Harry Potter audio, now with philosophical musings on reading aloud

[Amy Z]

Richelle wrote:

> I'd like to buy the audio CDs for all four Harry Potter books, but 
>I'm not sure which ones to get.  The U.S. versions have Jim Dale
>performing, or there's the UK Stephen Fry.  Is it worth the money to 
>order the British versions?  I'm assuming Stephen Fry has a British 
>accent, but what about Jim Dale?  I simply can't hear the books read 
>aloud without a British accent.  I've never heard him, so I haven't 
>a clue, hoping someone out there can help me out.

I had a grand time responding to this the other night when I couldn't 
sleep, but my computer must not have been feeling too well either 
because it couldn't cope with sending it.  

By preface, with all respect to Judi's children, children tend to 
prefer whatever is familiar.  (Hm . . . I guess that's true of 
adults, too.)  E.g., a child who saw the HP movie before reading the 
book would probably complain that the book got all manner of things 
wrong.  I'm betting if they'd heard Dale first, they'd dislike Fry.

I haven't done a conclusive comparative study, myself, much as I 
would like to, because I only have one volume of Fry and it isn't 
available in any libraries around here (I'm in the U.S.).  I've 
listened to all four by Dale at least 3-4 times, and listened to the 
Fry GF at least 3.  And like Judi's kids, my appreciation of the 
second I heard (Fry) was diminished by the fact that it, well, wasn't 
exactly like the one I'd heard first, though I got over that.  In any 
case, I like them both very much, and think the differences between 
them, like reports of Mark Twain's death, are greatly exaggerated.  
Here are some of my thoughts on the two versions and on reading in 
general.

ACTING VS. READING.

The main distinction people always seem to make is that Dale "acts" 
while Fry "reads."  I fall firmly in the "readers should act" camp, 
but I must differ with Haggridd--Fry does act, and acts very well (I 
recommend him as Jeeves, btw, but I digress).  So those who 
want "acting," don't avoid Fry on that account, and those who want to 
avoid "acted" versions, you're out of luck.  Ask a friend to read the 
books aloud in a monotone for you, because you're not going to get it 
from either of these men.

I have been to plenty of public readings where the readers, either 
through shyness, total lack of acting ability, or conviction, read 
the words off the page with as little expression as possible.  These 
were the writers themselves, who presumably had some emotional 
connection to the events and characters, but you wouldn't guess it by 
the way they read.  I find this approach boring.  Short of this 
extreme, I don't know what people mean when they say "a reader should 
read, not act."  Imagine these lines "read, not acted":

  "=What=?" Harry gasped.  "They've got . . . they've got =Ron=?"
  "The thing Harry Potter will miss most, sir!" squeaked Dobby.  "And 
past an hour--"
  "--'=the prospect's black,='" Harry recited, staring, horror-
struck, at the elf, "'=Too late, it's gone, it won't come 
back . . .='  Dobby--what've I got to do?"

Wouldn't it sound a bit odd and stilted if the reader carefully 
avoided all expression?  Shouldn't he or she sound just a bit horror-
struck when reading Harry's lines?  Would you really want to listen 
to 636 pages of Harry Potter, the London Phonebook?  Some people, 
e.g. the readers-of-their-own-fiction of whom I wrote, say that they 
are trying to be neutral so as to stay out of the way of the written 
word.  Well, I don't think it can be done.  Once you start reading 
aloud, you are interpreting, and your only choice is what 
interpretation you will give.  Trying to make your voice blank is 
like making a movie of the PS/SS without any human faces in it, and 
to this listener, almost as strangely horrifying.  Reading Harry's 
discovery that his best friend is likely to drown in a blank voice 
would be, paradoxically, "acting," and bad acting at that.

When I read to children, I don't put on a lot of accents, because I'm 
no good at them; much to my sorrow, e.g., I am incapable of doing 
justice to The Secret Garden, which I love and attempt to press onto 
every child I meet, as I have never been to Yorkshire and haven't the 
faintest idea how to pronounce "nowt."  But though all the characters 
sound like a middle-class northeastern American woman when I give 
them voice, I do read with expression and emotion.  I think it would 
be deadly dull if I didn't, and I doubt there are many people here 
who try to take all interpretation out of their voices when they read 
to children.

ACCENTS 

The other major distinction that's often made between Fry and Dale is 
their use of different accents.  There is no doubt that Fry does a 
lot less of this.  Some people find it distracting to keep stumbling 
across a wide variety of accents, and if you're one of them, you'd 
probably do best to avoid Dale's Irish Seamus, Scottish Moody, 
Liverpudlian Bagman (uh . . . I *think* that accent is Liverpudlian.  
He sure sounds a lot like all the Beatles docudramas I've ever seen), 
etc.  I only occasionally find it distracting.

