Audio tapes are no substitutes for books, but they have their merits, as this columnist has discovered during a recent series of car journeys down the country.
I began a few months back with Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island, given as a gift by a friend and read so well by American actor Kerry Shale that I found myself chuckling at many of the observations and asides even after three hearings. In fact, Bryson's phenomenally successful bestseller is an almost ideal audio-book, yielding its modest pleasures more effectively to the ear than to the eye, and the same can be said of that other contemporary American humorist, P.J. O'Rourke, whose Holidays in Hell leaps more gleefully from the car speakers than from the page.
And because neither of these writers is in the business of creating masterpieces, you don't really mind that their work has been abridged for tape - in fact, such abridgment, if astutely done, gets rid of their less inspired passages.
But what about a writer of real stature, a writer such as Patrick O'Brian? How do you justify a practice whereby a book that should, I suppose, take fifteen hours or more for an actor to deliver is reduced to a mere four hours and a bit? You can't justify it, of course, you just accept it or you don't.
I accepted it, primarily because of the splendidly spirited accounts that Robert Hardy gives of the first two of O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels, Master and Commander and Post Captain (both from HarperCollins audiobooks). Such O'Brian devotees as Kevin Myers might reasonably disapprove of these abridged versions, but they should applaud the effect - the tapes immediately persuaded this newcomer to go out and get the first five books in the Aubrey-Maturin series. There goes my year. (See Arminta Wallace's review on page 9 for a different reaction - Lit. Ed.)
I shall leave proper consideration of Niall Williams's first novel, Four Letters of Love to those assigned to review it. Instead, having read just over a hundred pages, I'll content myself with observing that I find it uncommonly well written and, in its subtle evocation of elusive feelings, refreshingly different from most contemporary Irish novels I've attempted in the last few years.
The 39-year-old Dublin-born, UCD-educated author lived in France and New York before settling in Co Clare with his American wife Christine, where they now live with their two children and where he works as a teacher. The couple have written two non-fiction books together (published in the US) about their life in Ireland, while Niall himself has written one play, The Murphy Initiative, for the Abbey, and has another due for a Druid production this autumn.
His novel has already received enthusiastic reviews in some British papers, and if you want to catch the flavour of it, he'll be reading in Waterstone's of Dawson Street next Thursday at 6.30pm. I think he's a writer to watch.
The title of Radio 1's new weekly poetry series, The Darkness Echoing, is taken from Seamus Heaney's "Personal Helicon", the final poem in his first collection, Death of a Naturalist ("I rhyme/To see myself, to set the darkness echoing"), so it's fitting that the Nobel laureate is to be the subject of the first programme, which is broadcast next Tuesday at 9.45pm.
Resident presenter, poet and fiction writer Mary O'Donnell will be chatting to him about his work, and he'll be illustrating his comments with readings of poems from various stages of his career - including, I'm told, some recent translations.
The series is the brainchild of its producer Seamus Hosey, who promises listeners that "the inevitable will never happen, but the unexpected will often occur". Thus, in weeks to come Dennis O'Driscoll will discuss his latest volume, John Dunne will talk about poetry in the classroom, KISS winner Mary O'Sullivan will read from her own work, and both Marianne Faithfull and John Hurt will be discussing their favourite poems. Stay tuned.
AS today marks the bi-centenary of Mary Shelley's birth, isn't it about time commentators, critics, columnists and subeditors all over the world learned that Frankenstein was the monster's creator and not the monster itself? Or will it take another two hundred years for this simple fact to be absorbed?