The Knight

By: Gene Wolfe

Narrated by: Dan Bittner

Length: 16 hrs and 6 mins

Publisher's Summary

From legendary fantasy author Gene Wolfe comes The Knight, the first half of the Wizard Knight duology, now for the first time in audio.  

A young man in his teens is transported from our world to a magical realm that contains seven levels of reality. Very quickly transformed by magic into a grown man of heroic proportions, he takes the name Able and sets out on a quest to find the sword that has been promised to him, a sword he will get from a dragon, the one very special blade that will help him fulfill his life ambition to become a knight and a true hero.  

Inside, however, Able remains a boy, and he must grow in every sense to survive the dangers and delights that lie ahead in encounters with giants, elves, wizards, and dragons. His adventure will conclude in the second installment of The Wizard Knight, The Wizard.

©2004 Gene Wolfe (P)2018 Macmillan Audio

A worthy narration of a great story

The audio production was invaluable and motivated me to do a re-read: the voice actor had impressive range, convincing as a callow boy, a boy trying to be a knight, and a knight of sure and well-earned nobility, giving tonal cues for the fast-paced dialogue. However, the audio is best taken as a supplement to the text, since it is often necessary stop reading when a new character is introduced and go back to the list of characters, where Able has sometimes placed information he had forgotten to include in the body of his letter, the whole effect to give a sense of verisimilitude.

5 of 5 people found this review helpful

Confusing as hell.

The writing style is fun, good to listen to, but I was so confused as to why, who, what for, reasons, so if that was what the book was going for then I'm doing it a injustice, but I could not follow what was going on most of the time, and the main character was something else. Usually the main character is somebody you root for, but his actions, hes supposed to be a young teenager in a grown man's body, but it should be a 5 year old in a mans body. He's a bully all the time, not some confused teenager. Was hoping he would get his ass kicked just so he'd stop being such a dick, but I guess that's the story. Couldn't get behind it, couldn't understand what the author was going for.

7 of 10 people found this review helpful

Great book but robotic, distracting narration

I love this book. I've read it at least four times in print and now I'm on my second listen. I'm braving the Audible version again only because the audiobook format is so convenient, and I have more time to listen (while driving to work or doing dishes or laundry) than to read. The narration is so bad it's puzzling. At first I thought it was a text-to-speech program, but the narrator occasionally tries out different accents for different characters. The pronunciation of the names is consistently bad. The one that I have the hardest time ignoring is Kulili, the goddess of Aelfrice, which the narrator consistently pronounces "Koo Loo Lee." The word "stripling," which Berthold uses to refer to Able, he pronounces "strapling." But the worst part is that the narrator apparently doesn't understand what he's reading. Able's style is colloquial, simple American English, not literary. The narrator will often stress the wrong word in a sentence, changing it to nonsense. If I had not already read the book several times, I would be completely thrown off by this. Wolfe's writing, although extremely rewarding, is difficult enough without this added layer of misdirection in the reading. Sorry, Mr. Bittner, but I wish you had more feeling for the text.