The biggest downside to Dale along these lines is that it imposes an 
interpretation that isn't in the text at all.  Okay, Seamus is 
obviously of Irish extraction, but we don't know whether he has an 
accent; by giving him one, Dale has decided that Seamus actually 
lives in Ireland and doesn't just have Irish ancestry.  In the case 
of Moody he's taking a couple of small cues and running with them 
(surely not everyone who says "laddie" is Scottish, but for Dale it's 
enough to make him settle on this accent, with the result that I 
envision Sean Connery in the role, albeit a bent and mangled Sean 
Connery).  In the case of Bagman he's utterly making it up.

The biggest downside to Fry along these lines, IMO, is that almost 
everyone sounds upper-class (i.e. like Fry).  He can pull off a 
working-class accent when it's clearly indicated by the text (at 
least, he can do so well enough for my untuned ear), e.g. with 
Hagrid, but most of his characters sound very Etonish.  I think this 
probably has to do with his lack of facility with accents rather than 
his actual judgment of the characters' social class.  The effect is 
off-putting at times, though; Fred and George's cutting up tends to 
take the tone of incredibly witty, Noel-Coward-esque repartee, and I 
keep expecting George to say languidly, "Time for a spot of tennis!  
Get your whites on, Fred, there's a good chap, or we won't have time 
before we have to dress for dinner," and that just doesn't sound 
right to me.  What social class the Weasleys *do* occupy has been the 
topic of discussion on the list; Catherine has made a cogent argument 
that they are of the "poor gentry" and wouldn't have middle-class 
accents.  Still, those tennis whites bother my eyes.  No doubt my own 
assumption that the Weasleys are not of a class likely to dine with 
Sebastian Flyte at Brideshead comes partly from the fact that my 
first encounter with them was via Dale, before I even read the books 
with my own eyes.  

VOICES

A related issue is different voices, which is not the same as accent--
e.g. my friend J. and I have very similar accents, being from the 
same hometown and of the same class, but our voices are instantly 
distinguishable.  Dale makes these subtle differences better than 
Fry, so that in his version, when Ron or Harry speaks unmarked by 
a "Ron said" or "Harry said," one can still tell which one is 
speaking.  In Fry the dialogue gets slightly confusing here and there 
because some voices sound so similar, Harry and Ron's especially.  Of 
course, we've all memorized the books, so this doesn't have much 
negative impact.

Whether you like the voice a reader gives a character is a matter of 
personal taste.  John Walton finds Dale's whiny Hermione intolerable 
(I think it's pretty excruciating too, but in Dale's defense, he 
usually saves it for lines that are tagged with "Hermione squealed" 
and the like); I find Dale's McGonagall a bit overdone and Fry's 
girls and women much too squeaky (Stephen, just for your information, 
women have only slightly higher voices than men--very few of us sound 
like Miss Piggy).  They are both very consistent in their 
characterizations, but screw up now and then.  Dale changed Sprout's 
voice radically over the four books, e.g. (I love the way she sounds 
in his GF.  She is clearly relishing the phrase "bubotuber pus").  He 
also gives Fudge and Crouch two quite different voices but then mixes 
them up a couple of times.  As with accents, Fry's characters have 
much less range of voice than Dale's.

ACTING ABILITY/INTERPRETATION

Since, as I said, both readers act, the question of how well they act 
and how we like their actorly decisions.  For my part, I'm divided.  
Fry's characters seem a bit sharper, a bit angrier.  Sometimes I 
don't like this; when Hermione speaks "briskly" he makes her sound 
like she's seething.  Other times I like it a lot; with just a few 
key lines read with real irritation or impatience, Fry has made me 
rethink my interpretation of Harry as a very gentle and pretty 
easygoing soul.  Fry seems to act the narrative bits more than Dale 
does, and I like that; he (Fry) reads the Quidditch match with 
excitement, e.g., even when he's just reading description, not 
dialogue.  Dale seems in some ways the better actor--subtler in his 
characterizations, though some are over the top (and that's okay 
too).  I would love to hear Fry's Lockhart.


To sum up, they differ in many ways but don't take radically 
different overall approaches, and I like them both tremendously.  
We're really lucky to have two such good readers of our beloved 
books.  So, my advice, if you're still listening, Richelle--
Richelle?  Richelle?  Wake up!--is to buy whichever one is not 
available in your local library, so that you can listen to both.  If 
that means shelling out serious money for the version that must 
travel overseas, you could recoup some of the money by renting it to 
your neighborhood HP-starved fanatics.  Or maybe report it as a 
professional expense.  <g>

Have fun!

Amy Z