"In the Closet of the Vatican is a fascinating description and evaluation of financial, sexual and political misconduct throughout the Catholic Church at a time when new revelations are being uncovered each and every week. This audiobook explores the underlying causes and includes interviews with numerous Cardinals and other individuals, some of whom cannot be named.
Martel reveals financial scandals in the Vatican bank; political collusion with unsavoury regimes, including Castro’s Cuba and Pinochet’s Chile; sexual abuse and hypocrisy over homosexuality. In this explosive account, Martel goes to the heart of corruption in the Catholic Church and inside the Vatican itself."
Narrated by John Banks & Produced by Ben Carpenter
22 hours - 19 minutes
©2019 Frederic Martel (P)2019 Audible Studios
* * * * *
This was a tricky and challenging book to work on and I'm grateful indeed to producer Ben Carpenter for his considerable input and support throughout the seven day recording period.We had actually scheduled eight studio days, but wrapped it up a day and a half early - which was pleasing in the sense of knowing that we'd been efficient and that the oceans of prep this book required, had paid off.
In saying that, we still took phenomenal care to ensure, as accurately as possible, that personal and place names were pronounced correctly. On occasion, we had to choose not to be absolutely accurate, which seems odd perhaps. As an example, General Augusto Pinochet, former President of Chile; here in the UK, 'Pinochet' is pronounced 'pin-oh-shay', whereas a Chilean friend of mine assures me it should be 'pin-oh-CHett'. Ben and I discussed this and numerous other, similar examples, throughout the recording and a lot of time was spent deciding which was the better option - go with what the majority of listeners would identify as being 'correct' or being strictly accurate and running the risk of actually sounding 'incorrect'.
With a running length of over 22 hours, the book had hundreds of names and locations to research and the actual amount of (unpaid!) preparation soon racked up into the many tens of hours - hence being so pleased that after such a full on effort, we managed to complete ahead of schedule.
Non-fiction can be a strange genre to record as so many decisions have to be made, in addition to those alluded to above, with regard to characters who are directly quoted. Should the narrator attempt to sound like the person whose actual words are being used, always assuming that it's even possible to discover how a particular person might have sounded in real life? If I'm voicing quotations by Winston Churchill, should I attempt to mimic his vocal idiosyncrasies. In a non-fiction audio book I recorded on the Russian Revolution, should I have given Stalin a Russian accent, or even more specifically, a Georgian accent? Should personal and place names be 'Anglicised' or should we attempt to voice them in their respective 'native' tongues? In this book on The Vatican, and indeed, in the other non-fiction books I have recorded, the producer and I have always chosen to 'flavour' a character voice, but not to mimic, which I think makes sense. For this book, Ben and I also decided not to 'anglicise' and made a concerted effort to voice 'authentic' sounding names as far as we were able, though given the 'catholic' nature of Catholicism, we encountered people and place names from all over the world - and some of them were mighty tricky to pronounce!
Regular visitors to these pages may well have little interest in a non-fiction book on the politics of The Vatican, however, if it is of interest to you, I hope you enjoy listening - I'll be there with you!
As is often the case, there's a short audio sample from the book on the Audible web site; just type my name into the search window and anything I've done, for audible.co.uk or other publishers, should be there. It's perhaps worth saying that many, perhaps all, (200 +) of my Big Finish audio drama recordings might also be available via the audible web site, though as the cast lists are often long, it may be that I don't always make the cut - I think they list a maximum of five actors per recording.
But enough; my ramblings are running almost as long as the book, so I'll end by saying - that's...
...all for now; more just as soon as it happens!
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