Reviews of Award Winners and Nominees
*reviews © AudioFile Magazine (1999-2007)
The Prestige
by Christopher Priest
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Audie Award nominee and Earphone winner 2007 |
Priest's remarkable novel won the World Fantasy Award in 1996. Now it's been produced as an audiobook every bit as remarkable. Simon Vance provides the voices of two late-nineteenth-century warring professional stage magicians: Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier. The entire novel is told through journal entries by these two prestidigitators. Hearing Vance mellifluously pronounce words like "prestidigitator" as if they were part of his normal speech makes the book worth the time, but there is so much more. These characters are shrouded in mystery from the very first minutes, and Vance expertly portrays these two men as their lives (and their tricks) are slowly revealed.
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The Warden
by Anthony Trollope
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Audie Award nominee and Earphone winner 2007 |
The incomparable Simon Vance parses Anthony Trollope's famously circumlocutory, phrase-filled style with aplomb in this first of the Barsetshire novels. In it, we follow Mr. Harding, the kindhearted warden of an old men's poorhouse, who is caught between his ambitious, conservative son-in-law and a reform-minded young man who wants to become his second son-in-law. Trouble ensues when the hapless Mr. Harding tries to avoid unpleasantness by agreeing with everyone. Vance's narrative skills help modern listeners hear the elegance of Trollope's writing and understand the writer's skewering wit. And his ability to create character-revealing accents, from the illiterate grumble of a local farmer to the nasal bray of a highborn clergyman, makes the nineteenth century live in our ears.
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The Book of Samson
by David Maine
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Earphone winner 2007 |
This is a fleshed-out story of Samson that you won't find in the Bible. Believing that he is a messenger of God, Samson slaughters and maims hundreds of the enemies of his people and sleeps with countless women as the body count rises. Delilah's persistent attempts to get Samson to reveal the secret of his strength give an appreciation for why he eventually gives in to her wheedling. It is clear that Simon Vance becomes the character of Samson, with all his frailties, naïveté, and sharp observations of the world around him. This great performance has everything a listener could wish for--excellent tempo, believable voices, and a tone of conviction that makes one believe that the events and dialogue in the book are truly what took place.
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A Spot of Bother
by Mark Haddon
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Earphone Winner 2007
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Be prepared to laugh and groan out loud as you listen to the machinations of retired Englishman George Hall and his family. In his previous novel, THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME, Haddon managed to make autism fascinating, funny, and heartwarming. Now he takes on today's family and produces a comic tale of love, need, and misunderstanding. Simon Vance inhabits everyone with class--as well as character-revealing accents and terrific, clear pacing. He gives us ponderously serious George; gay son, Jamie, and his leather-jacketed lover--yes, Vance lets us hear the leather; confused daughter, Katie, and her--horrors!--working-class fiancé. This is an audiobook to savor.
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Theft
by Peter Carey
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Earphone Winner 2007
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Peter Carey's characters are always dodgy and unreliable. In Theft, Michael Boone is a once-famous Australian painter now out of fashion and fresh out of prison. He lives in a backwater, taking care of a former collector's property and his autistic savant brother, Hugh. Beautiful, manipulative Marlene wants to resurrect Michael's career. But is it all a cover for getting a missing painting out of the country? Simon Vance develops a hardscrabble Australian accent for Michael that is completely authentic, with his belligerence, arrogance, and obsession perfectly rendered; we understand Michael, but we don't like him much. Vance deals with the significant challenge of making Hugh believable--both "slow-witted" and linguistically playful--by developing a booming voice that expresses both independence and impairment.
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Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell
(reading as Richard Matthews, with Scott Brick, Cassandra Campbell, Kim Mai Guest et al )
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Audie Award Nominee 2006
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The foppish English composer living abroad in the '30s, the vanity publisher imprisoned in a Scottish nursing home, the flinty female journalist exposing corporate malfeasance--these are three story lines from the six tales Mitchell weaves together in a sequence of literary forms (journal, letters, testament, first-person narrative). Each performer reads a section, but the packaging gives no clue as to who does what. The tales are tenuously connected, and each but the last futuristic episode is interrupted, only to be continued later in reverse order. Confusing? Yes, but the narration is uniformly excellent, and somehow it all hangs together. There's no going back; individual episodes are unidentified on the discs. The publisher gets kudos for bringing this fine, puzzling, and original novel to the audio format.*
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Market Forces - 2006 Audie Winner!
