I’ve recently been going to bed with Alan Bennett. He’s a very comforting presence as I drift off to sleep, his gentle voice soothing me with tales of what he’s been up to that day, or sometimes anecdotes from his long and successful past. It’s a real treat, the last thing I hear before nodding off being his mellifluous Yorkshire tones relating a Peter Cook one-liner from 1963.
I’m talking audiobooks, of course. There’s a nebulous point somewhere sleeping and wakefulness, a state where insomnia still reigns but you’re too tired actually to turn the light on and read. The solution? An audiobook. You get the hypnotic effect of a book without the hassle of reading it yourself. A literary sleeping tablet, an almost failsafe (in my experience) way of falling asleep that has no chemical side-effects and every chance of improving your mind. On the floor by my bed, ready to spring (or rather amble) into action whenever slumber proves evasive, are 20 or so cassettes. As and when charity shops stop selling them, as many have with VHS tapes, I’ll have to switch to CDs. But for now a couple of quid can still get you a quality highbrow lullaby service.
Bennett’s voice and subject material are ideal. His Diaries: 1980-1990 are particularly good, as is The Lady in the Van, his account of the woman who lived in a van on his driveway for several years. Alec Guinness is another master of the art. His various volumes of memoirs are aural Horlicks (in the best sense of the phrase), tales of Gielgud and church services and autograph hunters melding into one as his faultless delivery sends you snorewards. You feel as helpless as the Stormtrooper does when Guinness tells him ‘these aren’t the droids you’re looking for’. The only slightly jarring effect is Sir Alec’s occasional habit of emphasising the wrong syllable: ‘The Lavender Hill Mob’ or ‘backgammon’.
Other non-fiction gems include Peter Ustinov, Dirk Bogarde, Clive James, Bill Deedes and Ronnie Corbett, whose autobiography is one of the most perceptive and moving of recent years. Andrew Marr’s My Trade is a great book about journalism, but his delivery is a touch too mannered and telly-ish to let you drift off. (Although dating as it does from 2004, Marr’s speaking style is still vaguely human; these days he sounds like a cyborg that hasn’t been programmed properly.) Absolutely the worst audiobook you could choose to induce sleep is Murray Walker’s autobiography. You just know what happened. The producer spent hours reminding Walker that this wasn’t a Formula One race, and that he really should rein it in a bit, and Walker nodded and made all the right noises and said yes, sure, he’d keep it subtle. And then the green light went on and Walker started: ‘Hel-lo! I – am – Mur-ray – WALK-er – and – this – is – my – auto-bi-OG-raphy!’
Fiction tends to be less suited to the job of tackling insomnia, as you feel you should be staying awake to find out what happens. But this doesn’t matter if it’s a story you already know. A few Frederick Forsyth tales have caressed my eardrums in the wee small hours, including one read by an Olympically awful American actor who managed to refer to a ‘Seville Row suit’. The other way fiction can work is if it’s a story where you haven’t got a bloody clue what’s going on anyway, which is one of two reasons I love John le Carré’s audiobooks. The other is that he reads them himself, in a voice so beautiful it could stop traffic. That he should sell as many copies as he does and be able to read so well is one of the great injustices of the modern world.
When it comes to politics, I find myself sleeping on the right. Tony Benn’s diaries have got some great material in them, but his delivery brings home to you the essential problem that has always lost him sympathy not just with opponents but also those in his own party: he has absolutely no sense of humour about himself. The ultimate political audiobook — as indeed it is the ultimate political book full stop — is Alan Clark’s Diaries. Not only are they exquisitely written (occasionally a touch too exquisitely for the ear rather than the page, perhaps, but no matter), Clark’s drawling upper-class accent is as seductive in the metaphorical sense as it so often was in the literal. There is nothing so stylish, his performance reminds you, as a really posh person swearing. ‘These Nordic tours are a complete fuckface.’
For some reason I have a prejudice against non-fiction books read by actors rather than the authors themselves, though have recently made an exception for Simon Callow’s brilliant rendition of theKenneth Tynan Diaries. He rightly makes no effort to impersonate Tynan, but does find pitch-perfect voices for some of the minor players, including the grumpy New Jersey registry office clerk who presides at Tynan’s second marriage. One of the witnesses is Marlene Dietrich, who backs towards a sliding door in order to close it and block out the noise of typewriters from a neighbouring room. The clerk interrupts himself without breaking pace or tone: ‘And do you, Kenneth, take Kathleen for your lawful-wedded – I wouldn’t stand with your ass to an open door in this office, lady – wife, to have and to hold …’
Audiobooks – truly they are the stuff that dreams are made of.
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