Barry Lyndon: The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. - William Makepeace Thackeray Audiobook

Written by William Makepeace Thackeray
Read by Jonathan Keeble
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 13 hrs and 14 mins
Release date: 01-08-13
Publisher: Naxos AudioBooks

A morality tale made great fun.
Set in late 18th century Europe the adventures and mis-adventures of a minor member of the Irish gentry trying to better himself. Redmond Barry of Bally Barry is a clever young man. At the prompting of his mother, he learns what he can of courtly manners and swordplay, but fails at more scholarly subjects like Latin. He is a hot-tempered, passionate lad. Following the death of an English officer, Barry flees his native Ireland and attempts to establish himself as one of England’s aristocratic elite. For the next few decades he meanders through Europe, as a soldier, mercenary, gambler, and vagabond. He reaches the pinnacle of worldly success by marriage to an English heiress, but disastrously squanders her fortune and good will.

Barry Lyndon is boastful, conceited, loud-mouthed, a lecher, a gambler, a blackmailer, a liar, and a drunk. “I never struck my wife but when I was in liquor,” he comments at one point, as if it was sufficient justification. In other words, he is one of the great anti-heroes of fiction, a man who manages to insult his mother as pretentious, long-winded and vain in the same moment as he is praising her loyalty.

Through backstabbing and scheming he reaches the level of society to which he always aspired. However, intent on criticizing the period’s social order, Thackeray ensures that this success is soon followed by the hero’s ultimate decline.

Thackeray was making fun of the so-called Irish nobility, who claimed to be descendants of kings while living in “castles” little better than hovels, and “Barry Lyndon” is a satire painted in broad, comic strokes. Jonathan Keeble’s reading. . He wrings every comic drop from the text, even getting a good laugh just by his interpretation of Thackeray’s blanks (”the Duke of ___”). I can’t imagine anyone giving a better performance of this text.

Thoroughly enjoyable.