Narrating The Tiger’s Last Roar audiobook
How do you avoid ‘audio brownface’?
The Tiger’s Last Roar audio sample
There’s an elephant trap waiting for every narrator of historical fiction set in the British Empire. For those of us old enough to remember, it’s embodied by the BBC 1970s sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. The bumbling Indian servant. The comedy accent. The casual reduction of an entire subcontinent to a collection of vowel sounds and comic timing. It is, to give it a more current label, ‘audio brownface’.
One choice is to try to leap the elephant trap and read the Indian characters neutrally, focusing only on the particular personalities. But this sits oddly with the British characterisations. Consistency demands that they would need to follow this approach. And then you start to lose the rhythms of the dialogue that the author has carefully included for all their characters.
Happily, Morland writes his Indian characters with such genuine respect and individuality, that a light suggestion of different speech patterns, rooted always in the specific person rather than the generalised type, felt the right approach. I hope I’ve managed to voice his creations such as Havildar Harikiran and Aashvi with the care they deserve.
The Tiger’s Last Roar is the second book in Morland’s Life of William Culpepper series – seventeen hours of Napoleonic-era India, Mysorean cavalry prowling the jungles, a wagon train whose fate may decide the course of empires, and a young officer trying to become the soldier – and the man – he is trying to be
I found the battle scenes extraordinary. Morland writes them, adrenaline charged and viscerally immediate, but never losing sight of the human costs As a narrator, these scenes demand a very specific kind of energy and discipline: the forward momentum of action without losing the weight of what’s actually happening to real people. It’s one of the more satisfying creative challenges.
What I’ve also really enjoyed in the three volumes I’ve narrated so far (An Officer’s Justice, the third book is out in print and about to be released as an audiobook) is Morland’s depiction of the emotional lives of his main characters. The women of the novel, operating within the period’s rigid social and cultural expectations, are subtly and beautifully rendered. Their choices never feel anachronistic, they are often as agonising as they are nuanced.