Once Upon a River
By: Diane Setterfield / Narrated By: Juliet Stevenson
Length: 16 hrs and 27 mins
A story of stories, a river unlike any other, a pig who knows it all!
Boy, did other reviewers either Love It or Hate It? or what?!
Yeah, clocking in at 16 1/2 hours is quite a stretch for the Listener, but if one views it as a storybook for grownups, all is good. Nay, AWEsome! Author Diane Setterfield’s style here reminds me of The Magician’s Elephant where there are a MULtitude of characters who pull together or drive apart.
When our storybook opens, villagers are gathered together in the pub, The Swan, where all meet and imbibe, where all swap grand stories. The peace is somewhat disturbed when a stranger bursts in, carrying a dead girl. The village folk assist in getting the man to a bed for care, and the corpse of the little girl is taken away where the village folk-medicine woman prepares the body.
But what’s this? A pulse? What’s this? A breath taken, a breath expelled?
The little girl is alive, and with her brings the Unexpected to the Ordinary Day-to-Day. Around 4-years old, the child COULD be a family member long lost to two families, to one woman. Is she a lost/kidnapped daughter? Is she a granddaughter from a son’s liaison? Is she a sister from the past, now an incarnation of love lost?
We follow the stories from all three of these groups, and we’re gifted an extra tale of the medicine/midwife working with the man now revived. And where the haters seemed to find this book tooo long, tooo drawn out and tooo bogged down in details Details DETAILS, I absoLUTEly adored the way the story unfolded, the magnificent fleshing out of sooo many characters, each with their own life story to tell.
Don’t expect grand action, but do expect some meticulous plotting with each character getting attention, each character acting, reacting, shaping their Futures by making p’raps ill-considered choices during their Nows. There is pain here for most of the individuals within this story, but there is also joy and hope, and such Mystery. There is cruelty, there is the sharing of the world’s greatest woes, heavy burdens carried upon broad shoulders.
A lot of people thought things were wrapped up too neatly, that a lot of hard lessons were all-of-a-sudden learned with little effort. Nay, I disagree with MOST of that, tho’ I DID feel the vile characters were a bit too black and white bad guys, and I DID think their Fates were summed up in far too few sentences. Still, most of the people who lived and breathed and shared hardships at The Swan, whose lives depended upon a river that gave, a river that could take, were sooo gently written and fleshed-out. We rejoice when things are good for them; we feel sorrow for them when Life comes and goes, barely a whisper in between, a gentle gift from the river.
P’raps The Magician’s Elephant is coming to mind cuz THAT wonderful audiobook was narrated by Juliet Stevenson as well. Sometimes when audiobooks are stories that roll and twine and involve sooo many characters, when a certain atmospheric charm is being sought, things can go off the rails with the narrator coming across with a sort of singsong. Not here. Ms. Stevenson does indeed have a rhythmic quality to her voice, but it just makes the prose sound more lyrical, more finely wrought.
SUCH a charmer, and I’m so very glad that this audiobook is an Accomplice’s Favorite which is now a Shared Fave. Y’all just have terrific taste, and I thank y’all for helping me to get to some of the best audiobooks, stories out there.
Huzzah to Accomplices!
P.S. The pigs are to die for!
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