The Rapstone Chronicles - John Mortimer (Unabridged)

All from cassette tapes and unabridged. 32 kbps / 22 kHz Mono CBR using jetAudio 6+. Narrated by Paul Shelley. #1. Paradise Postponed [1985], 12 hours 47 mins. The Reverend Simeon Simcox, Rector of Rapstone Fanner, after a long life as Civil Rights campaigner and parish priest, dies quietly in his Rectory. Gathered at his funeral are his younger son, Fred, a doctor and part-time jazz drummer; his more volatile elder son, Henry, an angry young man turned crusty old blimb; their childhood friend Agnes and the devoted Lonnie; Simeon's wife, Dorothy; and the loyal villagers and gentry of Rapstone and surrounding parishes. These parishes have not been at ease with each other since the Civil War divided their inhabitants into Roundheads and Cavaliers. In 1984 old animosities survive: Hoooray Henries, new working-class Tories like the Rt Hon. Leslie Titmuss, M.P., rich Socialist idealists like Simeon Simcox and his family struggle on the battleground of a new and more brutal England.A shock is delivered at an early stage in the shape of Simeon's will. In Henry's ambition to unravel the mystery and Fred's equal determination not to uncover it, we are treated to a large cast of gloriously comic characters. In their different ways they tell us how the New Jerusalem we were promised after the Second World War looked very much like the mixture as before. [R.A.Hylton] #2. Titmuss Regained [1990], 8 hours 31 mins. The Right Honourable Leslie Titmuss has clawed his way up the Tory government ranks and is now Secretary of State at the Ministry of Housing, Ecological Affairs and Planning (H.E.A.P.), and in pursuit of beautiful widow Jenny Sidonia. But seismic changes are afoot in the beautiful countryside where a new town threatens to engulf his own back garden. Will Leslie bow to market forces? Or will he join the fight against the multi-storey car parks, shopping precincts and office blocks that could sweep away Rapstone Valley? The sequel to John Mortimer's stunning novel Paradise Postponed, "Titmuss Regained" is a panoramic satire on the machinations of politics and an affectionate elegy to a disappearing world. #3. The Sound of Trumpets [1998], 8 hours 23 mins. In Paradise Postponed and Titmuss Regained John Mortimer took some fairly hefty swipes at the Thatcherite Conservative governments and the way the Labour Party had let them get away with it. The fact that Labour is the government at this writing appears to have changed nothing and the final part of this post-war political trilogy launches a pretty good swipe at them as well. New Labour--or "conservatism with water" as the trilogy's most enduring character, Leslie Titmuss, calls them--are seen, like the appearance of identical high streets in every town, as just another example of the blanding of Britain. So enter Titmuss--now retired from the Thatcher cabinet and called Lord Titmuss, First Baron Skurfield--to shake things up. He plays a wonderful Mephistopheles to a proto-Blairite parliamentary candidate's Faust as the electors in the tranquil Rapstone Valley again become a microcosm of British public life. Champagne socialists seem to come out of it all rather well, (as, it must be said, do reactionary old brutes like Titmuss) and the real venom is again reserved for the insipid political clones and power junkies. All in all this is vintage Mortimer. [Nick Wroe] * These audio books are rare and were very hard to find. The cassette transcription sounds quite good for such old tapes. To my knowledge no CD versions exist. Enjoy and Seed!!

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