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Title: Fortress
Author: Hugh Walpole
Narrator: Peter Joyce
Format: Unabridged
Length: 26 hrs 42 mins
Language: English
Release date: 2013-05-15
Publisher: Assembled Stories
Genres: Fiction & Literature, Classics
Publisher's Summary:
It had been the wish of her whole life to flee from all the Herries, but Walter Herries had challenged her, and she had taken up the challenge'. Judith Paris, now middle aged returns to the Lakes to deal with the bitter feud between the two branches of the family. A feud culminating in the construction by one branch of a huge house known as The Fortress, which will dominate the land of the others. But within this conflict the children of the two families have important roles to play.
Hugh Walpole, now almost forgotten, was a literary giant. Descended from the younger brother of the eighteenth century Prime Minister Robert Walpole, a prodigiously fast writer who seldom revised his work, he produced at least a book a year between 1909 and his death in 1941. But who reads him these days? His books sold in vast numbers, including in America where on his lecture tours in the 1920s he was more lionised than Dickens had been eighty years previously. With his accumulated wealth he became a discerning art collector and left a fabulous legacy of paintings to the Tate and the Fitzwilliam. In 1924 he made a home in his beloved Keswick where between 1927 and 1932 he wrote the only one of his works which remains in print: this brilliant chronicle of the Herries family, the name Herries taken from Redgauntlet, the historical novel of Walpoles literary god, Sir Walter Scott. Beginning in the early eighteenth century with Rogue Herries, the chronicle drives on through Judith Paris, The Fortress and Vanessa up to Walpoles present day in the early 1930s. And what a saga it is! The 3000 pages of the four volumes seethe with drama, intense passions both thwarted and slaked, hatreds, feuds and disasters as the lives of the descendants of Francis Herries, the original Rogue who sold his mistress at Keswick fair, play out against an unfailingly authentic historical background. In recording every word of this gigantic saga for his own company, Peter Joyce took on a huge challenge, although for a man who has recently recorded Hamlet with every part played by himself, perhaps it seemed less daunting! Over two years Joyce spent 300 hours in the studio to record the Chronicles four volumes in 100 hours, in addition to time taken to prepare the 3000 pages for reading aloud. The result is extraordinary: an exceptional and indelible listening experience. A writer well overdue for a revival has been rescued. Joyce doesnt just read: he creates and extends Walpoles magnificent theatre. Theres the foul, baying rabble stoning Mrs Wilson for a witch before trussing her up and tossing her into the river, and the enraged Rogue Herries plunging in and cradling the limp bundle of flesh he has rescued. Theres the fire which rips through Fell House and kills Adam Paris amidst the crashing roof and the trampling of the terrified horses, and crippled Uhland Herries killing his gentle, able-bodied cousin whom his wicked father Walter had taught him to hate. Joyce gives all Walpoles drama an extra indelible dimension. Joyce tempers his voice not merely to produce a vast panoply of emotions, but also to convey the maturing of a character. Judith Paris, found as a newborn baby beside her dead mother, the wild gypsy Mirabell, bows out of the Chronicle after her one hundredth birthday. Tempestuous as a child, Judith marries her childhood love, untameable Georges, who mistreats her; much later surrounded by violent death in the Palais - Royale she gives birth to an illegitimate son.
