I know it will come as a shock for me to admit this, but I listen to a lot of audiobooks, across a whole variety of genres. I’m a lover of light science fiction and fantasy, mystery or suspense, heart-rending dramas, intellectual non-fiction, and I wallow in biographies. I love my audiobooks. But among the dozens, if not hundreds, of audiobooks that I’ve enjoyed over the last few years, many of my all-time favorite audiobooks are of a type that are increasingly rare in the audiobook world: the multi-reader production.
My first introduction to the world of the multi-reader audiobook wasn’t "technically" an audiobook. It was the BBC’s production of Lord of the Rings. It was performed more as a radio play than an audiobook, but it was a revelation. Having grown up in an era where the radio drama was long-since a defunct art form, this production was an introduction into the world of the long-form aural theater. It was spell-binding, and I’ve listened to it again a few times since.
In the official world of the audiobook, multi-reader productions are very rare. Some of my favorite multi-reader productions are Orson Scott Card’s multi-novel series: The Ender Series and the Alvin Maker series. Card’s writing tends to be a little more cinematic or theatrical than much modern literature, likely a result of his work and training in the theatre. As a result, his novels beg for dramatization in a way that many don’t. Add in the fact that the quality of the readers who perform his books is outstanding, and you have a series of audiobooks that are exceptionally engaging and fully immersive.
Using multiple readers for an audiobook can be an extremely tricky venture, however. You have to walk a fine line between audiobook and radio play. (Or maybe you don’t…that’s just traditionally been the case.) And, of course, you have to determine what would be right for the source material. When determining whether or not a book would be a good fit for a multi-reader recording, I consider a few things.
Point of View
Who holds the point of view of the story? Not only does that determine the voice of the reader, but it also can determine whether or not multiple readers are a good idea for the production. If the entire story is told through the eyes of a single character, having a multi-reader production may not be the best choice for the material. Take Harry Potter for instance. For the most part, the story is told through the eyes of Harry. At no point is Ron the voice of the story, nor is Hermione. And those few instances where Harry wasn’t the voice of the story, it was generally told from the point of view of an impartial observer. Despite the dozens of different characters in the story, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense as a multi-reader production.
On the other hand, many books jump back and forth between the points of view of multiple characters. I recently finished reading a funny little book called, Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go. It follows the story of a brother and sister who die in an exploding marshmallow accident (don’t ask) and end up in a sort of purgatory for children called "Heck." Half of the story is told from the brother’s point of view, and the other half from the sister’s. It would only make sense that and audiobook of this novel might contain a male reader and a female reader to reflect the point of view of the character telling the story at that particular moment.
Dialogue
Anyone who has ever seen a bad community theatre production can tell you from first hand experience that nothing murders the pacing and flow of a story faster than mistimed dialogue. It can be painful. Being audio only, audiobooks have to be even more careful about the pacing of dialogue. It’s much harder to "fill the silence." I’ve heard some audiobooks where a single reader is performing the dialogue between two or more characters, and is, to quote my old high school theater teacher, "leaving holes between the lines so big I could drive a semi-truck through them." If the style of the book demands lightning fast dialogue with the characters stepping all over each other’s lines and pushing the story forward, maybe multiple readers would be a good choice. With modern recording techniques, it is possible to cut and rearrange the recording of a single person to get the same effect, but using multiple readers will save you time, and moreover, might save your recording engineer from a nervous breakdown.
Trimming the Fat
At the beginning each chapter of Card’s Ender’s Game, there is a back and forth dialogue between two unnamed characters. It is written as though it was a transcript of a telephone call, with no "he said" or "yelled the man" after each line. These short scenes at the beginning of each chapter would be very difficult to make clear and understandable with a single reader. It really makes you feel as though you’re listening to the feed from a bug that was hidden in a room.
This example narrates another reason that multi-reader books can be beneficial: multiple readers allow the author/editor/abridger to trim the fat. Having the back and forth between characters, having different voices and different people can allow for abridgement of sections of the book that might normally have to be described in greater detail by the "narrator." Using multiple readers can help to fill in some of the gaps that may be left a little unclear by abridging the book.
Do You Feel It?
Sometimes, a book might not fit the "rules" for whether or not it should be performed by multiple people, but it will just feel like it needs that flavor that can only come from a multi-reader cast. Multiple readers can help set the mood, help provide a sense of closure section by section, can almost provide dramatic relief (like a commercial break) when one reader finishes a section and the next one begins. Like all artistic pursuits, the feel is the most important thing when determining production values. I recently got done listening to Stephen Colbert’s I Am America, and So Can You. Colbert is a funny man, and a great performer. However, his bombastic tone and very affected delivery, which worked very well for the book, could tend to get monotonous. So he interspersed each section of the book with a section performed by different actors. It served as a wonderful means of punctuating a section and changing the pacing just long enough to grab the listener’s attention again. Sure, he could have read the whole thing himself, but it just wouldn’t have been as enjoyable.
As the audiobook world continues to grow, it’s my hope that more authors and audiobook production companies will invest in multi-reader productions. There is a gestalt that can come about when you’ve got a cast of audiobook readers who all work together to make a great product. We’ll be doing it. We’re considering a couple of projects right now that will engage multiple readers, and we look forward to talking about the process as we go through it. Until then, find yourself a good multi-reader book. Or at least the BBC production of Lord of the Rings.
