Wuthering Heights
by Charlotte Bronte
Naxos Audiobooks (abridged audiobook)
The world has gone Bronte mad, with film versions of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights about to hit cinemas, not to mention the Eyre-esque Twilight books. Classical music specialist Naxos released this abridged audiobook to attract a new generation of readers: the lucrative 'young adult' market. This makes some sense: the passionate love affair (or wrestling match) between brutish Heathcliff and hair-tossing Cathy contains more than a touch of teen passion: they meet as children, fall in love as adolescents and tear each other apart as adults. But while modern tweens have notoriously short attention spans, I am not convinced Naxos needs to abridge this much: clocking in at under four hours, it is almost a third the length of most Wuthering Heights audiobooks. Some of the excisions are graceful - a paragraph cut down to size. But other gaps - entire sections of dialogue - smooth the weird atmospheric edges of Bronte's story. On the plus side, both readers Ken Drury and Freda Dowie are extremely good.
Extras: CD edition comes with a CD-ROM containing texts and notes by Francis Gilbert.