“Midwinter” by Fiona Melrose, narrated by Peter Noble, 7:34, Wholestory
A father and son unable to reckon with grief are in the hands of a narrator capable of sustaining the subtle and stormy emotions at play in Fiona Melrose’s luminous first novel, “Midwinter.”
What’s puzzling is that narrator Peter Noble has far more nonfiction titles among the 70 books to his name. Why would someone so adept at conjuring characters read so many travel books? “Midwinter” is where he belongs. He clearly relishes Melrose’s characters, providing a rich variety of voices for the cast of villagers and a subtle familial similarity for father Landyn Midwinter and adult son Vale.
The Midwinters are complicated men, abraded by the murder of Landyn’s wife when Vale was a boy. The death has made Landyn the kind of emotional man who can’t bear to leave his old dog alone. His raw tenderness embarrasses Vale, who nurses only a single feeling: rage, a furious coil straining to unfurl. One cold evening, after a fight with his father, Vale and best friend Tom get drunk and take a boat onto the river — a disastrous folly that serves as the book’s riveting opening.
Noble occasionally overdoes it on Tom’s theatrical proclamations. But any emoting is well in check when Vale finally lets loose in a harrowing scene so difficult that only the authenticity of Noble’s delivery carries it off.
You fall into a story like this one: the Midwinters, their Suffolk farmland, the fox that lives up the hill, sugar beets banging into the trailer during harvest. Noble makes it feel like home.
“What Belongs to You” by Garth Greenwell, narrated by Piter Marek, 6:20, Recorded
Piter Marek’s narration falls just short of satisfying in Garth Greenwell’s novel of distance and intimacy, “What Belongs to You.”
This is Greenwell’s first novel, an extension of an earlier and well-received novella, “Mitko.” In both, an unnamed American teaching high school in Bulgaria becomes entangled with a hustler, Mitko, who he meets in a men’s room beneath the National Palace of Culture in Sofia. Something about the young man, his “bodily candor,” a manner that was “cordial and brash, entirely public in place of intense privacies,” draws the teacher. He is soon torn between his desire for Mitko and the risk involved. Mitko is always angling, always asking. There is an undercurrent to Mitko’s manipulations, his perpetual insinuating requests and his desperate need. The teacher brings his own history of rejection, a distrust of intimacy, that makes him a mark for someone such as Mitko.
Unfortunately, Marek never quite embodies the layered characters he’s portraying. An actor on stage and television, with appearances on several TV series, including “The Black List,” “Law & Order” and “Days of Our Lives,” Marek has narrated a dozen audiobooks. But he’s slightly mechanical here, failing to communicate any insight about the story he tells. It’s not that the narration is distracting — although it is sometimes marred when Marek places emphasis on the wrong words in sentences, changing their meaning — it’s just not what it should be. And this is writing that surely deserves better.
“The Strays” by Emily Bitto, narrated by Vanessa Coffey, 7:39, Audible Studios
Australian Vanessa Coffey had narrated four books of toddler-rearing advice and one novel before she became the voice of the naive observer, Lily, in Emily Bitto’s compelling debut novel, “The Strays.”
Lily is in third grade when she is first drawn by friendship toward the debris-filled orbit of the bohemian Trentham family in the 1930s. Modernist painter Evan and his wife, Helena, whose family money supports the enterprise, are creating a commune for a small group of painters. They call the artists strays, but no one here seems more at loose ends than the three Trentham daughters.
Lily is bound to the middle Trentham child, Eva, in what Bitto describes as the “depth of intimacy in the first chaste trial marriage between girls.” Then a grave on-the-job injury puts Lily’s father out of work for months. Suddenly, Lily is a stray herself — a bit of wish fulfillment as her own parents have faded to mouse brown aside the multicolor Trenthams with their drunken parties, nude models, handsome young artist tenants and the occasional joint.
Narrator Coffey doesn’t create sharply distinct voices for each character, which feels appropriate because this is really Lily’s story and, by extension, Eva’s. Still, Coffey never allows the characters to blur together despite her low-key strategy. Even when Evan is enraged — as he often is over the actions of censors and art traditionalists — Coffey conveys his searing anger without a bellow. But we know Evan’s bellowing. And that’s the trick, isn’t it: making us hear what isn’t quite there.
Jenni Laidman is a freelancer.
