The image is striking...the first time...

[callunav]

I have just, with frustration more than sadness, returned to Audible my purchase of R. A. MacAvoy's Lens of the World. I dearly love the book and was looking forward to listening to the whole series over the next couple weeks of commuting, but I could not cope with the narration.

I did listen to the whole thing first, which I could not have done with some narrators. Lloyd James (Curse of Chalion, dammit, which is another book I love), Gerard Doyle (most of Diana Wynne Jones, dammit twice over), a few others whose names I have mercifully forgotten, start each sentence as though they can't be sure where it's going to end, and frequently hit commas and periods like someone hitting the last step of a staircase either one step sooner or one step later than they expected. The people who have only one sentence melody, the people who speak like a 45 record played at 33*, the ones who read lines of dialogue exactly opposite to the way the text describes them ("Hello!!!" she said drearily) - theirs, I stop, return, and delete after only a couple pages.

Jeremy Arthur isn't one of those. His reading isn't inspired, his ability to distinguish one voice from another is limited and not very graceful, but he's not outright painful to the ears. Unfortunately, he has a positive genius for placing emphasis on the wrong part of a sentence, trampling on parallelisms and wasting all of MacAvoy's deftly turned phrases. Even more unfortunately, he mispronounces a /lot/ of words in ways which are at first confusing and then deeply aggravating. 'Credibly' for 'credibility' is one example I recall. I was reduced to shouting at my dashboard more than once, in spite of all my resolutions to just let it roll off me.

I would have been more amused than anything else by his consistent reading of 'cavalry' as 'Calvary' if only the word didn't occur quite so often in the story.



* Sometimes I enjoy dating myself.**

** We generally split the bill. ***

*** What? It's late, okay?

Edited to correct an unfortunate construction which indicated that I delete readers themselves, which even I - who take such things seriously - would consider rather harsh.

Comments

[quiara]

This is how I feel about Wil Wheaton as a narrator. He’s very bland. And Mary Robinette Kowal will do an overall decent job, but there will be at least one character she gives the worst voicing that doesn’t fit them at all. Like Seanan McGuire’s Indexing series - she gives a 300 year old fairy tale wicked stepsister a valley girl accent and in The Hunger Games trilogy, she gives all Capitol people a voice that sounds like they’re on barbiturates. It doesn’t fit the descriptions in the text. Honestly, Vallry Girl would work for Capitol citizens in THG, but Sloane (Indexing) should have had a more distinct voice. I kept the MRK books, but returned Wil Wheaton.

[callunav]

Yeah. The worst, for me, is when there's a series I like where different books are read by different readers, and one of them is much worse than the rest. Riddle-Master of Hed (first book of the trilogy) and Harpist in the Wind (third) are read by Simon Prebble, who is quite nice to listen to. But the second book is read by Fiona Walsh, who doesn't absolutely suck but isn't in the same class. I love the trilogy and would love to listen to it, but I've held off on getting it. (I like that Heir of Sea and Fire is read by a woman, I just wish it was someone with a little more...grip...to her voice.)

[quiara]

Oh, I hate that. I actually went and pirated the UK version of the Harry Potter audiobooks because the US version is all Jim Dale and he might not mean to, but he makes me hate Hermione. He makes her sound uncertain of herself in every damn thing and that's not her. But I am lucky in that most of my favourites have consistent narrators. So far. The Children of Time/Children of Ruin series is narrated by Mel Hudson and she is amazing. She voices the most complicated character perferctly. I have an audiobook on constantly; it helps with my anxiety. It's upsetting when it's something I have looked forward to and it's read badly.