After my recent column about the horrors of travelling with my four children, I got a sweet letter from a 17-year-old called Tara Vivian-Neal recommending the wheeze that her parents came up with to keep her and her brother quiet on long car journeys: audiobooks.
‘Black Ships Before Troy, The Iliad and Tales of William Shakespeare have forever been drummed into my head,’ she wrote. ‘When a story as captivating as King Lear or Macbeth is read aloud you totally immerse yourself and bickering and fighting is forgotten.’
Now, I’m not so naive as to think that my children’s attention could be captured by Tales of William Shakespeare. Gnomeo and Juliet is about their level — and even that was considered a bit highbrow by seven-year-old Ludo, who still struggles with SpongeBob SquarePants. But before our trip to Cornwall over the Easter break I decided to give it a whirl and made a few purchases.
First into the car’s CD player was Robin Hood, Crusader, billed as a ‘Hodder Children’s Classic’. I shouldn’t have been fooled by those words. Far from being a ‘classic’, it’s an original work by Matt Willies and John Brett and it’s quite astonishingly bad. Here’s a verbatim transcript of a conversation between Robin Hood and Will Scarlett as they’re fending off a pirate attack on the high seas:
Robin: Hold on, Will. You can’t fight three pirates by yourself. Let me have one too.
Will: At last, Robin. I wondered where you were. It’s here that your noble breeding and education shows — in the heat of battle and with a gleaming sword in your hand.
Robin: Ah, but Will. You know my favourite is the bow. Fly to your target, arrow!
My children were momentarily distracted, but watching them knock six bells out of each other was preferable to listening to this dreck.
Next up was a BBC radio dramatisation of Treasure Island. Now, this was more like it: an intelligent, fast-moving adaptation, brought to life by a fine British cast. Unfortunately, the plot proved far too complicated for my brood. I kept having to pause it to answer their questions about what was going on and, because I couldn’t work the in-car stereo properly, when I pressed ‘play’ it always started again from the beginning. After listening to the opening scene for the fifth time, I had to pull the plug.
I then tried Tales of the Greek Heroes by Roger Lancelyn Green. Again, it boasted a fabulous cast of British actors, including Alex Jennings and Rula Lenska, and I couldn’t fault the prose. It was stirring stuff. But it left the children cold.
‘Boring,’ said eight-year-old Sasha after about five minutes. ‘Give me your iPhone. I want to play Angry Birds Space. Right now.’
‘Come on,’ I protested. ‘These are the myths and legends that all the stories you really like are based on. Superman? Batman? Spider-Man? They’re all pale shadows of these Greek gods. Why settle for the knock-offs when you can have the real thing?’
‘Oh yeah?’ said Sasha. ‘Which god is Harry Potter based on then?’
That stumped me.
‘Come on, Dad. Your iPhone. Hand it over.’
Before giving up I persuaded them to try one last story: King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table read by Sean Bean. Written by Benedict Flynn, this is part of the Naxos audiobook series billed as ‘Classic Literature with Classical Music’. Ludo asked to see the cover, which didn’t look promising, but I managed to sell him on it by pointing out that Tintagel Castle, which is only a few miles from where we were headed, is said to be where Arthur was conceived.
Within moments, silence descended. I’d like to say this was because they were entranced by the story, but it had more to do with Sean Bean’s voice. For two and a half hours, they were spellbound — and, of course, the moment it ended, they wanted to listen to the whole thing again. The only interruption was when Sasha complained that Benedict Flynn had got the story wrong.
‘Merlin isn’t an old man,’ she scoffed. ‘He’s a teenage boy.’
It took all my persuasive powers to convince her that the version of the legend we were listening to predated the BBC television series named after the wizard.
So thank you, Tara. I think you may have hit upon the perfect solution. Dare I try Black Ships Before Troy on our next journey? I think I do.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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