The Explorer - Doppler - First Novel - The Making Of - Still - Kandak - Ghostwritten

Short of time but keen as ever to talk about the books I read you will have to indulge me a little as I compromise with a quick round up of several books that are worth mentioning. I apologise for not being able to go into as much detail as I normally would but I hope that something will be better than nothing (but please let me know if you disagree!)


The Explorer by James Smythe

Towards the end of last year I entered a proper reading funk. I couldn't engage with books I was reading at all, gave up on one after another, often knowing that they were probably really good. I was just too tired and stressed to read, a big worry for someone so keen on reading. I had a little break and then picked up this new novel which a couple of other bloggers had mentioned favourably and which I thought might be just what I needed. It really was. Smythe's novel is narrated by Cormac Easton, a journalist chosen to document a groundbreaking journey into space that will take humans further than they have ever travelled before. However, the crew of the Ishiguro gradually perish one by one until Cormac is the last survivor. What follows is a brilliant examination of fear and grief, remembrance and memory, loneliness, exploration and time. I love space movies but the problem most of them seem to suffer from is that whatever interesting themes they set up in the beginning they nearly always dissolve into humans being chased about by something or other and once you've seen Alien that can't really be topped (yes, Sunshine, I'm looking at you). Smythe's novel does almost the opposite. In a breakneck opening we witness the demise of the crew and the reader is left wondering how on earth he might fill the rest of the novel. I won't give away the brilliant device that is this novel's twist but only say that it is a coup that allows Smythe to make the novel far more philosophical, interesting and moving than I suspect most 'science fiction' to be (I know, I'm probably wrong on that). This novel, very similar in feeling to Duncan Jones' film Moon, comes highly recommended and a huge thank you to the author for breaking my funk and getting me reading again.

Published by Harper Voyager now

Doppler by Erlend Loe

The cover to your left makes this look like a perfect Christmas book and in many ways it is but not at all in a traditional sense. The eponymous Doppler is a  man who seemed to be leading a successful life in Oslo until an accident whilst on his mountain bike leads him to reappraise things altogether and determine on leading a solitary existence in the woods where he will live off the land. His resulting hunger leads him to kill an elk in the novel's opening pages and whilst he is successful in that endeavour providing himself with food to eat and meat with which he can barter for other supplies he also finds himself encumbered with that mother's baby elk as a surrogate child. Soon christened Bongo, Doppler uses his new companion as a sounding board for his various foibles with modern society and the two of them struggle to maintain their Eden in the wilderness as various other characters encroach on it. The quirk factor might put off some readers but I found it to be both funny and sharp-witted, a perfect antidote to the commercialisation of Christmas and a great (if belated) stocking filler for anyone in your family who tends to say bah humbug around tis time of year.

Published by Head of Zeus now


First Novel by Nicholas Royle

Already an early contender for cover design of the year, Nicholas Royle's latest novel has far more going for it than that. That title and those very recognisable 'clean white spine with plain black lettering' paperbacks on the cover might lead you to think this is his debut published by Picador but it is actually Royle's seventh novel, albeit his first under the Jonathan Cape imprint. There's lots of other bookish fun along the way as we follow writer, Paul Kinder, author of a novel which didn't do terribly well, now a teacher of creative writing and avid collector of first novels. This meta-fictional novel has many strands to it and part of the fun is trying to work out where you are half the time. Along the way we will encounter, housebreaking, dogging, fighter pilots and loss of various types, in a novel which shows how we all use narrative to shape the story of our lives. A strange, unsettling brew that simply entertains at first before revealing darker and more dangerous depths as it progresses; a dark and delicious treat for lovers of literary fiction who like to have their grey cells tickled.

Published by Jonathan Cape now

The Making Of by Brecht Evens

Brecht Evens makes the most gorgeous graphic novels. His first, The Wrong Place, had me smiling and admiring at the end of 2011. His latest built on that promise at the end of last year and showcases yet again his glorious watercolour work and fresh approach to graphic storytelling. Watercolour is an odd medium for graphic work, especially in the free-flowing style that Evens employs. Character is often simply delineated by colour or distinguishing features and it is an incredibly effective technique. One character has large hands for example, always dominating his exchanges. 'You should see my Dad's' he says and sure enough when he visits him in his hospital room on the next page what we see are those huge hands waving back. The novel follows an artist, Peterson, as he travels to a small village to work as part of a biennial festival. It's a much smaller operation than he anticipated but what follows is a hilarious exploration of artistic inspiration, expression and shortcomings. Fabulously diverse characters, artwork that leaps off the page and somehow manages to escape it at times, Evens is one to keep watching.

