To have listened to Radio 4’s marathon ten-hour adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace as it was being broadcast on New Year’s Day must have been both wonderful and a bit weird. Like soaking in an ever-replenishing warm bath, indulgent, luxuriant, all-absorbing. Yet at the same time I imagine it was quite hard by the end to step back into your own world after being so taken over by the fictional cares of the Rostov, Bolkonsky and Bezukhov families. Needless to say, I caught barely one episode on that day (how many, I wonder, did listen all the way through?).
Fortunately, there’s a chance to catch up in the old-fashioned way, week by week, on Saturday nights (or to download and listen whenever you choose). This, though, is a different kind of listening experience. In between each episode I lose track a bit of where we are in the story; the characters have to make themselves known again. As the specially composed music (by Stephen Warbeck) slows us down, gets us in the mood and settles us in Russia in the early 1800s, it takes a while for me to stop worrying where we have reached in the book; who’s speaking now; what will happen next. But after only a few minutes such scattered thoughts disappear as Tolstoy’s imagined world is recreated on air brilliantly by the extraordinary cast (John Hurt, Lesley Manville, Harriet Walter and other great stars from theatre and film), the soundworld (designed by David Thomas) and the clever adaptation by Timberlake Wertenbaker. The key, I think, is to forget that this is Tolstoy and just to listen to it as radio; to be swept away by the interplay of voices, the conjuring up of place, of atmosphere, of panic, fear and bliss, by the play of fate upon the characters we come to know as the dramas unfold.
So far (we’ve just heard episode three of the complete ten) we’ve experienced the terrible defeat at Austerlitz, Kutuzov’s humiliation, Pierre’s escape from Helene, Lise’s death, each mini-drama resonating as powerfully as in the novel.
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