Correct me if I’m wrong, but lately I’ve been seeing (or in this case I guess, hearing) an unwelcome trend in audiobooks. To me, the first responsibility of an audiobook is to provide a successful translation from print to audio. A listener needs, at the very least, to be able to follow the plot. And of course the goal is much more ambitious: for listeners to enter into the story and invest in the characters and the world of the book, to become carried away by the skill of the narrator. Yet more and more, listening comprehension, the basic communication of a story’s essence, seems to be a secondary concern of audiobook production.
More power to narrators (such as the incomparable Jim Dale) who find distinctive voices for each character while still keeping the listener engrossed in the story. But sometimes that emphasis on “performance” can be a distraction rather than an enhancement. Listen to, for instance, the third book in Philip Reeve’s Fever Crumb series, Scrivener’s Moon, which suffers from too aggressive an approach to characterization. To back up just a bit, the second book, A Web of Air, was narrated, admirably and understatedly, by actress Jenny Agutter. Her command of the material was impeccable, and her assured narration pulled listeners right into the book. Perhaps she was tied up with Call the Midwife, but in any case she’s not the reader of this newest book, and I doubt you could find two more different narrators. Where Ms. Agutter’s narration was intimate, Ms. Sarah Coomes is frenetic. She is certainly energetic, and she obviously put a great deal of effort into the creation of the many different voices and accents, but the overall effect is that the listener’s attention is on the voices, not the story. I had read the book in print before I listened to the audiobook, and I literally could not follow it. (It didn’t help that a heavy Scottish accent had been assigned to characters living in the “far, far, far” north country, despite the frequent references to reindeer and shield maidens that might have indicated more of a Nordic setting.)
Less obvious is the trend toward a lack of command of the material. Does it really matter if the narrator sounds just like a character in a book if said narrator doesn’t seem to have read beyond the end of each line of print? So many audiobooks now sound as if the narrator has never read the book, has no idea where it’s going. It’s pretty hard, as a listener, to follow a book if the narrator isn’t leading you anywhere.
Another impediment to listening comprehension is the narrator who randomly varies pitch and rhythm to avoid, perhaps, sounding monotonal. FYI: it matters which words are emphasized in a sentence. If a narrator lands on the wrong word often enough, not just the sentence but the whole book becomes nonsensical.
So please, audiobook narrators and producers — make fluid narration and listening comprehension the priority. Let the story take precedence, not the performance. Let me back into the books.