by Richard K Morgan
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Audie Award Nominee 2006
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In this bizarre tale of the near future, the world has devolved into a Mad Max horror show in which businessmen are required to kill their competition. Simon Vance could have taken this story line either too seriously or too lightly but instead performs the work with the perfect amount of flexibility to make the listener empathize with a cadre of corporate killers. And even root for them. Vance, a British actor, brings his stylish accent into play for descriptions of lovemaking, as well as play-by-play rundowns of vicious battles on the boulevards of Britain and its boardrooms, without making the novel drift into farce. There's nothing funny here, and that's good.*
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Fairy Tales
by Hans Christian Andersen
(reading as Richard Matthews with Kate Reading)
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Audie Award Nominee 2006
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For listeners who haven't heard the classic Andersen fairly tales since their childhood, this collection from a new translation is a joy. All the famous stories are there, including "The Little Mermaid," "The Ugly Duckling," and "The Emperor's New Clothes." His later works also are included, such as "The Ice Maiden" and "The Wood Nymph." But listeners, especially parents planning to play this for children, should be aware that some of the stories are a little violent. For example, an oafish farmer kills his grandmother because he thinks it will bring him great wealth. But the violence is not graphic and can be explained to young listeners. Narrators Kate Reading and Richard Matthews alternate stories, a strategy that provides nice variety. Both are solid and engaging.*
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The Devil of Nanking
by Mo Hayder
(reading with Josephine Bailey)
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Earphone Winner 2006
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This novel of wartime atrocities by the Japanese in China benefits from the narration of two accomplished narrators. Josephine Bailey is haunting as Grey, a young English woman who is obsessed with something she read as a young child about the 1937 massacre in Nanking. Grey is determined to track down the truth of what happened and goes in search of a survivor who is now a visiting professor in Japan. Simon Vance is the calm, introspective, but equally obsessed, professor, who reads from his journal of the days leading up to and subsequent to the massacre. The two threads of the plot are kept appropriately disconnected by Bailey's narrating both sides of the dialogue between Grey and the professor.*
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The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Master and Man
by Leo Tolstoy
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Earphone Winner
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Some of history's finest fiction is brought to riveting life by reader Simon Vance. Brilliantly performed, saturated with real emotional depth, this is an unforgettable listen. Tolstoy on death is a vital addition to any audiobook collection, and these classic tales work both as entertainment and inspiration. Only the hardest heart would fail to be moved by these incisive stories of human dignity and death. Few writers reveal the human soul as well as Tolstoy, and few readers could provide such a worthy voicing of this work. Vance manages to transcend translation and ear to make Tolstoy very current indeed. Worthy of not only listening, but relistening over the years, this refined recording is full of nuance and wisdom, wit and sorrow.
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Treasure Island
by Robert Louis Stevenson
(reading as Richard Matthews)
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Audie Award Nominee 2004
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Editorial Review
Since its publication in 1883, TREASURE ISLAND has remained one of the great
tales of mutiny. Its primary malefactor, Long John Silver, has become synonymous
with evil. The story is told through the eyes of Jim Hawkins, a young man
who first encounters tales of buried treasure while working at his father's
tavern. The action moves from the Admiral Benbow Inn to the high seas and
on to secret islands. Never did virtue so reward a young man as Hawkins has
been rewarded, made immortal by the gifts of an immortal storyteller.
Unfortunately this is no longer available from Books on Tape.
