My life in audiobooks

I’ve done a million kilometres of commuting between Sydney and the farm -— and audiobooks have been my constant companion.

Masterful narrator: Kenneth Branagh. Picture: Justin Lloyd.

For almost 40 years I’ve been commuting between Sydney and the bush. Mostly nocturnal. A round trip of 600km, the grand total nudging 1,000,000. In terms of time I’m at the wheel for stretches of four to five hours, depending on the vagaries of traffic. The scenery is literally all too familiar and holds no mystery – except for the locations of new potholes. My only real distractions have been encounters with drugged or deranged truck drivers whose aggression has, as in Duel (the first and best of Spielberg’s movies), been near fatal on a dozen occasions. Plus collisions with kamikaze kangaroos leaping through the windscreen at 3am.

To fill the time I’ve listened to audiobooks – thousands upon thousands of old-style cassettes evolving into CDs and now downloaded and played via Bluetooth. I gave up on radio early – the signals come and go – and stopped listening to music. Anything too lyrical worked like a lullaby and made me dangerously sleepy. Too exciting (remember Ride of the Valkyries in Apocalypse Now?) and I’d accelerate into expensive trouble with the constabulary. Augmented by the dreaded points system.

So an old grain silo converted into a library on my property holds not only 10,000 books but also decades of audiobooks. Their readers, and the authors, have been my companions for most of those million kilometres. Most of the titles I’ve forgotten, but some are fresh in the memory and are sometimes revisited. Kenneth Branagh’s sublime read of Samuel Pepys’ Diaries, for example, and a long-lost cassette of Lauren Bacall reading Dorothy Parker. Lots of CDs of books narrated by John Le Carré – not only his own on George Smiley et al but books written by others. Le Carré reads wonderfully, as scholarly with accents as Henry Higgins. And sometimes I go for crime fiction with local favourite Emma Viskic or David Suchet reading – channelling – Hercule Poirot.

John Le Carré. Picture: AFP

An audiobook, at its best, is an art form of its own. Not good or better than the book itself (what Dame Edna used to call the choice of “limp” or “stiff”) but different and distinct, an effortless variation on reading. I reckon Pepys would be enthralled by Branagh and can imagine Porter laughing at the throaty Bacall. Highly recommended: Douglas Adams reading his wildly imaginative intergalactic misadventures of Arthur Dent. I avoid one form of audiobook: the studio dramatisation with half a dozen actors and sound effects. Usually an unhappy hybrid.

But one problem remains with the solo read. The need to be, in effect, half a dozen actors providing the voice for the hero, the villains, the extras. Only a few thespians have sufficiently flexible throats – even for characters of their own genders. Crunch time is when a male reader has to speak for a female, often resulting in embarrassing falsettos, or vice versa when a woman tries to lower her voice a few octaves for a bloke. On balance I prefer the reader to simply read all “the parts” in his or her own voice, allowing timing, context and the listener to do to the rest.

You can tell that audiobooks are a growing phenomenon when the likes of Amazon muscles in – and not just for road-readers like me. As sight dims with age, making television problematic for our senior citizens, it’s great to have a book read to you. And not by the author. Le Carré aside, most authors may write like angels but can’t read to save themselves. Now, back to the new Donna Leon.