This week I travelled hopefully through both Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (Naxos, 4 CDs, £16.99; Buy this book) and Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry (Random House, 5 CDs, £16.63; Buy this book). Both made excellent audiobook journeys, possibly the better for being abridged. Like James Joyce, McCarthy is best appreciated when heard aloud rather than merely read, and the narrator, Sean Barrett, does his laconic, lapidary prose full justice. We are in the Big Country: Texas in 1980, with drug barons pumping slugs every which way. When Llewellyn Moss happens on a massacre and purloins a satchel containing $4.5 million, he appears doomed. But isn’t he our hero? Surely he can outwit a psychotic hitman who enjoys macabre rituals of death? Don’t hold your breath.
Niffenegger’s second novel stars identical American nymphets roaming around London. An English aunt has left the twins a flat and enough money to do nothing. Cue lots of local colour but a disastrous outcome. It emerges that the aunt was their mother’s long-estranged twin, and that her charismatic and increasingly potent ghost haunts the flat. When one of the twins becomes fascinated by an obsessive-compulsive who lives upstairs and the other falls for her aunt’s grieving husband, the stage is set for a dizzy dance macabre.
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