A choice of recent audio books

Spectator, The, Oct 9, 1999 by Moore, Charlotte

Room at the Top is so famous for being a period piece that it is, I suspect, not widely read. Certainly my own conviction that I had read it before was not dispelled until I had listened to at least three sides of Paul McGann's attractively mournful rendition. `But when's he going to get to London?' I kept thinking, stuck on the notion that Joe Lampton was some kind of Angry Young Whittington. Of course it's not about London at all. It's about the social and economic hierarchies that controlled Britain in the aftermath of the war, but, more than that, it's about the uncomfortable alliance between sex and ambition.

Some may find ten hours and 45 minutes of listening to Joe Lampton taking his emotional temperature hard to attend to, but the character is real and so is the pain of his moral dilemmas. Yes, it is dated, but not so much in its depiction of the minutiae of post-war privations - the food, the clothes, the cars, or lack of them - as in the central choice Lampton has to face. Should he marry Susan, the teenage virgin daughter of the local bigshot, or should he follow his heart and rescue Alice from a loveless marriage, who at 34 is regarded as almost past her sell-by date? The pressure to take Susan wouldn't be applied now; indeed, that would seem the more shocking choice. This is an interesting, affecting book, and a salutary one for those who believe that Sixties' and Seventies' feminism made little difference to the way we behave.

In Shadow Baby, Margaret Forster charts changing attitudes to illegitimacy from a late 20th-century vantage point. Two women, Evie and Shona, born 70 years apart, have one thing in common: both were given up for adoption, and neither can rest until she has found her real mother. The story of their search spans the best part of a century. Forster has explored similar material in her non-fiction, most notably in the best-selling Hidden Lives, and to more telling effect. Shadow Baby is about how the past haunts the present, how emotional deprivation warps personality, how nothing -- no facts, no emotions -- can ever by truly hidden; the substance of the novel is interesting, but the prose is not. Phyllida Law's careful reading gives an initial impression of weight, but she cannot mask the fact that the book is schematic and surprisingly unheartfelt.

Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy is a gem, a perfect union of reader and writer. Conor Mullen manages to convey a peculiarly Irish combination of sprightliness and menace. The story of Francie Brady, the `Pig Boy' seeking revenge on the whole of his small world, is gripping from start to finish. And from start to finish is a pleasingly short distance, with only six cassettes to listen to.

The kind of Irishness examined in Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September could not ostensibly be more different from that of The Butcher Boy, as inhabitants and guests at the `Great House' observe the Troubles from behind the screen of dances and tennis parties, and yet here too ironic humour is interlaced with melancholy and threat. It is hard to believe that this accomplished post-Jamesian comedy of manners was only Bowen's second novel. Fiona Shaw's richly expressive voice does justice to the delicacy of the prose.

The Sound of Trumpets is an efficient, benign satire of John Major's Britain, though that use of the possessive is perhaps inappropriate. The shadow of La Thatcher looms large over this, the conclusion of John Mortimer's Titmuss trilogy - the forerunners are Paradise Postponed and Titmuss Regained. As with any sequel, the author has to spend rather a lot of time reminding us of who everybody is, but he achieves this quite neatly. It is read by Paul Shelley, who has appeared in various productions of Mortimer's works, so one is in good hands. This would be just the thing to listen to when convalescing from a minor operation; it springs no great surprises, and the rewards for the limited amount of attention demanded are relatively high.

Room at the Top by John Braine, read by Paul McGann, Chivers, 8 cassettes, 10 hours 45 minutes.

Shadow Baby by Margaret Forster, read by Phyllida Law, Chivers, 12 cassettes, 15 hours 44 minutes.

The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe, read by Conor Mullen, Chivers, 6 cassettes, 6 hours 45 minutes.

The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen, read by Fiona Shaw, Chivers, 8 cassettes, 8 hours 15 minutes.

The Sound of Trumpets by John Mortimer, read by Paul Shelley, Chivers, 8 cassettes, 8 hours 26 minutes.