Published by Jonathan Cape now

Still edited by Roelof Bakker

Roelof Bakker is a photographer who focused on the disused Hornsey Town Hall for one project which ended in an exhibition of photographs entitled Still. Bakker then approached several writers to select an image and then write a story based on it, relocating the image so that it wouldn't be about its original location but more about what that image suggested to the author. The anthology is incredibly diverse, featuring some writers I had heard of and read before like Richard Beard, Nicholas Royle and Evie Wyld. Others were completely new to me and that of course is the joy of an anthology. The pictures are wonderful and each reader is sure to find new voices they will want to keep an eye on.

Published by Negative Press now

Upcoming Audio Books

Kandak by Patrick Hennessey

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

As some of you will know I sometimes get the opportunity in my work as an actor to record audio books and I am in the process of recording a couple right now. Patrick Hennessey had great success with his first book The Junior Officer's Reading Club and Kandak follows his exploits training and fighting alongside the fledgling Afghan National Army. What comes across clearly is the confusion of the project, the clash of cultures and the suspicion that develops when things go wrong and soldiers even find themselves under attack from their own side. Hennessey is keen to write however about the bravery, integrity and comradeship that he experienced, something that brought him back to Afghanistan after he had finished in the army to search out those that had clearly become friends during his time there.

Ghostwritten was Mitchell's debut novel and after I recorded the bonkers number9dream last year I now have the task of doing justice to this multi-layered novel. Having read it before but a long time ago it was interesting to see how I felt on a second read. I was pleased to discover that I had roughly the same opinion of it as a novel, slightly daunted by the prospect of narrating effectively its very different sections but always pleased to have something challenging like that to keep me honest.

Both of these will be available unabridged later in the year from Whole Story Audio and W F Howse.

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Catch-22

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 Random House commissioned an animated video from illustrator Ian Higginbotham with audio excerpts from the book read by. . . erm, me!

Catch-22 50th Anniversary Animation from Ian Higginbotham on Vimeo.

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'Whoosh!'

Lights Out In Wonderland
by DBC Pierre

This isn't going to be a traditional post from me as this is a book I read professionally, for production as an audio book, but which threw up some interesting thoughts as part of the process. DBC Pierre is an author who seems to attract a fair bit of opprobrium mainly for having had the audacity to win the Booker Prize with a novel that wasn't just a debut but a thoroughly disrespectful and un-serious one at that, added to which it seemed that the £50,000 prize money would go on settling debts from his drug-addled past, or at least some of them (he did at one point sell a friend's house and pocket the proceeds). Personally I remember reading it, finding it entertaining enough and was never quite certain why people were so upset when it won (2003 was a pretty odd year if you look at the long and shortlists) That said, the pasting that his second novel, Ludmilla's Broken English, received was so universal that a gifted copy of it still sits on my shelf, and the concept that Lights Out In Wonderland was the final part of a loose trilogy meant I had little interest in reading it on publication, a feeling unaltered after hearing the man himself read from it at a literary event. Authors are seldom the best readers of their own work and though Peter Finlay may have lead a dissolute life that closely mirrors that of Gabriel Brockwell, the anti-hero of this latest novel, that doesn't mean the story is best served by his own wearied and monotonous drawl.

So when the job came through I was a little apprehensive. Narrated by Gabriel Brockwell the book begins as he comes round to find himself in a rehab facility having been dumped there by his father as a last throw of the dice to get his son back on the straight and narrow. Gabriel has squandered every opportunity he's been offered, a perennial under-achiever and after losing his job in the food court of a motorway services has occupied himself of late as part of a group of anti-capitalist demonstrators. Having decided that the only option left to him is suicide he then has a revelation: he doesn't need to do it right away. Suddenly he is in a state of limbo where the normal constraints of life no longer matter. If you know you're going to kill yourself you don't need to worry about consequences. Behaviour can be untrammelled, all bridges can be burned. Escape rehab, find old friend Smuts and muster forces for a final hoorah - A bacchanalian feast of excess not seen since the end of Rome.

