Full Cast Audio
Publisher: BBC
Age: Childrens
Genre: Fantasy
Format: Audiobook
Release Date: November 1st, 2000
Goodreads
Rating: 3/5 Stars
I may have enjoyed this more if I hadn’t seen the TV show. I picked this up because after watching the show, I realised although there were certain things I remembered really strongly from the books, there were more ‘finer detail’ type things I couldn’t quite remember. And as I do tend to quite like dramatizations, I thought I’d listen to this over a straight-up audio version of the books. Unfortunately, that was probably the wrong choice.
Don’t get me wrong, this did a really good job of condensing the books into something suitable for the radio. The voice acting was good, but there were some areas where it fell a little flat. I really struggled with the narration – we’re given the narration by one of the angels, and it worked to a point. That point being when the angel becomes more “active” in the story, and the narration switched from describing the scene to a first person POV. I find this is something a lot of audio, including podcasts, struggle with – conveying what the characters see in a way that suits the audio. It can come across as pretty clunky.
Some choices felt odd – there were parts when for no apparent reason some of the daemon’s only whisper when they speak, which got very grating after a while. There were moments when characters would be on their own and describing what they were doing – again, a clunky device often used in audio that doesn’t work, especially when you already have a narrator.
These are really good books that I remembered enjoying so, so much as a kid/teenager, but this particular version suffers from over-explaining and trying to cram in too much in a short frame. To me, it seemed like at least large parts of this script were directly adapted for the TV show, though the TV show made some excellent choices in what they changed from the books (such as aging up Will and Lyra), and really leaned into a lot of what’s missing from here.
This is one I’d suggest skipping, and stick to the original books or the TV show.
Unwrapping Words 