendship becomes both a trial and a joy to Tristan. Will, meanwhile, is struggling with entirely different but equally soul-shattering issues, and his combination of courage and callousness makes him a pretty absorbing guy to get to know. One of the many interesting angles in this novel are the overlapping but not identical portraits of Will as explained by Marian and by Tristan. I love the slight shifts and the gaps.

This is another in the Audies category of Solo Narration - Male, and my first experience of Michael Maloney's narration. I wasn't wowed. He was good for Tristan, other than my wish for a touch more emotional vulnerability when discussing the events of his early teens, but every word out of Marian's mouth grated on me. Not that the character wasn't somewhat brittle and acerbic, but the text made it clear that she was also quiet and tender at times, and you'd never guess it from Maloney's tone. I also had problems with the sound mixing in this - listening to the CDs in a couple of environments (home and car) I constantly had to adjust the volume and the bass to make up for inexplicable variances. It so rarely happens that I need to do anything like this that it bears mentioning now, and it made me question the nomination in this case.

Great, great book. Read it (on paper.)