Accents

Once again, Richard Matthews has got me completely impressed, this time with his reading of The Patient's Eyes, by David Pirie. Matthews has a very nice English accent, but he does the majority of this book in a Scottish accent, since it is told in the first person by a Scotsman. That alone is impressive, since it's one thing to do bit parts in various accents and quite another to do an entire book in something other than your own voice. And of course, all the different characters (even all the different Scottish characters) have easily distinguishable voices. One scene was particularly neat, where there was a conversation between two Scotsmen, an Englishman, and a Spaniard. It was really hard to believe all those voices came from one person. Another part I liked was a brief passage where a letter from an American was being read in an American accent. This was interesting because I generally don't think of American as being an actual accent (it's too "normal" to me). But I heard it entirely differently, since I was already so focused on all the other vocal styles. Really fascinating.