Narrated by James Bryce
I’ve had this title on my TBR pile for some time, but haven’t found time to read it yet, so when I saw it had been released in audio format, I grabbed it immediately. The book came very highly recommended and the author has a reputation for meticulous research and the ability to expertly immerse her readers into the historical periods about which she writes, so I was looking forward to listening to Gathering Storm with high hopes.
I’m not going to say those hopes were dashed – the story itself is very good indeed – but the audiobook as a whole turned out to be disappointing because the narrator, while very good on some levels, is not a good fit on others.
Set in Edinburgh in December 1743, the story opens as Robert Catto, Captain of the Edinburgh City Guard embarks upon a raid on Surgeons’ Hall at the Infirmary, seeking to find evidence of illegal dissections. Finding nothing, he moves on to the home of Patrick Rankeillor, respected surgeon-apothecary, where he encounters Rankeillor’s daughter Christian (Kirsty) who is infuriated by his insolent manner and declared intention to search the house. Robert is deliberately rude, crude and deeply unpleasant to Kirsty and the other women of the household, clearly not above using intimidation to get the information he seeks.
We learn shortly after this that Robert’s actual mission has nothing to do with cadavers and everything to do with the unstable political situation in the country at this time. He has been called back from fighting in Europe by the Lord President of Scotland in order to hunt down a Jacobite agent. The Lord President wants to preserve the peace and encourage the growth of stability and prosperity in Scotland, but divisions are running deep, emotions are running high and the Jacobites look set to plunge the country into civil war. It’s therefore essential that he gathers all the information he can about the current level of support for the Jacobite cause in Edinburgh.
Rankeillor, his assistant James Buchan, his daughter and all those in his immediate circle are known to be dedicated to the restoration of a Stuart monarch to the British throne, and Robert is sure that they are hiding the agent until such time as he can be safely spirited away from the city.
During the course of an eventful week, Robert finds himself thrown increasingly into the company of Miss Rankeillor, and it’s not long before others are noticing that they are striking sparks off each other like there’s no tomorrow. Kirsty is no simpering miss and refuses to cower under Robert’s continued onslaught of sarcasm and thinly veiled disdain, things he affects in an attempt to put a stop to his growing interest in her. They are on opposite sides; she is committed to a cause Robert has good reason to hate, so their mutual attraction can go nowhere and they both know it. But that attraction is so strong, it’s impossible to deny. The captain also finds himself drawn into the murky underside of the city when he investigates the murder of a young prostitute and, in pursuit of his aim to appear as though he might actually be sympathetic to the Jacobite cause himself, to join a kind of gentleman’s club in which the men are no gentlemen at all when it comes to the women they procure and use for their entertainment.
I’m not going to say any more about the mystery as I don’t want to spoil it, but Ms Craig very skilfully draws together her different plotlines as the story progresses. The romance between Robert and Kirsty is fairly low-key, but it builds continually throughout, reaching a satisfactory conclusion at the end, but leaving room for further development in the next book.
Ms Craig’s writing is captivating, and, as I had been told, she brings the sights, sounds – and smells – of Edinburgh to life in such a way as to put the listener right in the middle of it. All the characters are strongly written and Robert Catto is a very charismatic and memorable hero. He’s not Mr Perfect by any means – he’s got a nasty temper, a sharp tongue and can be ruthless when in pursuit of his goal, but he is also compassionate, extremely honourable and loyal; he is definitely one of those characters whose flaws make him that much more human.
It’s always a shame when an excellent story is paired with a narrator who isn’t quite right for it. That’s not to say James Bryce gives a poor performance – because that’s not entirely the case. He differentiates very well between the numerous characters and performs the different Scottish accents and dialects with consummate skill (I am assuming he’s a native Scot), as well as injecting a good deal of emotional nuance into his performance. I will say, however, that anyone who isn’t used to listening to highly accented words and phrases might have a little trouble understanding phrases such as: “And it would tak mair than callants like yon tae frichten me.” Or – “Ye ken fine he was going oot this evening, Miss Kirsty. Tae converse wi’— Weel, I canna just mind wha he was going tae converse wi’.” These are easy to decipher written down, but when heard at a quick-fire pace, it may be difficult to work out exactly what is being said.
Mr Bryce portrays the female characters well for the most part, adopting a softened tone for Kirsty, and raising the pitch and thickening his accent to perform the streetwalkers and female servants. There is, however one female character who appears near the end of the novel for whom he has chosen not to adapt pitch, tone or timbre, for some reason, so she sounds like a man.
