amazing

One of his best works, brilliant, and fantastic narration. My favourite so far, a must have

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Decent but not great

By the standards of many other authors, this would have been a good effort, but this is Neal Stephenson, so it feels like a weak follow-up to Snow Crash.

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A fantastic tale expertly told

If you're a fan of The Manchurian Candidate then this tale is right up your street.

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Not Stephenson's best & poor choice of narrator.

First, the book itself: 
I’m a big fan of Stephenson’s work; he might not have a clue how to tie up and conclude a story properly but the characters, love of obscure detail and continuing fascination with themes such as cryptography make him hugely pleasing for any reader or listener who takes to his idiosyncrasies. With a few notable exceptions, his plots are not hugely complex and that’s perfectly OK most of the time; his books are big old romps which are pleasingly bad influences when it comes to choosing between a new chapter and doing the laundry. Hence the pleasure of a well-read audiobook to keep you company while you get on with some tedious real-world task. The problem with Interface is that it’s neither particularly well-written nor narrated. 

Sooner or later any book which hasn’t somehow achieved Timelessness will either come to be seen as of its time or just dated. Sadly, Interface is the latter, though not necessarily through any fault of its own. Published in 1994 in a pre-internet age, it is frozen by much of the tech it describes (though not, of course, The Interface itself) in a very particular era, which lends the story the same feeling one gets watching an old re-run on Netflix. Lines like, “the kind of thirty-nine-inch Trinitron that rich people would own” come across as almost quaint today. As to the plot, another reviewer here summarised it perfectly: “Meh.”



Now to the narration: 
For the first few paragraphs, I heard Oliver Wyman’s voice and thought, “this is going to be really great.” However, by the end of the chapter, it was more like, “this really grates.” More than once I found myself muttering, “just get on with it, would you?” I’m sure he might be ideal for some material but his cadence was almost always too slow for the material, even during action sequences, killing the pacing and reducing some parts to a bit of a chore to be got through before something better came along. I got the distinct impression that the narrator had not actually read the book or done any basic research before sitting down in front of the microphone; place names and proper nouns were inconsistently mispronounced and the occasional hint that he is capable of deviating from his medium-paced drawl only coming long after a sequence of the plot demanded it. I’m going to try to be generous and consider this a simple case of bad choice of narrator and hope I just caught him off-form. It will, though, be the only piece read by Wyman I’ll ever purchase. 



For an example of how to do it brilliantly, I’d advise listeners to avoid Interface and choose Quicksilver - the first book of Stephenson’s “Baroque Cycle”. The narration by Simon Prebble is a masterpiece. As an avid reader who had hugely enjoyed Quicksilver on paper, I honestly think it works better in audio form and, in grand contrast to Interface, it’s about as good as an audiobook can be.

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3 people found this helpful