Tristram Shandy

“Nothing odd will do long,” declared Dr Johnson in one of his most famous dud verdicts. “Tristram Shandy did not last.” The cock-and-bull story by Laurence Sterne has, in its author’s words, somehow managed “to swim down the gutter of Time” from its first, sensational publication in 1759. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman has inspired and provoked writers as various as Dickens, Joyce and Salman Rushdie. At more than 500 pages, it is the perfect holiday read and Naxos audiobooks has just released an unabridged version, read by Anton Lesser with humour and brio. Lesser’s light tenor is perfectly suited to the many roles (Parson Yorick, Doctor Slop, et al.) who crowd Sterne’s narrative. This translates into 15 CDs and about 19 hours of listening. Perfect for a wet summer.

‘I have never done anything so hard’ a very pale Anton Lesser is said to have declared on completing his brilliant new recording of ‘Tristram Shandy’. A classic actor who’s voiced everyone from Homer to Hamlet, Lesser seems only to open his mouth for wisdom to come out. But then the problems with performing Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century classic of comic metafiction are well rehearsed. As sidetracks sprout from sidetracks, keeping up with the garrulous hero’s chaotic autobiography is one thing. But how the hell are you supposed to read out loud a blank page, or a squiggle? Here sound effects place you firmly at Shandy’s writing desk, while Lesser’s unflaggingly engaged reading insists on the vivid characterisation beneath the stylistic play.

When I’m in London during the summer, I don’t have the car. This is liberating to an extent, but does mean that I can’t listen to Tristram Shandy. I bought the unabridged 15-CD set at the best possible place – Shandy Hall, Laurence Sterne’s home at Coxwold, in Yorkshire. On visiting, I became uncomfortably aware that I’d never managed to get through any Sterne. Anton Lesser reads Tristram to perfection. By the time I’d driven back to Ramsgate the next day, I had heard 10 CDs, but what about the remainder? My ears are the wrong shape for an iPod; the little earphones fall out. I can’t expect the family to share Sterne in the car. Besides, is he suitable for children? Eventually, they may take to him more quickly than me always going off at a tangent, with no obvious beginning, middle and end, Tristram should appeal to the internet generation. It was a long journey home, because the A1 was jammed. I was amazed to see people turning round and going up a slip road the wrong way in order to escape the hold-up. A lorry driver at the top tried to block them all right, but us cars simply went round onto the verge. How very Italian we’ve become.

As a general rule I go along with the advice that if a book doesn’t grab you by the end of chapter 4, don’t waste your time, there are plenty more. Yes, but not like Tristram Shandy. Nothing I’ve ever come across is like Sterne’s extraordinary comic tour de force published 250 years ago which, I freely admit, I found pretty hard going a long way past chapter 4. And then, suddenly, I got it. Or at least I realised I was coming at it from the wrong direction. It isn’t a novel. It has no plot. Chapters break off in mid-sentence because, advises the narrator, ‘I would not give a groat for that man’s knowledge in pen-craft who does not understand this: That the best plain narrative in the world, tacked very close to the last spirited apostrophe to my Uncle Toby, would have felt both cold and vapid upon the reader’s palate; therefore I forthwith put an end to the chapter, though I was in the middle of my story.’ And which story might that have been? The one about Uncle Toby’s dalliance with the widow Wadman? Or his manservant Corporal Trim’s tireless reconstructions of Flanders campaigns, complete with battering rams and catapults on the bowling green behind the vegetable garden? Or of Dr Slop, summoned to assist at the narrator’s birth, being thrown from his horse and … Enough. If you’ve ever sat spellbound listening to a witty, satirical, outrageous, digressive raconteur regaling you with endless stories about preposterous characters that lead nowhere but keep you hanging on every word, trust me – they learned their craft from Sterne. So did postmodernists such as James Joyce and Flann O’Brien. It is tailor-made for audio, as is Anton Lesser’s reading – intelligent, humorous, charming. Dr Johnson admired the book enormously, but opined that ‘nothing odd will do long’. For once he was wrong. Tristram Shandy is decidedly odd and extremely long, but it has stayed the course.

