He tries another audiobook, and is as delighted as he was erstwhile disappointed.
Bardelys sometimes felt as though he were a visitor from the future; he wandered through the events of his own time with a slight sense of distance, of alienation. He saw events as through a distorting, somewhat smudged lens.
These football circuses, these happy people driving their huge tanks down the roads toward their distant, isolated houses swimming in lawns seething poisonous chemicals, were to Bardelys as the walking dead. ‘They move and speak, and live their lives,’ he thought, ‘and they don’t even know that their lives ended long ago this year. This year of 2008 is the last year of America. And yet they know it not. And yet, it is so clear.’
He had listened to the next chapter of the LibriVox recording of a reading of Rafael Sabatini’s The Sea Hawk on the previous night, but could not hear it out. For a new twist had been added to this reading: the original man continued only to read the description lines, but the dialogue was read by two young women. What made this disconcerting, in the case of the first scene of this chapter, is that the dialogue records the conversation of two men. So Bardelys in his mind as he listened, could only picture two women in drag, dressed up like dandies of the early sixteenth century, with swords and baldrics, and painted on mustaches.
Not to mention the fact that the whole thing had apparently been recorded in somebody’s bathroom. Echoes abounding, the voice of the tub vies with the voices of the performers.
He hated to make such judgments. After all, these people were not professionals, and had offered freely him and the world their services. And they had assuredly done a far better job of it than he would have been capable of doing.
All the same, he found he couldn’t listen to any more of it. He couldn’t.
So he picked out another recording from http://librivox.org/ (he had however found the recordings from the vast trove at http://www.archive.org/) – this was of a Pimpernel adventure by the Baroness Orczy – The Elusive Pimpernel as read by Karen Savage.
Ah, what a difference!
Savage is British, to begin with, and so her voice suits an Anglocentric tale of Sir Percy and his doings in naughty revolutionary France. In the second place, Savage is fluent in French, so her pronunciation of the French terms and names that pepper the tale are as good as her pronunciation of the King’s English. And finally, she seems professional – and indeed her blog confirms she acts.
Her enunciation was clear and compelling, enough to put Bardelys in awe. More, she spoke at a lightning pace, enough to make Bardelys envy her in the extreme. Ever since he had begun attempting to use voice recognition software, Bardelys has learned to appreciate how great an achievement it was to declaim and read naturally, clearly, and with gusto.
Ms Savage did all this, and more.
(The only pity was how badly the dear old Baroness opened her tale; three chapters in and it wasn’t much better, but here the note that the Singer can be more important than the Song itself is proven: Bardelys wanted more, even of this mediocre tale, so long as it was the divine Ms Savage who recited it.)
(Composed on keyboard Wednesday 1 October 2008)
