The Acid House, by Irvine Welsh, read by the author (Random House, 2 tapes, 3 hrs, £8.99 in UK)
An alcoholic dope fiend gets mixed up with a newborn infant during an electrical storm, resulting in a hospitalised teenager who wets his bed and a baby who steals wine from his parents' fridge God appears in an Edinburgh pub and turns a hapless youth into a fly Madonna and Kim Basinger mope around a Californian mansion drooling over the rippling muscles of a Scottish thug whose picture is in the paper, and plan to go to Leith for their holidays to see if they can catch a glimpse of him. When the author of Trainspotting turns his hand to short stories, you might expect a pretty zany result and that's exactly what you get in these bright, tough, fluidly constructed pieces. Welsh reads his work in a thick brogue which the ear first rejects as unintelligible once you get accustomed to the rhythms, though, the prose can be heard to run the gamut from hilarious through poignant to starkly violent. Certainly it's a long way from Andy Stewart and shortbread in a tin box.
. Call for the Dead, by John le Carre read by the author (Random House, 2 tapes, 3 hrs, £8.99 in UK)
This is one of a veritable shelf load of le Carrie novels available on audio The Night Manager, The Looking Glass War and A Murder Of Quality also come from Random House, and Hodder has just issued The Little Drummer Girl, The Spy ho Came Jo From The Cold, A Small Town In Germany and Our Game, all with new introductions and if you've never heard le Carre read le Carre, wait no longer. In fact, it wouldn't be overstating the case to urge listeners to rush out and buy them all. His is a virtuoso performance Smiley and the gang are conjured up with effortless brilliance, and so immaculate is the pacing that the narrative line is even more compelling, if such a thing is possible, than it is on paper. A must for le Carre fans a definite maybe for everyone else.
. In the Presence of the Enemy, by Elizabeth George, read by Derek Jacobi (Corgi Audio, 4 tapes, 6 hrs, £14.99 in UK)
Elizabeth George is making her way slowly but steadily into the mainstream of murder mystery writing with her Inspector Lynley books can the TV series be far behind and this one, which deals with the dilemma of a lefties tabloid editor forced to print the revolting details of his affair with a Tory politician on the front page of his down market rag, offers more of the same. Plenty of twists, nothing too difficult, a handful of red herrings. Derek Jacobi reads, as usual, beautifully.
. Strange Highways, by Dean Koontz, read by James Spader (Hodder, 4 tapes, 6 hrs, £12.99 in UK)
"Complete and unabridged", proclaims the cover, which means it takes the whole of the first side of the first tape to establish the idea that the main character a writer who is also, guess what, an alcoholic is uneasy about returning to his parents' house following the death of his father. And so it trundles on, wallowing in nastiness like a particularly clumsy rhino in a mud bath, until it reaches its, guess what, Satanic climax. Even then it doesn't end, but replays over and over in yes a time warp. James Spader does his best to sound hollow voiced but it's all about as interesting as listening to grass grow.
. Degree of Guilt, by Richard North Patterson, read by Ken Howard (Random House, 2 tapes, 3 hrs, £8.99 in UK)
Another exponent of the legal fiction genre, and a slightly less ponderous one than John Grisham, Richard North Patterson sets the scene for his extended courtroom drama with patient skill, making for an enjoyable if hardly edge of the seat listening experience. For my money nobody does this sort of thing nearly as well as Scott Turow still, the court scenes themselves are sharply etched, and Ken Howard reads with a pleasant collection of voices apart from his raw throated portrayal of the hero's adolescent son, who sounds like his batteries ran down during puberty and have never been replaced.
. Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson, read by Tim Pigott Smith (Harpercollins, 2 tapes, 3 hrs, £7.99 in UK)
So this is the novel which dominated the bestseller lists for so long? I used to wonder what all the fuss was about I'm still wondering. A fairly sedate murder mystery, coolly constructed and with an appealing sense of time and place the predicament of Japanese immigrants on Sac Piedro island in Washington State's Puget Sound during and after the second World War, to be precise it's hardly the sort of book which changes lives. Not on this side of the Atlantic, at any rate. Tim Pigott Smith reads with an imperturbable Britishness, which just adds to the bafflement.
. The Driver's Seat, by Muriel Spark, read by Judi Dench (Canongate Audio, 2 tapes, 3 hrs, no price given)
The Driver's Seat is a jaw dropping novel in its intense, impassioned pages apparently learn all there is to know about use, a deeply disturbed woman who leaves her job and flies to Italy, ostensibly for a holiday. Apparently, ostensibly nothing is as it seems in this tragicomic book which shows a masterly literary mind at work. Judi Dench's unmistakable rich soprano brings the psychotic Lise to uncommonly credible life, and weaves a colourful tapestry of secondary characters to throw her into vivid relief. Try switching it off, if you can for me, there was no stopping this harrowing roller coaster of a story as it lurched towards its memorable climax.
. The Life of Oscar Wilde, by Hesketh Pearson, read by Simon Russell Beale (Naxos, 3 tapes, 31/2 hrs, no price given)
An unabashedly admiring biography, this, complete with immortal epigrams, dinner table anecdotes and adoring acolytes even the awful Bosie, incredibly, emerges as a thing of beauty, while his dreadful father is painted as more mad than bad. Still, there's a great deal of comfort to be had from the reconstruction of, say, Wilde's luminous presence at a dinner table. Reader Simon Russell Beale goes for the obvious option, a languidly persuasive Oscar and the grim final chapters of Wilde's story, from the trial to imprisonment and rapid decline, have an in built momentum which never seems to fail in the retelling.
. The Railway Man, by Eric Lomax, read by John McCarthy (Random House, 2 tapes, 3 hrs, £8.99 in UK)
At the beginning of Eric Lomax's story his understated, almost terse style is mildly irritating by the time he has made his way through unconscionable quantities of suffering at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army after the fall of Singapore, it's almost a relief. Besides, by then you understand the reason for his reticence the last thing a torture victim wants to do, as Lomax points out, is talk. The most fascinating part of the book is, though, the final chapter, where he describes the events which eventually led to his meeting with one of his torturers. The image of the two frail old men whose lives have been blighted by the application of brutality is unforgettable. John McCarthy ought, with his first hand experience of unreasonable imprisonment, to be the perfect reader, but his approach is perhaps overly reverent.
. An Experiment in Love, by Hilary Mantel, read by Billie Whitelaw (Penguin, 2 tapes, 3 hrs, £7.99 in UK)
Billie Whitelaw's voice gives a pleasantly elegant sheen to this acid coming of age novel set in a bleak north London university residence. The central trio Carmel, Karina and Julianne form a triangle whose edges are so jagged that somebody is bound to get torn to shreds. Somebody does alas, an innocent bystander. The obsessions of young adolescents in a more innocent age (the year after Chappaquiddick) are beautifully observed, the fluid transitions from comedy to pathos seamlessly done, and Whitelaw's unfussy delineation of the girls makes this a listening treat.
