Carole Mansur listens to the ageless John le Carré, who brings a gritty honesty to his reading of A Delicate Truth.
John le Carré at the premier of
the film adaptation of his novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Photo: AP/Sang
Tan
Most authors outsource the reading of their work; not so John le
Carré, even at the age of 81. His 23rd novel, A Delicate
Truth (Penguin, 10hr 48min, CD £19.99), is thrilling, not only for its
post-Iraq inquest into the privatisation of war, but because he tells it himself
and with such conviction. The opening scene, a bungled counter-terrorist
operation in Gibraltar, gives a taster of the arch ventriloquist.
Amid the babel of voices is a stodgy South African mercenary, a lilting Welsh
commander, and a Foreign Office mandarin with a patrician drawl to outfox Edward
Fox.
Down the phone at the Ministry of Defence struts a New Labour ranter. He is
one of le Carré’s targets in a hard-hitting novel that lines up shady defence
contractors, “armies of accountants and lawyers on the make” and, in a bucolic
interlude in Cornwall, denizens of an ersatz merrie England. Deceit and
corruption, long le Carré’s themes, have found their niche in the here and now.
A recent survey found that the books of Roald Dahl, who died in 1990, are no
longer children’s favourites. Time then for Penguin to update the audio
catalogue. Out go old stagers Simon Callow, Miriam Margolyes and Geoffrey
Palmer; in come, among others, David
Walliams (The BFG, Puffin CD, 4hr 25min, £12.99), Kate
Winslet (Matilda, 4hr 18min, £12.99) and Douglas Hodge (Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory, 3hr 18min, £12.99). Sound effects dress up these
recordings, in case it is beyond a child’s imagining to conjure a waterfall,
say. But Dahl’s original creative flow is there. The voice of Julian Rhind-Tutt,
reading James and the Giant Peach (3hr 18min, £12.99) comes closest to
the author’s discomfiting tones.
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