A Question Of Abridgment
Sep 19 '00
One day at work Jackie was telling me about a book titled Lord Of the Dead she’d just finished that she felt was stunningly brilliant. As she was telling me about it I was thinking I needed to find this book because it sounded great. Then I was thinking that it sounded like a book on tape that I’d listened to. Then I broke down and asked "What was the author’s name? Was it Holland?"
"Yea, I think so."
"I listened to that on audio and thought it was dumb."
And why did I think it was dumb? Was I not paying attention to the plot being too busy driving? Am I thick? No, half the book was chucked out to fit it on two audio cassettes. Don’t assume I’m all that naive. I knew they were cutting large chunks of book out by the number of cassettes in the package, but I didn’t ever plan on reading this particular book anyway and I needed something to distract me from my two hour commute. However, I didn’t realize that the abridgement was going to destroy the novel.
Another memorable book, trilogy actually, that I did on audio was the Jedi Academy by Kevin J. Anderson. It was good enough to satisfy my curiosity until I read The Essential Chronology and started noticing all the stuff that was left out. That and the fact that the reader consistently pronounced ‘Bespin’ wrong. (Let me tell you, hurling down 77 south at 80 miles an hour screaming "BESPIN’ is not the safest thing in world.)
I’ve had a number of good experiences with books on tape, Stephen King’s The Mist was fabulous, and Rose Madder (unabridged) was very good. Tom Bodett’s End Of the Road series goes with us on every long car trip. And I never would have been able to fully appreciate Bag of Bones without having heard Rebecca ("Last night I dreamt of Manderly….") But each one of these is the full, unabridged story. You see, all those bits that get abridged out, the author meant for those to be there. They serve a purpose and when they’re gone, the story is a little more fragmented and a little hollower than it should have been.
Books on tape serve a purpose. I’ve used them to alleviate the boredom of long drives and to just entertain when I’m doing something mindless like cleaning. My husband was a faithful book on tape listener when he was doing lots of comics inking because the work was mind numbingly boring and he had no one to talk to. And two people in a car driving to Florida from Ohio can only entertain one another for so long before they learn to hate each other. But I will never again listen to an abridged version of a novel. Abridgement makes a good book so so and a so so book bad. Now I have to read Lord Of the Dead after all. Fortunately I was so bored by the audio version that I don’t remember how it ends.
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