Audiobooks
The late Simon Cadell was best known as the holiday camp manager in Hi-de-hi!, playing a defensive bat against the advances of yellowcoat Gladys, and a losing wicket against the Fates in charge of things going wrong. He was also the deranged civil servant dedicated to driving a new motorway through the rural heartlands in the BBC’S six-part Blott on the Landscape and the voice of the Old English Sheepdog in the TV ad for Dulux paint. Above all, literally, his was the original voice of ‘Mind the Gap!’, which barked its bright ultimatum at a generation of London Underground commuters, conveying good and bad news – you’re safe if you mind, not if you don’t – in three tart syllables.
Cadell’s was a voice that did not sell you anything. Melodious but reticent, covering a spectrum of male fallibility, it proved irresistible to advertisers in their Eighties Ironist phase: who better to sell something Samsung than someone constitutionally and Britishly incapable of doing so? The mystery in all this was the fingerprint of Cadell’s voice, recognisable without obvious distinguishing marks. Its immaculate side-parting matched a face as straight as Buster Keaton (albeit, as his friend Gyles Brandreth remarked, lopsided) and with comparable resources of impassivity.
Cadell played serious roles – a memorable Hamlet at Birmingham Rep – and he admired Graham Greene for his lack of concern about the margin between the serious and the entertaining. Among his several audiobooks, which include Waugh’s Scoop (bafflingly available only in America), the jewel is Cadell’s reading of Greene’s slender and sombre The Quiet American.
The novel is a triangular affair, set in colonial Saigon in the early 1950s, and written while events were still playing out – Greene covered the Indo-china war as a special reporter. The French are fighting their losing battle against communist insurgence, while America hovers supportively, angling for a future as the region’s dominant outside power. (We know where that will lead.) Into this city of shadows and random explosions comes Pyle: young, idealistic and American, ‘with his crew-cut and his wide campus gaze’, sent to instil – or install – textbook democracy through a mysterious Third Force, between communism and colonialism.
The English narrator, Fowler, is a hardened foreign correspondent who watches caustically from the sidelines, remarking with hindsight that, ‘I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.’ As Pyle blunders into something bloodier than economic aid, Fowler rumbles his cover and sets him up, impelled to do so as if pushed from behind. But his motives are suspect, to himself and to the police, who are aware that Pyle had stolen Fowler’s mistress, Phuong, with a promise of marriage and life in America. And Phuong – ingenuous, venal, inscrutable – wants security, from whomever can provide it most.
The novel is written from inside all the subterfuge, yet lucidly plotted, closely splicing retrospect and endgame, lean and linear throughout. Cadell reads it with biting sardonic urgency and no time to separate the voices – even Pyle’s American is only lightly inferred, a marker rather than an accent – sensing that there are three voices but one atmosphere.
For this reason Cadell is responsive to the novel’s undertow of nostalgia – ‘and then I came east’ – a place where home and homesickness are words for the same thing, where you can miss a place while being there, or a person (Phuong) while they are in the room. Cadell’s Fowler has the timbre of a man living where no one else lives, a bystander who yet monopolises all meanings.
What astonishes about the novel on this straight reading is how little Greene bothered to explain the geopolitical opacities, how immersed the novel is – a landscape seen by flashes of lightning, moving between jagged dialogue and big set-pieces: a bombing raid seen from a remote cockpit, an explosion in a square. Not war without end but, more corrosive and maddening, a war without beginning. Cadell’s jump-cut voice carries these meanings and opacities. Among the finely judged things are his accent in the snatches of French dialogue: precisely as good as Fowler’s would be at this stage in the game, and no better.