"Kind? How boring that would be. I aspire to be wicked."

Until I began listening to the Song of Ice and Fire books, I never really considered audiobooks as an option for consuming novels. If I was going to read, I was going to read - hold a paperback in my hands, sit in a nice comfortable chair (or, y'know, a filthy bus seat), maybe put some instrumental music on (I can't have two sets of words going into my brain at once)… y'know, really make a night of it. But my attention span is short, and the more time I spend working for The Man and the less I spend writing my little stories, the more precious those minutes begin to feel; so sitting down in my favourite pants on my favourite chair to read a thousand pages of fantasy for three weeks suddenly doesn't seem as appetising an idea as I'm sure it does for so many other people. Hence the reason I turned to Audible.

Well, that and the fact that I had a code for two free Audible books.

Anyway. Fast forward a year, and I've just finished listening to book four, A Feast for Crows, and it has made such an impression on me that I just have to review it for my blog that no one reads. Yes, it has rocked my world. Made me laugh and despair and feel painfully confused. It's been a hell of a ride.

But I'm not talking about the story. No, sir; I won't be reviewing that. We all know how good the Song of Ice and Fire series is, how incredibly broad and deep George R. R. Martin's imagination has proven itself to be in the five books we've seen so far. There must be a hundred thousand reviews all over the Internet that go on about all of that - I don't want to cover old ground.

I want to talk instead about the narrator of the books (the longest of which is 47.5 hours long!): Roy Dotrice. The now 93-year-old actor has voiced every one of the books so far, and even held a Guinness World Record for the number of characters he voiced in the first, A Game of Thrones. He does all these different voices, he reads clearly, and he has a great timbre to his voice, which is vital if you're going to spend forty hours listening to it. He's really quite impressive, most of the time.

I just don't think he should voice the next one.

It all starts so well. At the beginning of A Game of Thrones, the children have children's voices, the women have women's voices, Tyrion has a curious northern English accent for which we can just about forgive him, and the book flows along nicely. But then, at some point, something goes wrong. Maybe Dotrice lost his notepad, or the Excel spreadsheet in which he noted down all his voices was corrupted by a shoddy Windows update (typical Microsoft). Or maybe he took a blow to the head, I don't know. Either way, Tyrion turns Welsh, never to become northern again.

That's fine. Maybe he moved to Wales at some point, and picked up the accent really quickly. Remember that time Joss Stone took a week's holiday in the USA and came back talking like Dolly Parton? Who's to say that couldn't happen to a Lannister?

But as you listen on, you slowly become aware that that explanation is an unlikely one, as other accents start to fall apart too. Varys speaks like he's just crawled out of a horrific car accident and is yet to see a doctor. Jaime and Cersei speak nothing like their younger brother. Tywin sounds like a huge fat man, a Jabba the Hutt of Westeros, for whom it is such an effort to speak that he can only say two or three words at a time without taking a break. Thoros of Myr starts out as a very old, fragile man and ends up a burly northerner. Through the course of the four books to which I've listened, Samwell has had about seven distinct accents.

Then Dotrice loses interest in names as well as voices. Bran becomes Brian. Brienne starts out as Bry-een, then in the fourth book, she becomes Brian too. Maybe he just likes the name Brian.

But that doesn't mean the voice fun is over. While everyone else turns slowly into Brian, Jaime becomes Welsh too, just for a few chapters. Cersei, not one to be left out while the rest of her family lose their minds, goes through male puberty, and trades her lady's voice in for one much deeper. 

I know, I'm being very mean. I don't mean to be. Roy Dotrice is a legend - I'm not sure I could record one of these books now, at 27, let alone at his age. I certainly couldn't come up with all the voices he does, to make dialogue that much easier to listen to. And it must be hard to get everything right in 40 hours of audio recording - I imagine there comes a point where you notice an error in the middle and just think, Fuck it, we've been here for two weeks doing this, let's just burn it to disc and go home. But still, this bloke held a Guinness World Record for this shit. Did they not listen to the book, and realise that he'd given two different voices to some of the characters? Does it still count, if you do it wrong? With this being the only audio edition of these books that is likely to be recorded for the foreseeable future, and with the narrator having such a huge influence on the listener's enjoyment of them, I'm just thinking that maybe it's time to get a slightly better reader. Someone who isn't as useless as nipples on a breastplate.

Although, thinking about it, and reading back what I've written here, that would make them less fun. A lot less fun.

So no, actually, ignore all of the above; I'd rather they kept him. Has anyone got his number? I want to call him up and have him talk to me in Lady Melisandre's whispery voice for a bit of cheeky ASMR.