I don’t think that authors are always the best at recording the audio versions of their own books. When our children were small, one accompaniment to car journeys were the tapes (as they then were) of Bill Bryson – Notes from a Small Island etc. The reader, William Roberts, was brilliant and will forever be “the voice of Bill Bryson” for me. (Bryson himself has since done his own recordings, but I confess I have never brought myself to listen, for fear of spoiling the Roberts-Bryson experience.) And I am sure I am not the only one to have been ambivalent, to say the least, when we first listened to T. S. Eliot reading his own poetry: conflicted between the sense that it was his poetry so he should be allowed to read it as he wanted, and the competing disappointment that it just didn’t sound like I always imagined it would.
I haven’t always read my own books to audio, and I should thank those who valiantly did (SPQR must have been quite a marathon). But for almost a decade, starting with Civilisations, I have done it myself, where I have been allowed (and, years ago, I described the eye-opening experience of reading aloud Women and Power here). I am sure that, in many ways, I am much less expert at the task than the professionals. But I started to feel that none of them captured what I see as my own “down-to-earthness”, and they repeatedly shied away from the scarcely concealed jokes, making it all sound terribly serious (Roman history = solemn).
I am afraid US publishers are the most anxious here. A couple of years ago one of them wanted to catch up with an audio version of a book I wrote a long time ago. They send a couple of sample readings for my “approval”. They were both by posh British ladies, speaking royal-family style RP, elegantly but without any hint of wit or combativeness. My suggestion that I might read it myself was greeted with refusal (or not really greeted at all, honestly; ignored, more like). So, I suggested that I send them a recording of me reading the first page, to help the professional readers get my style. This made not a blind bit of difference. I just received more samples of identikit posh British voices. Of course, those publishers may well know the American market better than I do. But I haven’t dared listen to what was finally “released”.
Happily, my UK publisher is keen for me to do my own reading. So here I go again – and this week I am recording my new Talking Classics over two days (it’s only 200 pages, which should fit). It is never an entirely comfortable experience, as I always hear words that I think could have been expressed better. But at least it sounds like me: a text I can own.
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