I'm listening to Snow by John Banville, and the narrator is amazing

[BlackAmericanoNoSugar]

It really makes a difference when the narrator is good, and this guy is great. He nails accents so well that I knew which characters were Protestant before it was mentioned in the text (there's still sometimes an accent difference now, but even more so back in the 1960s when the story is set). He makes everyone have an individual voice even though many of them come from the same area and therefore have similar accents, and he doesn't do that annoying squeaky voice for women that some narrators do.

I like it when they put a bit of effort into finding the right narrator. I started listening to a book by a Dublin author and they had clearly just asked the narrator if she could do an Irish accent and not checked. So the narrated the book with a very RP English accent and did the dialogue in a Belfast accent, it was a good Belfast accent but these people were living in Dun Laoghaire/Dalkey/Killiney. She also cocked up by saying Dun Laoghaire in the Irish way when she was speaking English (like someone speaking English but saying Paree instead of Par-iss). When she started calling the Gardai the guard-i instead of the guard-ee I gave up because I realised I was so annoyed by the narration that I wasn't following the plot.

You didn't tell us his name!

Sorry, it's Stanley Townsend. I vaguely recognise him as he's an actor who has had small parts in lots of things. www.imdb.com/name/nm0870199/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

ooooh thanks for this! I was in the midst of reading this novel, but have just downloaded the audiobook from the library based on your recommendation. :-)

What do you think of the story so far UpToMyElbowsInDiapers? I'm finding it interesting in as much as my DM's family were Irish protestants in a big house with a long driveway and my Mum would have been just a few years older in the 1960s than the daughter in the story. Not many similarities other than that though as my maternal grandpa was successful in his career so the house was always warm and well-maintained and they were in a more densely populated area on the outskirts of Dublin and, as far as I know, had no contact whatsoever with the local Catholic priests and definitely did not have any of them killed and mutilated on the property.

Thanks! I'll look out for him.

Off on a tangent but I just listened to an audio book where a narrator pronounced the word "ennui" "n yew eye"

Did the word crop up often tobee? Once or twice I could ignore, but sometimes authors have favourite words that they use more frequently than they probably realise, so it would really bother me if a badly pronounced word kept popping up.

I listened to a fantastic sci-book (We Are Legion, We Are Bob) and there was a character in it named Archimedes. The narrator (who was terrific) pronounced it so strangely that I didn't even realise it was supposed to be Archimedes until about an hour into the story. It bothered me for a bit and then I convinced myself that it was fine on the basis that I have no knowledge of ancient Greek so the narrator's guess at pronunciation was as valid as anyone else's. Lots of people commented on it in the Audible reviews though, so it obviously bothered others too. I re-listened to the book last year and the pronunciation had been changed. I don't know how they did that so smoothly, surely they didn't re-record the entire book but there was no sound indication that they had just replaced one word either, I would have expected slight differences in tone or something.