Audio-book Review
By Chet Yarbrough
Blog: awalkingdelight)
Website: chetyarbrough.blog
Oliver Twist
By: Charles Dickens
Narrated by: Jonathan Pryce
“Oliver Twist” recreates the London of Dickens’ time with detail created by a genius of storytelling, observation, and wordsmithing.
Charles Dickens is considered by some to be the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. Though Dickens stories offer magnificent glimpses of the Victorian era, he is only one of a number of literary giants of his time. There are the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling. Though not having recently read Kipling, Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” and George Eliot’s “The Mill on the Floss” recall visions of a past that are as large in imagination, revelation, and erudition as Dickens’ “Oliver Twist”.
What is interesting about audio books is that actors who narrate some of these great books add a dimension to their stories that are missed when read. “Oliver Twist” “Jane Eyre” and Elison’s “The Invisible Man” are three examples of how actors add an intimate dimension to great authors’ books.
A dimension of antisemitism slaps listeners in the face when Pryce says “The Jew” as Dickens’ primary appellation for a criminal named Fagin. Narration of Dicken’s story conjures an image of every nation’s tendency to identify minorities as the “other”, i.e., whomever is not one of “us”.
Pryce’s verbalization of “The Jew” raises remembrance of Hitler’s antisemitism, WWII’s holocaust, and more recently, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial, its convicted perpetrator, and the repellent idea of racial and ethnic discrimination.
Listening to Pryce’s narration of Dicken’s description of Victorian London, a listener reminds oneself that the past is always present. Discrimination is as old as time. Diminishment, abuse, and women’s discrimination remain today. “Oliver Twist” is an example of a great writer who paints a spectacular picture of his time. The squaller of London, the hateful treatment of women, poverty’s existence, ethnic discrimination, and other failures of society are artfully and unforgettably illustrated in “Oliver Twist”.
Discrimination is an irradicable fact of life reinforced by great and forgettable writers.
This complicated story of lucky happenstance, evil doing, and rewarded goodness is artfully written by Dickens and beautifully rendered by Jonathan Price. Price gives weight to the horrible truth of historic antisemitism and how it insidiously permeates the human condition. This is not a condemnation of Dickens but a geniuses’ representation of a sad truth of life and the faults of human society.
REVIEWS AND VIEWS OF LIFE 