Poor performance

The reader seemed to be incapable of accents and pronounced various words quite incorrectly. This is the first time I have had to complain about this on Audible. This may have influenced my enjoyment of the book itself which I found not to be up to Boyd’s usual standard.

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Spoiled by t glottalisation and mispronunciation

I’m confident that a 1910s West End actor would not have lost his ‘t’s in the middle of quite so many words. And I'm sure he'd know how to pronounce Folkestone. Perfect for a Nick Hornby but very, very distracting here. Ultimately made it almost impossible to suspend disbelief.

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Poor Narration

It is a pity that the narration is so poor. It is monotonous without any feel, inflection or variance of tone. Nevertheless I stuck with it and eventually I became unaware of this problem. The story was quite interesting and had enough pace. Not the best work of fiction but I enjoyed it enough.

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Complicated

I enjoyed the narration most of the time but there were some jarring mispronunciations particularly of place names. I found the story absorbing and exciting but I would have preferred a clearer ending. Perhaps the whole point of the book is that people alter the ‘truth’ so that they can get on with their lives.

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excellent story

narrator a bit irritating
several words mispronounced and not quite the accent for the officer upper class hero.
Otherwise very enjoyable and gripping

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Frustrating

I read this book a little while ago and suggested it for my upcoming book club. I got it on audible to remind myself about the plot etc and was hugely disappointed by the reader. His accent, pronunciation and pace were so poor it jarred. Some readers are better than others but this was something else. This is the second William Boyd I have read. His storytelling is wonderful. His characters fit the period and are beautifully drawn. I am a great fan of audible but shall stick to the book for William Boyd in future.

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Some poor accent choices

I don’t for one minute think British readers should all speak RP, but if a reader is going to assign accents to characters, then some historically-informed authenticity would help. Here, First World War British army officers are assigned a variety of regional working class accents that just doesn’t seem believable and which really detracts from the enjoyment of the boom. The main character too, speaks in an estuary drawl. I’m fine with the reader’s own London estuary accent for the narrative passages but for the dialogue someone should have directed him to be a bit more authentic.

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Appallingly read - disappointing story

This has to be the worst read book on Audible. I am surprised that Penguin (and William Boyd?) chose this actor to read it. Huge number of mispronunciations and a very irritating Cockney accent for virtually all the characters. All they did was jar and get in the way of the story.

William Boyd’s ‘Any Human Heart’ and ‘Restless’ are superb novels. I thought this was a much weaker effort with poor pacing and too much descriptive flannel which added little to the narrative drive of the story.

Final verdict- disappointing.

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Interesting story ruined by awful narration

I’m a fan of William Boyd ( Any Human Heart is terrific ) but this book was ruined by the narrator’s complete lack of ability to do any accents at all apart from cockney, to vary the the different characters voices ( one was so grating it hurt to listen to him ) and finally he couldn’t actually pronounce words. Quadrangle became quandrangle and he pronounced the ‘ l ‘ in Folkestone to name two of many. It did distract from the story when the narrator couldn’t actually read or got the emphasis on the wrong syllable of a word.

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Poor narration

The story would have been enjoyable, I think - but the narrator’s insistence of not pronouncing any ‘Ts’ completely spoiled it for me and I couldn’t get past the first chapter. I’m afraid good English pronunciation for audible is essential to my enjoyment of the books.

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2 people found this helpful