Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel

Narrated by Marc Bramhall.
Audiobook published by Random House Audio, 2010.
Formats available: print, ebook, MP3 audiobook, CD audiobook.

Story:
Reading:

Like most everyone else in the world who read it, I loved Life of Pi. So I was excited when I learned that Yann Martel had written another book.

I started listening to this as an audiobook and had to abandon it after a few chapters. This is the story of Henry, a famous writer who is experiencing writer's block. He moves to a big city with his wife, which city we don't know, and takes a job at a chocolate shop. One day Henry receives an intriguing package in the mail which contains a short story by Flaubert and an excerpt from a play written by the sender. It was when we got to the play that I had to stop listening to the audiobook. Not only is it incredibly dull to listen to a narrator read a play within a work of fiction, complete with stage directions and having to identify the characters every line, but this particular section of the play that is sent to Henry contains a conversation between a donkey named Beatrice and a monkey named Virgil, chatting about a pear. It's a very long conversation about a pear. Since skimming isn't possible with audiobooks, it was unbearable. I had to stop.

(As an aside, I should make clear here that what makes the audiobook intolerable is the story and not the narrator, who did the best he had with what he was given).

Although I gave up on the audiobook, I didn't give up on Mr. Martel. I checked out the book from the library and took up where I had left off on the audio. I enjoyed reading the book more than listening to it, but only marginally. Henry, our famous-writer-turned-barrista protagonist, decides to track down the sender of the package. This leads him to a taxidermy shop. I must admit that the descriptions of the shop are fantastic. Animals of every sort, large and small, domestic and wild, are crammed in until the shop is about to burst. And they are posed in the most life-like ways that Henry is quite taken aback. So the taxidermist/playwright, also named Henry, convinces writer Henry to help him finish his play (the one with the pear scene), which he considers to be his life's work. Henry reluctantly finds himself helping Henry write the play and, as a by-product, learns more about taxidermy than anyone should probably know.

The play is an allegory, hence the donkey and monkey I suppose, and we come to figure out that it's about the Holocaust. The story devolves from bizarre to brutal. The surprise twist at the end dragged it back from the brink of utter antipathy for me, but wasn't enough to redeem the novel.

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Narrated by Bernadette Dunne, Marc Bramhall, and Katie MacNichol.
Audiobook published by Books on Tape, Inc. 2009.
Formats available: print, ebook, MP3 audiobook, CD audiobook.

Story:
Reading:

I'm stunned by Margaret Atwood's ability to produce one great novel after another. This is an intreaguing story, well-told. It's classic Margaret Atwood: who survives in a post-apocalyptic future and how? The story takes a look at the world she created in Oryx and Crake from another point of view, that of the members of the fringe religious and environmentalist group called God's Gardeners. Toby, Ren, and Adam One tell of the events that led up to what The Gardeners call the "waterless flood," a plague that has wiped out the majority of human life on Earth.

Toby joined The Gardeners to escape a homicidal stalker. While she doesn't embrace all of their religious tenets, she does embrace their preparations for the waterless flood. She learns survival skills, the medicinal uses of plants, gardening, and hunting, all of which serve her well in the aftermath of the plague.

Ren came to The Gardeners as a child when her mother left her father to run off with Zeb, a Gardener. When her mother returns to her father in the HelthWyzer Compound, Ren feels unmoored and eventually ends up as a sex worker at a high-end brothel. She survives the flood because she is locked in a decontamination zone when the plague hits.

Adam One joins the story in the form of his sermons to his Gardener community by which we come to understand The Gardener's theology.

Three narrators bring the voices of Toby, Ren, and Adam One to life. The multi-voiced performance worked very well for this book. What didn't work as well for me is the fact that the novel skips around quite a bit in time. This works better in print where you can revisit chapters if you lose a sense of the order of events. Because this audiobooks takes 14 hours to listen to, it was difficult to keep straight the events of the story as we jumped forward and backward in time over the two weeks it took me to listen to it. The Gardener hymns written for the book are an interesting idea but seemed a drag on the pace of the reading. I found myself skipping over them to get back to the story, especially at the end when the story becomes highly suspenseful.

Overall I thought this was an excellent story and very well presented by the narrators. Highly recommended to Atwood enthusiasts.

Ratings System

Here's how I think about audiobooks: 1. did I like the story? and 2. did the narration enhance my experience of the story? A great audiobook is one that takes a wonderful, powerful story and adds the special spark of life that you get when you read a book aloud. With this in mind, I've decided to give each book two ratings, one for the story and one for the quality of the audio production.

The Story:

Soul food

I would definitely read it again

Worth reading

If I had nothing else to read

I'd rather read the phone book

The Reading:

How did I live before hearing this?

Like music to my ears

Worth a listen

This narrator should take up yodeling

I'd rather listen to nails on a chalkboard