Colm O'Regan: Listening to the voices that add spark to our car journeys
"It’s quite the thrill having Kate Winslett read to your children. We might even get her in to babysit. Her voice acting is outstanding."
The children are pucking in the back of the car. The ancient tradition of siblings just lightly belting each other in seatbelts. No reason. There is no “who started it”.
It’s been going on ever since children started being transported around. The Norse sagas don’t record every detail, so I can’t say for definite.
But I’d like to think Snorri Snurgelsson looked over his shoulder and roared at the junior berserkers behind him and said: “If ye don’t cop on, I’m going to turn this longship right round, and there’ll be No. Founding. America. For. Anyone.”
There are pointless threats and surreal rules “no one is to make horse noises to anyone DJEE HEAR ME?”, they come up with their own solution: “Just put on the audiobook Daddy.”
Good idea. They’ve graduated from the fairytale-based podcasts and are now in the grey area of ‘what books are suitable for their parents’.
It can be tricky to find the right ones. Leaving aside taste, the other problem is physics. You must be able to hear the voice.
I am pleading with podcast and audiobook makers: Test the voice in a car on the road. For example, the Lord of the Rings is indecipherable at motorway speeds.
And if the voice has too much bass, it might sound absolutely magnificent on the stage playing Othello on the Abbey stage, but just sounds like vibrations when bypassing Abbeyleix.
Recently we’ve struck gold. First there was the Weirdies: Three books voiced by Kate Winslett and then Helena Bonham Carter about a weird family and their evil parents.
It’s quite the thrill having Kate Winslett read to your children. We might even get her in to babysit. Her voice acting is outstanding.
And after watching her fierce, chaotic, tough cop in Mare of Easttown, you know she’d take no shite around bed time. She does many voices in the Weirdies.
I wonder do these top narrators regret telling the audiobook company they can do all the voices.
When you read to your own children and you make the mistake of showing off with a couple of voices at the start and your children want to do keep on doing all the time then. It’s a lot of work.
The other woman who can do all the voices is Kristin Atherton. She is the narrator of the last 15 hours of our car journeys: The fantasy trilogy of Howl’s Moving Castle, The House of Many Ways, and The Castle in the Air by Diana Wynne-Jones.
Cited as inspiration by people like Terry Pratchett, we have spent most of the last month on the road lost in her books and Atherton’s reading — while paying attention to the road obviously.
Both women may have caused us to increase our carbon footprint. A number of borderline evening spins were done just to hear more of the story.
Sometimes we are just sitting in the car outside our destination unwilling to go in because we crave one more minute. But look, we can’t just stay in this hospital car park forever. The child will miss her operation.
When the whole family is enthralled with the same story, it’s an absolute bonus of family life they don’t tell you about in family school.
But the flip-side is no one can skip ahead alone. It would be a betrayal. We can’t listen on public transport. Headphone companies only make earphones in twos.
So, fair play to Kate, Kristin, and the other good narrators of the family books. You’re doing mighty road.
- Colm’s latest book ‘Gallivanting with Words’ is out on October 30 and available to preorder anywhere with Internet.
