The Message to the Planet
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The Message to the Planet
Narrated by:
Carrington MacDuffie
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Narrated by:
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Carrington MacDuffie
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By:
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Iris Murdoch
About this listen
For years, Alfred Ludens has pursued mathematician and philosopher Marcus Vallar in the belief that he possesses a profound metaphysical formula, a missing link of great significance to mankind. Luden's friends are more sceptical. Jack Sheerwater, painter, thinks Marcus is crazy. Gildas herne, ex-preist, thinks he is evil. Patrick Fenman, poet, is dying because he thinks Marcus has cursed him.
Marcus has disappeared and must be found. But he is a genius, a hero struggling at the bounds of human knowledge. Is he seeking God, or is he just another victim of the Holocaust, which casts its shadow upon him and upon Ludens, both of them Jewish? Can human thinking discover the foundations of human consciousness? Iris Murdoch's endlessly inventive imagination has touched a fundamental question of our time.
©1989 Iris Murdoch (P)2002 Phoenix BooksListeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
"Carrington MacDuffie gives a fantastic performance, carrying the book through cumbersome philosophical discussions and straightforward drama with equal ease. Each character has a distinct and appropriate voice, making the profuse dialogue a pleasure to hear. As the drama unfolds, along with the loves, betrayals, and intricate triangles, MacDuffie rises to the occasion, taking the listener along for the ride through Murdoch's strange world." ( AudioFile)
classic murdoch
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Distracting accents
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We all have opinions, but they are of no account here: let us stay with the facts. Throughout the entire book Ms MacDuffie’s spirited attempt at English intonations is sabotaged byher relentlessly pronouncing words with an American stress accent rather than English: that is, privileging final vowels over penultimates (viz., ‘garAGE’ for ‘GARage’.). In Murdoch’s Oxford English world this creates the aural equivalent of someone in a performance of Julius Caesar going on stage arraigned in traditional costume but wearing glasses. Ms MacDuffie clearly has the correct idea that Scots’ voices and Irish voices sound different from Oxford English, but assuredly no Scot or Irishman ever sounded like these, not even in the days of Music Hall entertainment. Some words are so bizarrely mispronounced that I cannot believe that any type of American accent would treat them so: ‘docile’ – a favoured word of Murdoch’s – regularly comes out as 'dossill', rhyming with ‘fossil’, to give but one instance, whilst short vowels are sometimes lengthened, to disconcerting effect. (‘Cosmos’ becomes 'cosmose', rhyming with ‘morose’, ‘veranda’ mutates into 'verarnda', to rhyme with ‘demand a’.)
If that were the worst of it, we would let it go; but unfortunately Ms MacDuffie extends her vocal characterisations beyond the Celtic, so that we are treated to the central character of Marcus, whose ‘voice’ is achieved by sinking her own into her boots as a woman might in imitation of an embarrassing uncle, whilst the ‘Scottish’ Alison, whose voice she sends in the other direction makes her sound about ten years old. Ms MacDuffie has a good stab at Patrick, the Irishman, though unfortunately it is the accent more of an Englishman in the pub trying to add verisimilitude to a joke beginning, ‘there was this Irishman…’ But the nadir is reached with the introduction of the Stone People, whose vocalisation crossed the line between the ridiculous and just anger-making: I say this because when Murdoch invites the outside world into the carefully constructed arena of her novels, it is a moment always pregnant with significance, and one needs to concentrate. What happens here? One can almost imagine Ms MacDuffie’s thinking, now what voice shall I give them? The answer is readily apprehended by anyone who has sat through Dick van Dyke’s ‘Cockney’ accent in Mary Poppins.
I hope I have not been unduly harsh, but presumably Ms MacDuffie did not do this reading for love and was paid for it; and this is an expensive download for anyone not using a credit. Audible should not be allowed to produce such results at such a price and go unchallenged: I hope someone in the corporation will take note.
The Message to the Commissioning Editor
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