Author: Emily Brontë
Publisher: Digiview Entertainment
Rating: WARTY!
This is part of a trilogy of reviews centered around Wuthering Heights, including Withering Tights and the amusingly titled Wuthering High by Cara Lockwood. Only one of the three I did I find to be a worthy read, and it wasn't this one.
This novel should have been titled Wuthering Shite, it's such a huge, teetering pile of festering excrement. This is, without any shadow of a doubt, absolutely the worst audio book I've ever had to stomach. The cover says that it's narrated by Tiffany Clark, who is useless, but it's also co-narrated by a guy, who goes completely uncredited. I understand his desire to remain anonymous given that he is without question the worst reader of anyone I've ever encountered, audio-book or not, professional or amateur. He is completely pathetic in every sense. He can't pronounce any word that is longer than three syllables. Neither of them can do a British accent, let alone a Yorkshire one. Both of these dickheads read it with American accents because they are Americans. From what I can gather, Tiffany Clark is a retired porn actress, and the guy might well be her ex, Fred Lincoln, but these are just guesses. Both of them are only semi-literate as judged by their horrendous litany of mispronounced words.
That's why, even though this novel is set in Yorkshire, a county I love and from which both my parents hail, I cannot recommend this novel. And it's not just the audio version, it's the novel itself, as well. I swear, if Emily Brontë, aka Ellis Bell, were alive today, she'd be living in LA and writing trashy scripts for daytime soaps. Do please note the cover image above. This is a photograph of Cathy taken precisely at the moment when Heathcliff put his right boot tip up her snotty, smart-mouthing arse.
This was a wretched trash-heap of a racist novel and the reading, by people with American accents had to be a joke, right? There was no chemistry so why the publisher thought this would work was a complete and utter mystery of Holmesian proportions. The story already was nauseating, but it was rendered more so by the vomit coming from these readers' mouths.
This novel, which teaches that Romany people are nothing but child-abandoning and violent scum would never have gained publication for itself (except as a self-published novel), had it been written today. Here, as a public service, so you never have to read this novel and suffer through it yourself, is a précis!
Lockwood, having seen bizarre dysfunctional behaviors at the home of his landlord, abusive bastard Heathcliff, and dreamed of the ghost of Psycho Bitch trying to get through his window, gets the lowdown on the action from his own housekeeper, Nelly Dean. This is the start of a confusing babble of multiple PoV historical accounts of events in which Nelly can recall word for word conversations from thirty years before, including the exact wording of a letter, and can describe events to which she was never party. A-friggin'-mazing!
Heathcliff was an apparent Romany child who was adopted by Earnshaw and who through cheating, intimidation, and subterfuge rises to own Earnshaw's home. His co-dependent and vilely dysfunctional relationship with Catherine is the Gothic romance which people have praised almost since this abortion of a work of so-called literature was published. Even Brontë's own sister thought it was so bad that she edited it extensively after the novel had killed its author (evidently she died of a broken heart after realizing what a lousy piece of crap she'd foisted upon the unsuspecting public).
There follows a litany of bullshit and crap, with bad people doing worse things to losers, some of whom even deserve what they get, but in the end, Cathy dies, and Heathcliff is still a jerk. The best part of the novel is when they're both lying next to each other in the ground, dead and rotting, just as each of them spent their entire life.
I thoroughly recommend this novel for toilet paper - but not the CD version - it's kinda hard to wipe with CDs and you can't even rumple them up first.
