The NAB Blog

THE Cock and Bull story

By Nicolas Soames

1 July 2009

One of the ineluctable facts about audiobooks is that the voice predominates. You can listen to Sean Barrett read Bleak House, or Anton Lesser read The Old Curiosity Shop, or David Timson read Our Mutual Friend. They are all reading Dickens. But it doesn’t seem to matter – one doesn’t expect to hear the ‘voice’ of Dickens.

But were you to listen to Anton’s abridged version of The Old Curiosity Shop and decided the novel was so wonderful you wanted to hear it unabridged, and you switched to another reader, you would, most likely, get a shock!

Who is this voice? That is a different character! Oh no!

It takes some getting used to. For some reason, it doesn’t make such a massive difference with a remake of a film, or in the theatre, of course… but with an audiobook, with that special person reading to you alone for such a long time, it can be very jarring.

Anton Lesser

So – for all of you who have heard John Moffatt’s hugely entertaining abridged reading of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent, be prepared. Here, marking the 250th anniversary of the first publication of this milestone in English literature, is the unabridged version – read by Anton Lesser! And, it must be said, produced by Roy McMillan – for the two of them spent days and days in the studio working on Laurence Sterne’s masterpiece, to get it just so!

Now let’s be very clear! There are reads that are easy. And there are reads that are middling. And there are reads that are difficult. And there are reads that are off-the-scale. I would say Proust is difficult. I would rate Ulysses somewhere between difficult and off-the-scale. Finnegans Wake is off-the-scale and then some.

And so is Tristram Shandy.

Is it something to do with it being Great Literature AND being a comedy AND modernistic AND all jumbled up? I suppose so.

But it is also about the energy required to keep the longest cock-and-bull story in the world going – for 15 CDs. It is about bringing some of the most delightful characters in English literature to life – and keeping them alive, even when they are in the shadows.

Anton Lesser is, of course, one of the stars on Naxos AudioBooks. His very first recording for us was an abridgement of Paradise Lost. He remembers going on until 11  o’clock at night to get it done, although it was a stroll in comparison to Tristram Shandy.

Anton is an immensely practical person. He built his wife a yoga studio in their garden

Similarly, he took the unabridged Paradise Lost in his stride. As for Homer (Iliad and Odyssey) or numerous Dickens titles, or Hamlet – all were more visits to the park, when compared with this, his latest Naxos AudioBooks venture.

‘I have never done anything so hard,’ he said as he came out of Motivation Studios in North London. He had been in there for days – with his few breaks providing serious rest time.

A trained architect in his pre-actor days, Anton is an immensely practical person. He built his wife a yoga studio in their Wiltshire garden, and when I say built, I mean foundations, walls, roof and rafters, shiny wood floor and all.

He built garden features: a pond (very eco); a pleasant area for outside entertaining.

So, when he went into the studio to do Tristram Shandy, he was fit, bronzed and ready.

When he came out… he was pale.

He is a great actor accustomed to scaling heights. Richard III, Hamlet, Petruchio and no end of leading characters in modern plays have all been taken in his stride. Right now, he is wowing audiences in A Doll’s House at the Donmar Theatre.

But Tristram Shandy was another thing again.

‘Wonderful… but I want to go home now,’ he said. Eighteenth-century effervescence and unpredictable Sternian sentence construction meant that every page was like going at speed down a dry river bed, over rocks big and small, fixed and loose, with occasional puddles to slip in.

Then there are the characters: Tristram’s father and mother, Uncle Toby, the servant Trim, Dr Slop, the parson Yorick, and Mistress Wadman. And Tristram Shandy himself.

Both Anton and Roy spent a long time preparing for the recording… working out how to do the oddities such as blank pages, Latin pages, mumbles, diagrams, music, and goodness knows what. They were assisted, at the end, by a total enthusiast, of the kind without which a project like this cannot happen: Patrick Wildgust.

Shandy Hall, Coxwold, Yorkshire

Patrick owns Shandy Hall: Sterne’s house in Coxwold, Yorkshire where he lived as a ‘witty and eccentric local parson’. It was Patrick who went through the penultimate edit with a fine tooth comb, making suggestions here and there, to ensure that it was the most faithful and yet inventive performance (this isn’t just a reading!) of Tristram Shandy possible. He even provided the cover picture: a charming account of the intimate chat between Uncle Toby and Mistress Wadman!

So – I commend it to you. It is a delight, certainly with its longueurs, but with some of the funniest scenes in English literature, and one of the most engaging seduction scenes as well.

And I also raise my glass to John Moffatt, an outstanding reader in his own right (well-known on BBC Radio 4 as Poirot). As Anton knows, I did ask John first of all if he would like to do it. He smiled in his gentle way, and declined. Now in his late 80s, John’s remarkable career has seen performances with John Gielgud and Noël Coward, and many other great actors of the 20th century. Tristram Shandy uncut was a fence too high for him to leap in 2009.

But this has meant that Naxos AudioBooks is PROUD TO PRESENT two voice-views on the greatest shaggy dog story. I am sure you will be entranced by each! Surely, Tristram Standy’s 250th anniversary should be marked by listening to one or t’other – or both!

Nicolas Soames