Nasty Narrators

I AM not suggesting that fascism is anything to laugh about, but whenever I have tried listening to audiobooks that deal with the history and theory of the subject the narrator adopts a typically bad-tempered tone that makes the listener feel as though he or she has just strayed onto the lawn at Buckingham Palace in the presence of a particularly psychotic gardener.

By sheer contrast, audiobooks on communist history seem to convey the plentiful crimes of Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung with a certain spring in their step and one could be forgiven for thinking that each Siberian gulag had been equivalent to a luxury holiday home for retired billionaires or that The Long March was but a gentle ramble through the rolling hills of the English countryside.

How does a professional narrator get into the right mindset when it comes to reciting a volume like Mein Kampf, I wonder? I suppose it must be similar to the way an actor will shed real tears in front of a camera, yet in this instance concern someone with a poor old grandmother who was once transported to the wrong location in a Berlin taxi with the result that she missed the international knitting conference. An octogenarian outrage that is surely comparable to the wild rampages of Kristallnacht and certainly enough to plunge any narrator worthy of the name into the gloomiest of dispositions.

Personally, rather than have some moody mouthpiece sneer his way through the 1930s I would much prefer to endure a brief, obligatory warning about listeners taking care not to entertain a questionable growth on their upper lip or keep their arms raised for more than five seconds after changing a lightbulb. At least then we might be spared the psychological torture of revisiting the headmaster's office over and over again and being read what amounts to twenty-eight hours of the Riot Act.

Perhaps, after all, that is the ultimate objective? To deter people from taking an interest in fascism on the basis that its enumerated tenets are completely unlistenable, subjecting them to a holocaust of aural displeasure that makes even the worst excesses of tinnitus appear soothing and agreeable.