Emma: An Audible Original Drama by Anna Lea
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Fine Adaptation Marred by Music This Audible Original full-cast recording of Anna Lea’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s romantic comedy of manners Emma (1816) captures the original story’s spirit and retains much of its content and style. But the sound effects and music! (Music and sound design by Stephen Jones.) Carriage wheels roll, horses snort, birds twitter, rain patters, fires crackle, silverware clinks, pianofortes plink, and so on, all quite audibly. The most excrescent sound effect is a loud clock ticking during conversations indoors when the fire and silverware are at rest. Actually, for the most part the sound effects are OK (to this listener), because they aren’t repeated by the narration (which redundancy harms the “illuminated production” audiobook of Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, wherein the narrator will say, for example, “The door opened” and we hear a door opening). The Hollywoodish Austenesque music, however, is another matter, being irritatingly intrusive from the start, coming at the ends or beginnings of every scene, running over and through too much of Emma Thompson’s fine narration, and detracting from rather than enhancing the listening experience. That’s a pity, because the adaptation of the novel and the reading of the professional actor readers are fine. The story concerns the education by experience of Emma Woodhouse, a wealthy (30,000 pounds!) 21-year-old lady who is intelligent, pretty, accomplished, funny, and high-spirited, and is running her family house and feeble-minded, self-centered, and hypochondriac father, with whom she lives. Her sister has married and left home. Emma claims to wish never to marry and says she’ll be content with her status and responsibility in taking care of her father and home and nieces and nephews and so on. Emma is spoiled, snobbish, egotistical, meddling, envious, and has too high a regard for her perception and sensitivity. Hence her need to be improved by adversity, which she doesn’t suspect but we eagerly await: Austen’s irony is one of the pleasures of the novel. The adversity will come about due to Emma’s misguided efforts to play cupid and anti-cupid, depending on whom she thinks ought or ought not to marry whom. The characters include the innocent and low status Harriet Smith (who is an unknown person’s “natural” child), the flirtatious and higher status Frank Churchill (who is the step-son of Emma’s childhood governess), the accomplished Jane Fairfax (whom Emma has always envied and hence disliked and distanced), the gentlemanly Mr. Knightley (a friend of Emma’s and her father sixteen years her senior), the eligible and superficial Mr. Elton (the neighborhood vicar), and so on. One bonus of this audible adaptation by Anna Lea is its reduction of many of Miss Bates’ lines. I still remember reading the original novel in book form years ago, when I became quite impatient with Miss Bates’ appearances in the story and soon took to skipping her interminable speeches, because Jane Austen was too good at conveying at great length and in exhaustive detail their irritating air-headed prattling quality. I believe that every important element of the full novel’s plot has been retained (even Emma’s appalling put down of “poor Miss Bates” at one point). And the adaptation keeps many of Austen’s wonderfully delicious lines, like this from the narrator: “The lady had been so easily impressed, so sweetly disposed, had, in short, to use a most intelligible phrase, been so ready to have him that vanity and prudence were equally contented.” It also retains the antique, genteel savor of her characters’ dialogues, like this from Jane Fairfax: “I am exceedingly obliged to you, Mrs. Elton. I am obliged to anybody who feels for me, but I am quite serious in wishing nothing to be done until the summer.” I often got the feeling that Austen’s comfortably well-off characters never actually DO anything or actually TALK about anything. They visit each other and have tea and attend dinner and dance parties and go on excursions exploring each other’s gardens and share carriages and gossip, and so on, but. . . Sure, getting married is an important part of life, but it seems to be all the characters are concerned about (that and what kind of family people come from and how much money they’re worth). After reading just before Emma Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, which is so full of interesting ideas about science, politics, economics, society, time, space, work, and, yes, love, Austen’s novel seems a little frilly. Furthermore, I got the sense that in the novel much of Emma’s class-conscious snobbery isn’t a flaw requiring change so much as Austen’s own feeling. Lines like “They [the Coles] were a very good sort of people, but they were of no origin, in trade, and only moderately genteel,” make my skin crawl a bit, as does the final development of the relationship between Emma and Harriet despite my telling myself, “Hey, Austen lived in a different era!” Anyway, so as long as you don’t mind a radio play type experience (including sound effects and music) and a story about half as long as, say, the Naxos unabridged recording read by the superb Juliet Stevenson (16.5 hours), this audiobook adaptation would be entertaining and worthwhile (especially if you could get it for free as an audible member!). View all my reviews
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