[ApK]

Sometimes a narrator's creative choices just leave me saying "WTF were you thinking?!"
I recently listened to "Fat Ollie's Book," an Ed McBain 87th precinct novel. I was happy to see it was narrated by Dick Hill, who's work I've always liked. For some reason, he did the narrator's voice with an accent somewhere between FDR and the guy from the Pepperidge Farm commercials. None of the character's had this accent, just the omniscient narrator. The book is not set in New England. It was bizzare and distracting.

Now I'm listening to Brian Daley's "Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds" narrated by Brian Holsopple, who I'd never heard of. His narration seemed perfectly fine and appropriate...until he got to the voice of the second lead character, Hobart Floyt. This is the character with whom the reader is supposed to identify, the everyman. He is a minor functionary in the Earth bureaucracy. Holsopple gives him a wholly irritating, nasal, whining, Weasley voice. A caricature of an unlikable bureaucrat. Fine if he was a bit character in one or two scenes, but for a lead, who the audience is supposed to like. OMG. I read this book on paper years ago and loved it. I may have to get it on paper again, and find a way to wash this guy's voice out of my head.

I guess it could have been some director or other exec making the narrator do these things. But if so....yikes.

ApK