I am waking earlier and getting up later these days. Once the dawn chorus begins, I make tea with the bedside kettle and prop myself up to turn the pages of Birdsong (Quadrille, £30) in search of what I think I am hearing. Then while gazing at a beautiful photograph of dunnock or blackbird, robin or wren, I find the appropriate page number on the digital counter built in to the side of the book and press a button to check if my hunch is right. Then I read about its habits in the informative text, while repeating the call a few times. This is a huge improvement on average birdcalls audiobook’s short oral description followed by a sound recording. Nor have I ever possessed a book so instantly coveted by visitors of all ages. It has been a best-seller in Sweden, and, adapted as it now is to describing 150 British and Irish birds, will no doubt be a best-seller here as well.
With summer's arrival, I have enjoyed listening again to Tarka The Otter(Audiogo, 6 CDs, 6hrs 15 mins, £21.50, or audible.uk.download), especially as Henry Williamson’s supple and deceptively simple prose is read by Michael Maloney, one of the most intimate and mellifluous of narrators. My six-year-old grandson was instantly gripped, though you need to bear in mind that Williamson offers nature red in tooth and claw, and that Tarka is not a cuddly chap.
Arthur Ransome is best known as the author of Swallows and Amazons but the decade or more he spent in Russia and the Baltic States before he settled down to write sailing yarns continues to fascinate. His great-nephew Hugh Lupton, one of Britain’s most inventive and distinguished performance storytellers, has now recorded a ‘praise song’ to his famous relation, The Homing Stone (1 CD, c. 1 hr, £12 from www.hughlupton.com). The title refers to a stone (‘grey and green and speckled like a curlew’s egg’, that Lupton imagines Ransome finding on Coniston Water’s Peel Island and clutching as a talisman through all the dangers that beset him and his beloved Russian wife-to-be on their escape from Russia in the autumn of 1919. Lupton tells the story in haunting alliterative rhyme, using the same wit and exaggeration with which Ransome embellished it, adding subtle references to the Caucasian fairy tales that Ransome published as Old Peter’s Russian Tales (‘Troubles always come in threes’) and many affectionate jokes. Chris Wood’s music is romping, ribald and romantic by turn
Browsing through Audible’s historical novels section in search of some easy listening while ski-loping in Norway (it gets lonely when you are as slow as I am), I was startled to discover a Tudor trilogy that I had never heard of, by Ford Madox Ford. The Fifth Queen (Audible.co.uk download, c.19 hrs, £23, or £7.99 for subscribers) is an utterly unexpected approach to Katherine Howard, usually dismissed as a feather-headed wanton. Ford’s slim, sombrely-clad Katherine is straight out of a Pre-Raphaelite portrait. She is loyal to a fault to old friends, dedicated to restoring the Roman Catholic faith, educated in classical learning by the humanist Nicholas Udall, and universally loved by her maids. She makes Henry an ideal wife, until the machinations of the protestant faction and her own unnatural family bring her down with a tissue of lies. Ford’s writing is that of an impressionist painter, building up detail on detail until scenes stay etched in the mind’s eye. His dialogue sounds brilliantly true to period, infused with latin quips, and reminiscent of Shakespeare’s rhythms and phrases: his words, wonderfully projected by Ralph Cosham, echo in your head like music.
As, too, do the Bard’s best-known bits voiced by Ben Crystal and other actors in Shakespeare’s Original Pronunciation (British Library, 1 CD, c. 1 hr, £10), a fascinating collection of poems and lines from the plays spoken as they would have been four hundred years ago: they become satisfyingly classless, and new insights on even the most famous lines emerge. The CD is accompanied by an essay by David Crystal explaining how ‘OP’ is established.
Patrick de Witt must surely have read Portis’ True Grit before writing The Sisters Brothers (Whole Story, 8 CDs, 9 hrs, £16.99, or download from audible.co.uk). His laconic, stately prose, full of haunting asides (‘our blood is the same, we just use it differently’) and visceral episodes of casual cruelty more often than not turned into knockabout comedy, gains tremendous panache when heard aloud, especially when voiced with intelligent energy by William Hope. But the form of the book is closer kin to a meandering Arthurian romance, in which two brothers-in-arms wander in the wilderness encountering sorcerers and and slaying foes with their snickernacking blades. Eli and Charles Sisters are hired guns doing the will of the mysterious Commodore during the Californian Gold Rush, but the catharctic events alter both their life style and their relationship to each other.
