Rating: WARTY!
As I've mentioned before in reviews of audiobooks, they're throwaway for me. I'm a captive audience commuting, so I turn to more experimental fiction under those circumstances, which means audiobooks are more likely than others to be found wanting. Plus I get them for free from the library (they're far too expensive to buy because the publishers insist upon hiring actors to read them which means a hefty fee which too-often isn't worth it since the actors do such a lousy job. They need to get ordinary people - people with good reading voices to do the reading. They'd save a fortune, get better narration, and be able to sell the novels more cheaply, thereby attracting more buyers! Idiots.
This one is about Allan, H Rider Haggard's Quatermain man, despite the fact that it's purportedly about his girlfriend. Many people believe the H in Rider Haggard's name stood for heroine, but it really didn't. It's Henry, which as everyone knows, is really shorthand for heroine, thus this novel is about Quatermain's Lady-in-Watusi, Marie Marais, who was named after a siren used on police vehicles in French Iguana.
By modem standards, the story is tediously slow. At one point Marie and some other dude have a plan to spirit Q out of captivity, and hide him in a mealie bin. Whereas a lesser-spotted Wood-writer might have dealt with the basic plan in a few sentences, and then turned the actual rescue in a several page adventure, H Rider Haggard it out over page after page after page before the actual rescue even began and dealt with the rescue in a few sentences. He expended those earlier pages discussing every factoid facet of this plan and that's where I gave up. I'd been skimming prior to that, and this was the final store that broke the chameleon's back.
No more looking Haggard for me!
