Feature

Author On Audio:
Patrick O'Brian

"AudioFile has been kind enough to ask me to write a short piece on recorded books: by all means; but from the outset I must make it clear that I am no authority, having never heard of them at all ( I live very much out of the world, in a remote Pyrenean village) until about two years ago, when a woman wrote to tell me she had been reading one of my books on a 39 bus, the kind that traversed the Chelsea of my youth, as she was on her way to a studio where she was to record some other writer, and that at a given moment she burst into tears. She would much rather have read my tale, she said, but since it was about men-of-war, battles and the sea, there would be no chance for a woman's voice.

I reflected upon her letter, first with gratified vanity, of course, but then with some surprise: after all, women make the best radio announcers; their higher pitch comes through without bumbling, and, generally speaking, the timbre of their voices is more agree-able.

Recently, several of my own books have been recorded. I have listened to them and to some others, and I have grown more convinced that my first notion is right. It is true that, so far, all my books have been read by men, but one of them was introduced by a woman, and her voice was as clear as a bell, exactly pitched for the novel I had written.

It must indeed be difficult for the manager of a recording firm to choose just the right reader for any given book. There are so many styles of reading, from the flat, objective, businesslike, wholly unemotional voice in which a practiced hand runs through the latest Wall Street quotations to the ambitious attempt at producing a different tone for every character and for each nuance of emotion. Clearly, a single voice can manage memoirs or a first-person narrative perfectly well, but, equally clearly, no one man can convincingly impersonate a whole ship's company. Since there has to be a distance between the narrator's voice and those of at least some of the characters, might it not be as well to accept this difference and concentrate on perfect clarity, a characteristic of the best kind of female voice?

Leaving gender aside for the moment, may I describe my ideal reader, calling him he for the sake of simplicity? He obviously has to be educated, though not ostentatiously so-those who utter pedantically exact pieces of French or Spanish are as tiresome as those who are incapable of either-and he obviously has to learn any particular jargon his author choose to employ. In some of my novels I talk about sailing ships, which have an enormous vocabulary of their own, and some-times when I listen to the tape, I hear some very strange things indeed. Richard Brown, who records for Books on Tape, had the good idea of telephoning me from America, and his version of these terms is impeccable; but his solution has not occurred to all. Then again, there are many pitfalls for an American reading a book first published in England or Ireland: Salisbury is pronounced "Sawlsbry," Wriothesley "Riley," Geoghegan "Gaygan." In the same way an English reader is just as likely to stumble over Arkansas, Illinois or the Potomac, and so it goes. Surely the sensible thing is for the reader and the writer to confer at some length, the reader having first run through the text, marking doubtful points.

To revert to my ideal reader: he would avoid obvious emotion, italics and exclamation marks like the plague-trying to put life into flat prose is as useful as flogging a dead horse. In short, he would remember Hamlet's words to the players. He would also know his text through and through so that he reads it with full understanding. As for voice, if he is English, he must speak standard English, the Queen's English; if he is American, let him come from the West Coast or the moderately deep South. If he can be black, with something of the splendid African depth and volume of Paul Robeson, so much the better though even then I personally should prefer him to be a woman, akin let us say, to Maureen O'Sullivan.

Finally, since all printed books pass through a least one stage of proof, in which errors can be corrected, might not the same apply to those on tape?
--Patrick O'Brian

June/July 1993
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