Clara’s Verdict
Two hours and twenty-two minutes is exactly the right size for this book. Paddington Marches On is a set of self-contained escapades rather than a novel, and this single-title audiobook read by Hugh Bonneville gives you the whole of it in an afternoon, or across several bedtimes, which I suspect is how most households will actually use it.
The listing places it sixth in the Paddington chapter books, from HarperCollins, dated 14 July 2016, with a 4.6 average from 176 ratings. That is a modest pool by the standards of a character this famous, and as you will see below, some of it is not commenting on this edition at all. I would still call it one of the safest purchases in children’s audio, with a single caveat, which I will come to, about what these reviews are actually praising.
About the Audiobook
The description opens with Mrs Bird, which is the correct instinct, since her one line in the copy does the dry-realist job on its own: “I’ve never known such a bear for smelling things out,” said Mrs Bird. What follows is pure Michael Bond machinery. Paddington’s nose and his gift for finding difficulty lead him to “an orange marmalade tasting party”, his enthusiasm puts him inside a barrel of the stuff, and the consequence, in the description’s own words, is “an avalanche in the warehouse”.
Then the copy does something rather lovely. One morning, it says, “he sniffs out a surprise for himself and discovers that he is about to embark on the greatest adventure of his life”, and it stops there. What that promise does is give the collection a shape it would otherwise lack, since the episodes the copy describes read as stand-alone comic set pieces and not as chapters of a single plot.
Sixth in the chapter books sounds like a commitment and is not. Nothing in the description asks you to have heard the previous five: it assumes only that you know who Mrs Bird is, and then introduces her in a line of dialogue anyway. Start here if you like. If you would rather go in sequence, the listing tells you where this one sits.
The Narration
Hugh Bonneville reads, and the casting logic is easy to follow. Paddington’s comedy depends entirely on the gap between the chaos he causes and the perfect seriousness with which he causes it. Wink at the audience once and the bear stops being funny, because the joke has always lived in his total lack of irony. What this material wants is a narrator who plays the earnestness absolutely straight and lets Mrs Bird and the marmalade do the rest of the work.
The ensemble is the harder half of the job. These stories run on friction between a literal-minded bear and the adults around him, and at this length nobody has time to build a voice slowly. Everything has to be sketched in a sentence or two and then held consistently across separate episodes, which is a harder discipline than it looks.
Pace is the third thing, and here the brevity is an outright advantage. A children’s audiobook of this length has no room for a warm-up: it has to arrive fully formed inside the first minute. The episodic structure means the book resets rather than building one long arc, which makes it unusually forgiving of interruption, and forgiveness matters more than almost anything else when your listeners are five and easily distracted.
No reviewer on this listing comments on the narration, so what I am describing are the demands of the text and not the performance that meets them.
What Readers Say
The affection running through the reviews is unmistakable. DH 88 Comet writes that “The Paddington books were the first stories I can remember” and describes the memories flooding back on a reread. Andy, at four stars, is the most practical of the three: “Good little stories as always. Stands up to repeated bedtime reading to little ones”.
Here is the caveat. Two of the three reviews praise the illustrations, and illustrations are the one thing an audiobook cannot supply. Loobylou calls the stories “delightful and utterly charming not to mention beautifully illustrated”. DH 88 Comet is more specific still, having deliberately sought out the Peggy Fortnum illustrations, described there as “the original (and best)”, and reporting that they are as good as remembered. Those are reviews of a printed book, praising a quality this edition does not by its nature possess.
That is not a reason to avoid the audiobook. It is a reason to read the score carefully. An average built partly on the visual pleasure of Peggy Fortnum’s work is not a verdict on Bonneville’s reading, and Andy’s point about repeated bedtime use is the one that transfers most cleanly from one format to the other. Happily, it transfers very well, because a short episodic recording is built for exactly the kind of repetition small children demand.
Who Should Listen?
Families are the obvious buyers, and the shape of this edition suits them unusually well. Two hours and twenty-two minutes covers a car journey to the coast, a wet afternoon, or several nights of bedtime in easy portions, and the episodic construction means nobody has to remember where they got to. Adults revisiting Paddington on their own account will find it a very pleasant couple of hours as well.
Look elsewhere if the illustrations are the point for you, since this format cannot carry them. And do not expect it to fill a full day of driving. It is a bedtime-sized book, and that is the whole of its design, which is why I would happily put it in front of a five-year-old who has never met the bear before.
