Being read to is one of life’s best small luxuries, but it was until very recently reserved for children and a few select adults. Now any grown-up with a smartphone has tens of thousands of audiobooks readily at her disposal in the car, gym, kitchen or bed. The appeal of listening to a book is still, however, much entangled with deep memories of slipping under a parent’s arm to have a story unfolded for you in a beloved voice. Is it any wonder, then, that the most celebrated audiobook narrators — in particular, Jim Dale, who has read the Harry Potter series for at least three generations of fans — acquire their own devout followings? The peculiar intimacy of modern audiobook narration (with earbuds, the narrator’s voice seems to emanate from inside the listener’s head) intensifies the old association with cozying up with Mom or Dad and a bedtime book. These performers may be unknown to the culture at large, but among the initiated they are adored; they could teach psychotherapists a thing or two about transference.
Now that technology has fostered an audiobook boom (in the most recent figures, unit sales were up 20 percent between 2013 and 2014, and a vast majority of these were digital downloads rather than CDs), more traditional celebrities have been enlisted to read to us. Audible, the leading purveyor of downloadable audiobooks, has boosted the production of such projects, hiring movie stars like Kate Winslet and Colin Firth to narrate classics like Zola’s “Thérèse Raquin” and Graham Greene’s “The End of the Affair.” But narrating a novel is a specialized skill, particularly when the text has dialogue from a wide variety of characters. The best narrators — Simon Vance and Katherine Kellgren are two names to conjure with — get called upon to do things dramatic actors rarely attempt, such as speak like someone much older or younger than themselves or as a member of the opposite sex. Furthermore, the descriptive language of many novels doesn’t resemble natural speech. Intelligibly pronouncing the wayward sentences of Faulkner or the clause-dense prose of Henry James surpasses the capabilities of many actors. Some of these new celebrity narrations have been sublime, like Susan Sarandon’s reading of Carson McCullers’s “The Member of the Wedding.” Others (Jake Gyllenhaal’s “The Great Gatsby,” for example) are uninspired.
But it hardly matters how lackluster a celebrity narration may be; these recordings always seem to outsell their competitors and win gushing customer reviews, testimony to the fact that glamour trumps skill, even when you can’t see the famous face reading to you. Bah! This makes even less sense when the book being narrated is for children. A case in point is Audible’s recent production of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” read by Scarlett Johansson. Not that Johansson’s performance is substandard; she acquits herself very well with a challenging text, creating distinct characterizations for such icons as the White Rabbit and the Mad Hatter as well as an excellently feline Cheshire Cat. Her narration has its oddities — she gives some of the characters English accents, but not Alice, despite her use of Victorian figures of speech that sound weird when delivered in an American accent, and Johansson’s working-class characters, even the rustics, all drift into Cockney. But these are quibbles, not serious reservations.
Still, this recording doesn’t have a pressing reason to exist. There are already dozens of recordings of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” including one narrated by Jim Dale. I’d be surprised if anyone has raised a child under 8 who would be more thrilled to be read to by ScarJo than by Dale, but if such parents exist, surely they wouldn’t be interested in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” in the first place? You’d think they’d have briskly moved the kids along to the “Gossip Girl” books. No, Johansson is clearly a narrator choice pitched to celebrity-dazzled adults, and to be fair, “Alice” is a book whose appeal defies age. Personally, I’d prefer to hear it read by someone more adept at the accents, and besides Dale, the options along those lines include such titans as Christopher Plummer, Alan Bennett and Fiona Shaw. Also Michael York, but I’d be leery of that last one: York’s reading of “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” suffers from the forced, unctuous “Hello, children!” tone so often used by people who don’t really like or understand kids but have somehow gotten saddled with the task of amusing them.
This and other forms of hamminess are problems that plague the narration of children’s audiobooks. A rule of thumb for anyone reading aloud to kids, whether there’s a microphone in front of your face or not: Children prefer that you give it to them straight. This is why they have always gravitated toward the most unexpurgated editions of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales they can get their hands on, despite adult efforts to bowdlerize the sex and violence. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm did not conceive of their original collection of folk tales — published in 1812 and gathered from sources ranging from older relatives and artsy friends to servants — as a book to be read by children. When it became a best seller commandeered for nursery use, the tales drew criticism as inappropriate material for tender ears, so the brothers issued increasingly cleaned-up editions. But there remains something untamable about these enigmatic stories of cruel parents, brave tailors, cannibalistic witches, enchanted princes and princesses, and big bad wolves.
A new recording of selected tales from the Brothers Grimm produced by Listening Library uses the 1884 English translation by Margaret Hunt, which, rather like Baby Bear’s porridge, falls somewhere between the unexpurgated and the totally neutered. Rapunzel has twins by the prince she somehow manages to take as a “husband” even though there was no priest up in that tower, but the wicked stepsisters do cut off a heel and a toe to fit into Cinderella’s glass slipper, filling the shoe up with telltale blood. Each tale gets a different narrator, chosen from the starry firmament of the audiobook world: Vance, Kellgren, Dale, January LaVoy and Davina Porter among them, as well as Roy Dotrice, a legend for his performance of George R.R. Martin’s series “A Song of Ice and Fire,” the source for HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” Dotrice delivers the only biblically themed tale in the bunch and sounds like the voice of the Lord himself.
Surprisingly, the most “acted” tales in this collection are not the most effective. Narrators like Vance and LaVoy, so skilled at crafting individual voices for diverse casts of characters, tend to sound as if they’re overdoing it on fairy tales. The cackling witches, sneering dwarves, imperious queens and booming giants of folklore are already caricatured enough; vocal embellishments only flatten them further. The more subdued and nuanced readings here — from Grover Gardner, Alfred Molina and Bahni Turpin, among others — have greater power. That’s because the only real character in any fairy tale is the teller, a voice transcending time and history. You could call it the voice of humanity itself, but on any given evening in childhood, it’s also the voice of the human being you love best.