The Things They Carried
By: Tim O'Brien / Narrated By: Bryan Cranston
Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
I have to admit: I still like the book best even tho’ Bryan Cranston’s narration comes out better than I thought it would…
So sue me: I dooo sometimes read, and many, many years ago, a teacher of a writing class I was taking assigned the short story, The Things They Carried which blew my socks off. I immediately dashed out to get the book with the rest of the stories, and all of them have been some of my favorites of literature that came out of/was inspired by the Vietnam war.
Each sentence was written with such precision and care, spare but packing an emotional wallop. When my husband read the book and started dog-earing pages and underlining particularly fine sentences or paragraphs, I damned near KILLED him! Cuz seriously. We’re talking an AWEsome book by Tim O’Brien, and I wanted to keep that copy of incredibly heartfelt literature in perfect condition.
You can understand, then, how such a love and devotion to the written word had me feeling quiiiite a bit of trepidation when I saw that Bryan Cranston, venerable actor though he might be, was doing the narration for the audiobook. It kept coming up on Sale, and I kept listening to the audio Sample, and I kept hearing flat tones, a near monotone. Naturally, I was disappointed; naturally, I kept foregoing it.
But my love for the book had me picking up the audiobook eventually, hesitation be damned! And lo’ and behold, Bryan Cranston doesn’t completely suck…!
I know, I know. Fine praise indeed. But hey! He very much has those flat tones, especially when reading the text straight. Thank GOD, however, he does dialogue suuuuper well, enough for me to stop gritting my teeth, start giving the guy a chance. He doesn’t deliver the moon, but he at least delivers a comet or two.
Which is verrrry important because I LOVE these stories (I’m saying this again just in case I didn’t make myself clear enough the first gazillion and six times). They run the gamut between horrific scenes of a young man being blown up, leaving strips of flesh dangling from trees, all the way to an innocent young gal flying over to be with her boyfriend, being a motherly sort, until she goes the way of the guerrilla troops and winds up wearing a necklace of enemy tongues around her neck. They only begin to scratch the surface of what fear the men felt, of the everyday boredom that is punctuated by a sniper bullet, leaving a person dead even as he’s zipping up after relieving himself.
One of the most important bits I learned about writing comes from this book in, “How to tell a true war story”: One has to write fiction to make the true parts believable. The “protagonist” of the book, ostensibly a fictionalized O’Brien, tells each story, sometimes tells of the same incident but through a different lens (He killed a man; he could’ve killed a man; actually, he didn’t kill the man, but this is what he was feeling when he saw the corpse…), and sometimes he interviews one of his former comrades in arms. No matter what, however, the concept leads the listener to wonder just what is made up, leads us to dread the most awful part—they are what actually happened.
No, I don’t think Bryan Cranston owned this book, tho’ I’m glad that he put his acting chops to good use for the dialogue. But I DO think he did fairly decently, certainly better than all those times I passed up the opportunity to buy the audiobook, cringing over what turned out NOT to be a heinous narration job (I know: AGAIN with the high praise!).
And Cranston does deliver the lines that matter. The story that has our “protagonist” in Vietnam, revisiting where his friend Kiowa died in a flooded field of excrement, is particularly touching. He’s with his daughter, and she’s having trouble understanding the whole concept of war. What can he say? He simply puts a pair of moccasins in the spot he believes Kiowa went under, and he grieves silently.
I guess that’s why I like the stories so much: Because I too wonder about the concept of war. And tho’ there are no answers for me here, there is plenty for me to think about.
And god KNOWS: There’s so very much for me to feel…
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