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The Napoleon of Notting Hill
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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-
-
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- Narrated by: Harold Wiederman
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Few people had a more profound effect on Christianity in the 20th century than G. K. Chesterton. The Everlasting Man, written in response to an anti-Christian history of humans penned by H.G. Wells, is considered Chesterton’s masterpiece. In it, he explains Christ’s place in history, asserting that the Christian myth carries more weight than other mythologies for one simple reason—it is the truth.
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Evan MacIan is a tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed Scottish Highlander and a devout Roman Catholic. James Turnbull is a short, red-haired, gray-eyed Lowlander and a devout but naïve atheist. The two meet when MacIan smashes the window of the street office where Turnbull publishes an atheist journal. This act of rage occurs when MacIan sees posted on the shop's window a sheet that blasphemes the Virgin Mary, presumably implying she was an adulteress who gave birth to an illegitimate Jesus.
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Orthodoxy
- By: G. K. Chesterton
- Narrated by: John Franklyn-Robbins
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Orthodoxy was named as one of Publishers Weekly’s 10 indispensable spiritual classics of the past 1500 years. It is the personal journal of one man’s search for understanding culminating in his conversion to Catholicism. Written with wisdom and wit, G.K. Chesterton captures the very nature of faith.
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The Tempest
- Arkangel Shakespeare
- By: William Shakespeare
- Narrated by: Jennifer Ehle, Adrian Lester, Bob Peck, and others
- Length: 2 hrs and 11 mins
- Original Recording
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Story
This haunting drama of vengeance and forgiveness crowns the group of tragicomic romances that Shakespeare composed at the end of his career. Sometimes read as his farewell to the stage, the play contains some of Shakespeare's most lyrical verse. Prospero, wise Duke of Milan, has been deposed by Antonio, his wicked brother, and exiled with his daughter Miranda to a mysterious island. But Prospero possesses supernatural powers. Aided by the spirit Ariel, Prospero uses his magical art to bring his enemies under his control.
Summary
In 1904, Great Britain was at the height of its prosperity; but G. K. Chesterton saw the drudgery of capitalism and bureaucracy eating away at the eccentricity and spontaneity of the human spirit. In The Napoleon of Notting Hill, his first novel, Chesterton creates a witty satire of staid government, set in a London of the future. Auberon Quinn, a common clerk who looks like a cross between a baby and an owl and is often seen standing on his head, is one day told that he has been randomly selected to be His Majesty the King. He decides to turn London into a medieval carnival for his own amusement - with delightful results.
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- Nierestel
- 16-02-18
Competent but over-stylized reading of great book
The story:
The Napoleon of Notting Hill is one of my favorite books; I highly recommend it to everyone. Chesterton was friends with many authors we still know today, but is criminally under known in our era. While his fiction can stretch the bounds of story, this, his first novel, is a triumph, and deserves the sometimes-bestowed title of best first novel of a 20th century novelist.
Chesterton pokes a gentle fun at all of us, and often himself; the book begins with a humorous accounting of various ideologies he predicts will have happened 80 years hence. However, unlike his friend, HG Wells, GKC wasn't much into technology, so I generally find it better to think of The Napoleon of Notting Hill as an alternative past rather than a possible future. When the action starts, England is full of somber, efficient people, largely apathetic to governance—they even pick the king out of a hat. But what happens when the king they pick is the silliest civil servant in London, a man so bored he'll do a headstand in a frock coat on the lawn for a laugh? The King treats everything as a sort of joke, inventing ridiculous customs on a whim, but the inertia of business and government continue on.. until one day he is inspired to craft his greatest joke yet. And then the unexpected happens: someone takes it seriously. What follows is both hilarious and genuinely moving.
The performance:
There was no sample preview on this ("Unfortunately, we are unable to release a sample prior to the publication release of this book"—note that the book has been released, both for Kindle and Audible, more than a year ago, and was published in 1904). That might have changed my mind about getting it as a Kindle add-on, not because the narrator isn't skillful, but because of how two major characters are voiced. Sadly starting where I'd left off reading put me right at a conversation between two characters I disliked his choices for.
The narrator has a good range of voices and accents. He reads clearly and at a good pace. His voice has a nice tone to it; overall he is good at his job. But unfortunately I find his choice of voice for the titular character vexing. It would be a perfect voice for Jacob Marley (in fact, various actors and narrators have performed that role similarly); it has a stretched, airy, perhaps reedy quality to it. But it doesn't make sense for a 19 year old boy, not in his passionate, misguided patriotism nor his nervousness (he hilariously tries to recruit shopkeepers to his cause and mostly ends up talking nonsense and buying a lot of stuff off them). I also feel he is missing the humor in both this character and Auberon the jokester king. There's a bit too much reverence-for-victoriana on those two characters; it works for Barker et al., but not for the jokester and the madman. Hopefully future listeners will be able to hear a sample and decide if they can live with Adam Wayne's distractingly odd voice in an otherwise decent if over-serious narration.