‘At present, nothing is talked of, nothing admired, except what I cannot help calling a very insipid and tedious performance: a kind of novel, called The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, whose humour consists in the whole narration always going backwards’ – thus Horace Walpole in April 1760, when the first two volumes of Sterne’s masterpiece had become the rage. By 1776 Samuel Johnson was declaring ‘Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.’nAnton Lesser’s defence is all-out attack, abetted by candour and an ingenuous eagernessnThey were right about the oddity, and the going backwards. The novel mostly unfolds before its hero has any Opinions, and a third of it before he has a Life – he isn’t born until volume four, and the action ends in a cul-de-sac several years before his birth. There is scarcely room for him amid the anecdotal clutter and human relics lying around from a previous age. Anton Lesser’s unabridged recording of the novel for Naxos is wonderful, because with Sterne we need the whole package – the way the thin air of experiment thickens unexpectedly into the novelistic domesticities of Walter and Mrs Shandy, and Uncle Toby and his loyal corporal Trim; and Parson Yorick in the parlour, who cannot abide gravity; and the mid-wife and Dr Slop who jointly attend on the eventful birth of the hero; and their servants and animals. (Sterne makes us feel the texture of an age in which England had more sheep than people and a parson could love his horse.)nAnton Lesser’s defence is all-out attack, abetted by candour and an ingenuous eagerness – like an 18th-century hero, in fact. He rightly avoids irony (the novel’s ironies being situational rather than verbal). It is a hobby-horsing voice with an elocutionary flourish, and his energetic delivery drives Sterne’s mazy sentences, which might otherwise run out of steam. At the same time Lesser lets Sterne’s ‘periods’ have free rein; he parses them so confidently that he does not mind where they go, for they have an Augustan lucidity even at their most wayward (they merely wear their syntax on the outside, as the Pompidou Centre wears its pipes). This is a feat of intelligent listening, first and foremost, and it makes hearing the novel more involving for long stretches than reading it for ourselves, which can be a fearful and blindfold business.nThe declamatory aspect is key because Tristram’s version of events is all performance (as Walpole perceived), his characters reading aloud or speechifying or quoting or sermonising. But this recording also pays attention to the unsaid and unsayable. Sterne’s digressive principle is based on Locke’s theories of the association of ideas, which seemed to explain the comically ungovernable workings of the head and heart. We muddle our stories, like Uncle Toby. We cannot know our own minds because they are confounded by the vagaries of language – and are attached to bodies, which have minds of their own. Which is why gesture is so important, and is of a piece with other unbearable things in the novel, its blank pages and asterisks and dashes and so forth. At this point an audio reading becomes an intriguing commentary on what Sterne is up to.nBy the same token, we cannot know each other. The final chapters, when the comedy of the sexes comes to a head with Uncle Toby’s thwarted wooing of and by Widow Wadman, are incomparable. Lesser does justice to Wadman’s genteel but incorrigible solicitude concerning Toby’s wounded groin, and to the uxorious parrying between Walter and Mrs Shandy, the blandest exchanges in the history of the novel, in which nothing is said yet something (but what?) is intimated. Anton Lesser reads these passages with just enough sidewind of hesitancy or reserve, as of something blowing the reading slightly off-course, to allow their silences to sound in our ears. In an age which felt suddenly confident that the novel could know everything, Sterne extended this to include the knowledge that other people are a mystery story.

I never got very far with reading that most confusing, weird novel Tristram Shandy, so I’m listening to it. It was after all published between 1759 and 1767, a time when novels were often read aloud to an audience eager for any kind of entertainment while they tatted lace or fiddled with fishing flies. Apparently they didn’t mind the fact that, thanks to the discursive style, Tristram isn’t born until the third volume. By then the bemused, possibly snoring, listener has met Uncle Toby and Parson Yorick, and been led up innumerable garden paths and gathered many more or less bawdy red herrings. Anton Lesser is magnificent; his sparky, slightly manic narration is ideally suited to Laurence Sterne’s exclamations and digressions. A little goes a long way, though. It is some comfort to learn that Sterne published it in parts over eight years. I’ve decided to look on it as a radio soap and take it in daily doses. Will it work? Time will tell.