With the police and bailiffs on his tail Gabriel reassigns the group's treasury to his personal account and heads off after Smuts, which means a flight to Tokyo where he now works in a high-end fish restaurant. Smuts is a delicious concoction. A genius chef with a passion for the extreme he introduces Gabriel to sashimi that carries the added risk of death and a new breed of wines that invoke almost a new sense of taste. The two of them are like volatile ingredients that are safe when kept apart but lethal when mixed and their first evening together is a potent mix of fine food and wine, class-A drugs, brushes with the Japanese underworld which climaxes quite literally in a giant fish tank. Thereafter Gabriel will travel on to Berlin where the plot becomes ever more outrageous and the menu not just exotic but positively endangered.

If this just sounds like an entertainment fit for the gourmand then that's to miss the pretty hefty satire. I say hefty because Gabriel sees himself as living in the end of days, the decline of Western civilisation, and has plenty of things to sound off about (Free-market economics, consumerism, drug-taking to name but three). Some of these fit more neatly into the plot than others and the use of footnotes to allow him to digress at will may put some readers off. For me as the reader of the audio-book version there's a particular challenge: not just how to read those footnotes so that you don't lose the flow of the book but how to keep the listener engaged during those moments of pontification. Pierre helps by injecting plenty of gusto into his diatribes and the rest is up to me of course. And that's the biggest challenge of course. Reading a whole book in first-person narration is an act of stamina in itself but Gabriel is also a pretty unlikeable character if truth be told so how do you make it a pleasant and engaging experience for the listener. Theatre is full of anti-heroes who appeal to the audience through wit and humour, making them complicit in crimes committed and I can only hope to do something similar: entertain, engage and perhaps find a smidgen of sympathy in Gabriel's fractious relationship with his father.

I haven't read any of the critical reaction to this book in the newspapers but all I can say is that as a project to read and bring to life it's an absolute hoot. A day's recording is six hours of you talking, just you, talking and talking, and can be exhausting quite frankly. But when you've got something to get your teeth into it can be a lot of fun. I guess the only danger is if I come across like those people fond of a line or two of cocaine who love the sound of their own voice, finding themselves terribly interesting, whilst those that are forced to listen scan the room for the nearest exit. It will after all be only the click of a button away.

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Audio Books

Here, in one place, is a collection of extracts from the audio books I have narrated. There's a fair old range there and you can find out more about each book underneath the player. I hope you enjoy.

Create a playlist at MixPod.com

It was only a couple of weeks ago that I reviewed this book and you can read what I thought here.A story of a group of friends that meet at Oxford University and what it takes to bring them together and break them apart. For James, the narrator, the greatest lessons learnt in life come after he's left the study room.

The Great Lover is a marvellous book which I reviewed here around this time last year. Narrating it as an audio book was daunting not only because I wanted to do justice to a book I admired but also because I was voicing a real person, the poet Rupert Brooke. After all the anxiety the book was actually a huge amount of fun to read, and I hope also to listen to.

Mr Toppit was published along with a flurry of well managed publicity last year, a little ironic given the swipes that former publisher/literary agent/producer Charles Elton aimed at the publishing industry, but inevitable after the fierce bidding war that saw Penguin come out on top after handing over a reported six-figure sum. A look at the impact and legacy left behind by the posthumous publishing success of a series of children's books, particularly on the real boy, now man, immortalised within them, Elton clearly relishes the opportunity to have some fun with his former employment. My original review of Mr Toppit can be found here.

The very first book I recorded: a teen adventure about a boy who is broken out of a young offender's institution, where he is languishing after getting a bit too clever with his computer, and welcomed into a gang of similarly talented youngsters from around the world, under the leadership of the enigmatic Coldhart. What follows is high-octane adventure utilising every one of the gang's skills that jets them around the world and pits them against some very dodgy types indeed. It was a bit of a baptism of fire for me with accents from all over the place, including a teenage Haitian girl.

This is another teen adventure series in which author Andy Briggs has hit upon a rather neat idea. In his tales about teenagers who download superpowers from the internet Briggs has written two strands of books: Hero.com and Villain.net. The reader can decide which side they want to be on, goodies or baddies, and follow the intersecting drama from that perspective (or if you're very enthusiastic you could read both). I provide the voice for the Hero books and Paul Thornley is the voice of the Villain franchise.


The Great Lover is available from Isis Publishing.

All other titles are available from Whole Story Audio and W F Howse.

Oh, and I'm available through Lynda Ronan Personal Management.

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