At the recording of the audiobook, with Samantha Bond
This week I had of those ’I can’t believe this is my job’ days. Thanks to the audio team at Bonnier, I was able to sit next to the booth, with headphones on, as the inimitable Samantha Bond read several chapters of The Queen Who Came In From the Cold for the audiobook.
Although she’s already read the first four books in the series for the UK, this is the first time I’d met Samantha (Sam to me, now) and seen up close the precision that goes into the narrations. As well as being known for her work in the Bond series, Downton Abbey, the Marlow Murder Club on TV, and many more shows, she has a lot of experience with the Queen after all the documentaries she’s narrated. It must be very odd going from fact to fiction with the same central character.
I loved it when a joke in the text made her laugh so that she had to stop. Also, she happened to be reading one chapter with the Queen’s emotional and ethical dilemma in it that lies at the heart of the novel, and another, with the ‘men in moustaches’, that was so fiendishly difficult - lots of references to other characters that had to be brought to life and made to matter - that it was fascinating to watch a trained theatre actress at work, giving every word, accent, hyphen and em dash its due.
Lowlights were the times when she read a sentence more fluently than I’d written it, and had to change it to my version, as instructed by the valiant Leo, the producer, at his desk. I know there’s a focus on recreating the written text exactly, and when it comes to meaning, that’s great, but when it’s a matter of natural speech rhythms, I wish the narrator (if they’re a really good one) was allowed to collaborate in the process and create something that sounds natural in the moment. However, they aren’t!
In one morning session just off the Tottenham Court Road, she got through chapters that had taken me several weeks to write. I was transported back to Venice, where I’d set some of the scenes, and travelled for research (and was able to help out with some Italian pronunciation), and to my time studying for my first degree in French and Italian, just down the road at UCL and Birkbeck, when I’d dreamed of becoming a novelist one day. I’d love to be able to tell that twenty year-old that it would all work out in the end.