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Austerlitz
by W G Sebald
(reading as Richard Matthews)
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Audie Award nominee 2003
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Much is gained, but more is lost in this audio version of the last novel of W.G. Sebald. The lure of discovering who we are through memory in the face of its inherent repression and distortion over time, the nightmare of history (especially the Holocaust), and the human desire to collect disparate facts and information to ward off meaninglessness are some of the major themes of this unorthodox novel (if it is one). The long, beautifully constructed translated sentences are reminiscent of Dickens and Poe, and narrator Richard Matthews gives them his full attention with a crisp and self-assured, but necessarily detached, British voice. The rhythms and poetry of the language are thus fully accessible to the listener, though the vignettes, asides, digressions, and elaborations, which make up a large part of the book, fly by at a dizzying pace. Also, the many photos and graphics that document the places described in Jacques Austerlitz's wanderings and serve as counterbalances to the text's ephemerality are, of course, not available through audio. Through no fault of the narrator, this book needs to be held in hand.*
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The Piano Tuner
by Daniel Mason
(reading as Richard Matthews)
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Earphone Winner 2003
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Daniel Mason combines Britain's attempt at pacification of the Shan states in 1886 with one man's mystical journey. The British War Office sends piano tuner Edgar Drake to Burma to tune Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll's rare Erard grand piano. Drake's long trip from England to Burma is fraught with strange meetings, bandits, and tribal uprisings. Deeply affected by the florid, tropical landscape and a beautiful woman, Drake is lulled into Carroll's visionary dream of peace through music and art. Mason's delicate prose ensnares. Richard Matthews delivers an astonishing performance. His characters are as meticulously crafted as Burmese-carved ivory miniatures. Matthews handles Asian pronunciations without hesitation in accents absolutely convincing. The dialogue soars. Mason's plot fascinates and surprises, while Matthews's performance is a tour de force.*
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Shackleton's Way
by Margot Morrell and Stephanie Capparell
(reading as Richard Matthews)
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Audie Award Nominee 2002
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Biographies of great leaders usually let the reader sort out the qualities worth emulating. Now, with the help of a narrator able to keep a good pace and provide a pleasant, conversational style, we can efficiently learn how a sea captain, using humor, generosity, intelligence, strength, and compassion, led his crew to survive an Antarctic ordeal that would have conquered most mortals. Richard Matthews subtly changes his tone as the sea story digresses into "leadership lessons for the modern," and we enjoy a little instruction. This audiobook's universal advice would be of value to everyone hoping to inspire and lead people, either in a family or a business.*
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Food of the Gods
by H.G. Wells
(reading as Robert Whitfield)
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Earphone winner 2001
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H.G. Wells's tale of the end of the world as we know it is an entertaining fable, in which lawyers and politicians battle giant animals and giant humans before an inevitable military confrontation. Robert Whitfield gives a merry air to the adventure, creating just the right attitudes for each of the many characters and shifting tone deftly with the writing. Depending on the circumstances, he conveys a sense of wonder or a nonchalance that makes giant rats seem perfectly ordinary. First published in 1904, this satirical novel holds up well today, and the reading makes listening something to anticipate.*
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Dead Ground
by Gerald Seymour
(reading as Robert Whitfield)
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Earphone winner 2001
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Robert Whitfield superbly performs this exciting spy novel whose action takes place in post-Cold War Europe. The plot centers around a woman's expedition to destroy an ex-East German secret police official who years ago murdered her lover, a young agent. But on an even more interesting level, the book portrays the struggle of Joshua Mantel, the woman's aging and seedy partner in her mission, to overcome his self-loathing over a past "compromise" of his own in the amoral world of espionage. Whitfield's subtle shadings of tone, cadence, and inflection artistically reveal the rich subtleties that Gerald Seymour has woven into this fine book.*
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Little Dorrit
by Charles Dickens
(reading as Robert Whitfield)
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Earphone winner 2000
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Why do we never tire of Dickens? Isn't it because of his characters and their crazy worlds? Science fiction was never so strange! Reader Robert Whitfield catches this zaniness and infects us with it. Whitfield is at once the delicate and sensitive heroine, Little Dorrit, as she humors the illusions of her father; he is that same father, presiding like nobility over his fellow debtors in the Marshalsea prison. He is the crafty Frenchman, Monsieur Rigaud, who is blackmailing old Mrs. Clenham. He is the pompous Mrs. Merdle, the asinine Mr. Sparkler, and the young Mr. Barnacle, who has attached himself to the annoying government Circumlocution Office to make certain nothing jolly well ever gets done. Crazy? Yes, completely, but nonetheless real as Whitfield, with a unique voice and vision for each character, casts Dickens's spell of mystery and intrigue. Dickens fans should not miss this almost perfect performance of his most mature work.*
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Dracula
by Bram Stoker
(reading as Robert Whitfield)
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Earphone winner 1999
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The world's best-known vampire story comes to life in this expert performance by Robert Whitfield. No music, no special audio tricks detract from the chilling, gruesome tale of the un-dead. Whitfield's minimalist narration suits perfectly. His subtle shading of voice gives complete personality and motivation to each of the eight protagonists, with exaggerated accent reserved for the Dutch Dr. van Helsing, and, to a lesser extent, Count Dracula himself. His women come across as sweet, yet intelligent. With the same understated clarity, he brings full voice to the voluptuous vampiresses' seduction of their victims and to the malevolent machinations of the Count. For a classic performance of a classic work, this production must not be missed.*
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