Blatant Berry: Messages and Media
Echoes of McLuhan while listening to a book
By John N. Berry III, Editor-at-Large jberry@reedbusiness.com -- Library Journal, 2/15/2007
Just before the holidays, my friend Nora Rawlinson, now head of library marketing at the Hachette Book Group in New York, gave me a copy of both the print and audio versions of John le Carré's latest book, The Mission Song (Little, Brown). I have always loved le Carré, as so many do, and was delighted to get the book and to find the author as compelling as ever at age 75. I only finished reading the book in January, enjoying it as I rested up from the hectic holidays.
The book, despite disagreement among some reviewers, is vintage le Carré. It pulled and carried me along from the first page to the last with its wit, vast conspiracies and smaller personal intrigues, all kinds of lust, and many kinds of love that only this old master can bring to a novel.
Protagonist Bruno Salvador is a translator of great skill and expertise. Familiarly known as Salvo to his colleagues, he is a specialist in minority languages and exotic dialects of Africa and the region of the Congo. The story moves Salvo from youthful idealism and ethnic pride to the cynical disillusion and realpolitik of governments and corporations and back again. This means, of course, that the story, like so much of le Carré's work, is immediately resonant as an allegory for our times if not all times.
Yet another aspect of the experience of The Mission Song fascinated me as much as or more than le Carré's story: the ten-CD Hachette Audio version of the novel. It is read by the incredibly talented actor David Oyelowo, playing and reading the role of narrator Salvo.
Hearing Oyelowo, I was reminded of Marshall McLuhan's mantra, “The medium is the message.” The story, including the words and attitudes of each character, is delivered in the unique accents, style, pitch, and linguistic intonations of that person and his or her place. I am not expert enough to assess the authenticity of Oyelowo's unique vocal performance, but his ability to differentiate the voice of each character gives an apparent genuineness that enriches the story far beyond what its print version could deliver. It is a tour de force that is rare in my experience, ranking up there with Christopher Plummer as Iago in Shakespeare's Othello.
Oyelowo's performance, coupled with le Carré's writing, illustrates why great works must be appreciated in more than one medium if their full beauty and meaning are to be comprehended and absorbed. Now I am impatient to see this story translated once more, into a motion picture, and I am deeply hopeful that Oyelowo gets the part of Salvo.
There is an important lesson for libraries in all of this, and it is still debated at a few library board meetings and conferences. There is no doubt that libraries must collect in all formats and all media, print, audio, video, and in as many languages and dialects as possible. A true work of art deserves to be rendered into all formats, all colors, all languages, and all places. It is only in the sum of those transformations that we begin to understand the totality of that work.
Surely great writers and philosophers have stated this far better than I can manage here. Indeed, I'll simply borrow the words of McLuhan, the man who wrote Understanding Media, and admit that after being immersed in The Mission Song, I finally understand what he meant by, “The medium is the message.”
For me, it means I will never again answer the old question about having read a book as I so often have in the past, with a flippant, “No, but I saw the movie.”
