Great book, terrible narration

The book is worth putting up with the narration for. It shines a whole new light on a much more politically active Victoria than is commonly understood. Victoria herself does not come out of it well. Her own words in letters to her prime ministers and others are extensively quoted and reveal a narcissistic, reactionary, self-pitying and profoundly selfish monarch with a martyr complex, incapable of distinguishing between the national interest and her own. She is revealed as intensely partisan – at first for the Whigs, but latterly and more lastingly for the Conservatives, and often acting as an agent on the latter’s behalf to undermine Liberal governments. But it’s also a great character study of her personality in the round.

The characters of her different prime ministers are also all well portrayed. With so many years’ distance the immediacy of the various political crises that took place between 1837 and 1901 have faded, but this book revives them by showing at least how the politicians themselves viewed them. The book gave my interest in the Victorian era – previously never very great – a whole new lease of life.

The narration is really not very good. The narrator has a strange verbal tic of pronouncing the word “majesty” as “manchesty”, which can get very exasperating in a book whose central figure is a queen. The mispronunciations are manifold, and you can have a fun game for all the family trying to work out which bother you the most. Maybe Mum particularly hates the way the word “demur” is pronounced like “demure”; maybe your brother in law can’t stand how the Ottoman sultan Abdulaziz’s name is pronounced as though there were something funny about it.

Her pacing takes a while to get used to as well, as her pauses come in apparently random places – presumably at the turning of the page. So for example a phrase like “the governor-general of India” comes out as “the governor, general of India”. Similarly, she often fails to make any indication that she is moving from one subject to another, so it can feel a bit like talking to a friend whose conversation is full of non-sequiturs, and you spend a long time trying to work out how one subject relates to another before you realise you’re on something new now.

In short, it’s the kind of book worth reading on the page.

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Brilliant revelation of Victoria’s true worth

Having had a poor view of Queen Victoria as a petulant and idle monarch my view has changed totally. I had no idea how involved in politics she became following Albert’s death.
There were some horrible pronunciations by the speaker unfortunately.

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Great book, inadequate reader

Listening to this audiobook, I started to keep a list of words the reader didn’t know how to pronounce, but lost count.

Book readers are presumably chosen on the quality of their speaking voice - often trained actors. But if they do not have a wide education or vocabulary, they will inevitably come across unfamiliar words. What do they do then? Stop & find out how to pronounce it, or just make a guess & bash on? I guess that, given the economics of reading books for a living, it’s the latter. Unfortunately, when it comes to books like this, it shows.

Another examples is Andrew Roberts’ Napoleon the Great - a magnificent work of history marred by a reader who had no idea how to pronounce French names.

Whoever commissions readers for serious historical works might want to consider the education and general knowledge of the reader, in addition to the quality of their speaking voice. Endless mispronounced words & mangled phrasing distract the listener’s attention from the quality of an A* work like this.

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2 people found this helpful