I’m afraid there are two larger issues which – for me, at least – outweigh the good in Mr Bryce’s performance. One is the pacing. This is a fifteen hour audiobook, and I am sure that it could have been whittled down to thirteen-and-a-half had the narrator not taken such…. looooooooong…. pauses…. at the end of almost every sentence. The narrative is on the slow side anyway, but the continual pauses made it even worse. In fact, I found it so annoying that I almost gave up listening to the book after the first hour or so; I couldn’t concentrate on what was being said and the story took that much longer to get going because the pauses and slow speed were so distracting. I listened to this on an mp3 player – perhaps if I’d listened using the Audible app and had been able to speed things up slightly, I might have found it easier going at the beginning, and I will admit that once the story really got going, and I became used to the speed and pauses, I found it easier to listen to. But I still kept zoning in and out and having to rewind, which isn’t the best way to experience an audiobook.
The other – and for me, biggest – problem is with something I rarely take issue with when it comes to narrations, but which had a severely negative impact on this audiobook.
Speaking as someone who is the wrong side of twenty-one and has been for more years than I care to remember (!), I don’t like to seem ageist. A skilled performer can make their characters sound whatever age they need to be, and I can only think of one other time I’ve had a problem with a narrator sounding too old. But there is absolutely no way Robert Catto sounds as though he is a few days short of twenty-five years of age. I knew that he was probably supposed to be younger than Mr Bryce makes him sound and I’d put him at mid-late thirties (at best), but when Robert gave his age as twenty-five, it skewed the whole audiobook for me. I thought I’d been listening to a grizzled old-soldier, and while Catto certainly has the experience of an old campaigner and has been in the army for most of his life, the impact that should have been made by the juxtaposition of his youth with his wide-ranging experience was completely lost. Also, while the romantic elements of the story are very much secondary to the mystery and political plots, the growing attraction between Robert and Kirsty also loses out because he sounds old enough to be her grandfather. Granted, Kirsty doesn’t sound especially youthful either, but it’s easier to make allowances for that when a male narrator is performing a female character.
Mr Bryce is obviously a skilled narrator, but wasn’t the right choice for this story, and I spent most of it thinking that James Langton (hint, hint for book two!) would have been a much better fit.
Ultimately, Gathering Storm is a book that’s best experienced in print. It’s a terrific story, full of political intrigue, conspiracy, treachery and deception, and Maggie Craig is a superb storyteller whose grasp of the historical and political background against which she has set her story is masterful. But I can’t give the audiobook a wholehearted recommendation.
Caz
Narration: C+
Book Content: A
Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in, but for language and talk of a sexual nature, not for love scenes because there really aren’t any!
Violence: Infrequent, but graphic descriptions of war and the aftermath of battle. WARNING: There is one scene where a character recalls seeing the aftermath of a particularly gruesome rape.
Genre: Historical Fiction/Mystery with strong romantic elements
Publisher: Soundings
Gathering Storm was provided to AudioGals for a review.
A very vthorough and entertaining review Caz and one in which you have captured the essence of this fab story. I love Maggie Craig’s work…as you know… so I gobble up her writing as soon as it appears. I had already read this novel and loved it so I was eagerly awaiting the audio version. Leslie Mackie has always narrated Ms. Craig’s novels in the past, she is a competent Scottish voice actress, with a lovely melodious voice, who actually ‘can do’ men really well (Richard the lead protagonist in One Sweet Moment to name one), I reckon she would have handled this one but perhaps the reasoning was that there is such a large cast of men that a Scottish male would cope with the many and varied ages, dialects, better. I too was initially taken aback at James Bryce’s portrayal of Robert Catto but managed to overcome my reservations as the story progressed. I realise this is probably because a).. I had already read and thoroughly loved the story and b)..I adore everything MC writes, so much so, that the delectable, but flawed hero, was already firmly entrenched in my mind. James Bryce does give a good performance but I think he is more in tune with the many and varied ‘characters’, I do have to agree that this is a very slow performance. I know for a fact that Maggie Craig had no control over who narrated and that at one point she had hopes that Leslie Mackey and her husband would be employed to narrate Gathering Storm. I hope your comments are taken on board re the narrator and your suggestions as to who might be employed for the next in this series, due out next Summer, I believe. I need to know how Robert and Kirsty overcome their humongous difficulties! Maggie certainly knows how to pull a surprise out of the bag!
Thanks for such a considered comment, Wendy. I’m someone who enjoys listening to books I’ve read, so I certainly understand where you’re coming from about being more easily able to deal with the problems with the performance because of your appreciation for the story. But this is one of those times I hadn’t read prior to listening, so I came to the story afresh – and as you’ve read here, I struggled to continue to listen. It was only because Ms Craig’s work has been so highly recommended that I persevered, but otherwise, as I’ve said, I may have set it aside because I really wasn’t enjoying the narration.
I know authors who are not self-publishing have little to no control over when or if their books are made into audios and over the choice of narrators. It’s frustrating enough for listeners to discover a terrific story being dragged down by a lacklustre narration, so I can only imagine how much moreso it must be for an author.