A Tale of Two Cities

Anton Lesser was a fantastic narrator - I hadn't heard him do audiobooks before but I'd heard some radio dramas. I would definitely look out for more books read by him - he managed to do all the voices without them getting in the way, and get across the sense of Dickens' really long sentences. He read like someone who understood what he was reading, which really isn't always the case, unfortunately. I saw there were other audiobooks read by Simon Callow and Julian Rhind-Tutt and I'd expect them both to be very good as well.

There are a few odd places (I found three) where the audio skips a couple of pages of text and also repeats itself. I've reported these and I hope the files will be re-uploaded soon.

I've always enjoyed Dickens when I've read it (Great Expectations, Bleak House, Nicholas Nickleby a bit less so), but this is Dickens doing historical fiction - the French Revolution in 1789-1793 and him writing around 1859.

To get the negatives out of the way first, he can't write women, I hate all his insipid, useless, perfect china doll women. I imagine he was probably an insufferable man. So Lucie Manette was uniformly irritating.

However, the book more than made up for the overly-sentimental first half with the horrors and brutality and visceral terror of the second. It's really noticeable how little distance Dickens, writing only 70ish years after the events, has to the revolution. It's very like reading WWII fiction now. I studied the French Revolution briefly at school, but all I could have told you was that a Louis and Marie Antoinette were guillotined. This is a whole difference experience. I really felt the fear and uncertainty of living through those times in Paris, not sure if you would be arrested and executed for any invented reason, endless violence and killing in the streets, frenzied celebrations and new rules every day for how to be a good "citizen". I had never heard that the revolutionary motto wasn't "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité" but "Unité, indivisibilité de la République, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité ou la mort" - liberty, equality, brotherhood or death.

I also thought that his depiction of Dr Manette's life after the trauma of having been imprisoned for over ten years was very believable and sympathetic. I'm always a bit surprised by how relatable his characters' experiences are, even writing back in 1859. And as always, there are some great moments of humour - Jerry Cruncher's resurrectionist tendencies in particular.