All Things Bright and Beautiful

I needed an audiobook to accompany me on a long drive home from West L.A and I also wanted to get some more chores done.  Since I happened to be in the Science and Technology section of the Los Angeles Central Library for other reasons, I grabbed an audiobook from there that looked promising.  After the last audiobook I listened to (see the review of On the Beach), I wanted something more uplifting.  I was already familiar with James Herriot’s books because I used to watch the BBC TV series “All Creatures Great and Small” with my parents on public TV in Alaska.  I found the show humorous, though some may call it fuddy-duddy.  It combined light humor with some drama and fairly accurate depictions of veterinary science.  The show was based on the book of the same name along with 2-3 other books by James Herriot including All Things Bright and Beautiful.

When I checked out the book I thought it was the first in the series.  It’s actually the second, but order really doesn’t matter much since every 1-2 chapters is more or less an independent vignette.  They’re based on James Herriot’s real life experiences as a veterinarian in the Yorkshire countryside of England during the early 1940’s.  Along with his partner in practice and his partner’s younger brother, Herriot mostly treats farm animals: cattle, horses, sheep, and pigs; though he also works with family pets such as dogs, cats, and a bird in one case.  Subplots include flashbacks of him awkwardly wooing his future wife, his more present adjusting to life as a newlywed, and his partner’s younger brother, who is a student in veterinary science, behaving mischievously.  Nearly all the vignettes end happily.  Most are humorous and a few are laugh-out-loud funny.  Herriot goes into great scientific and graphic detail about his work that almost made me queasy.  But his remarks about how much veterinary science has progressed between the 1940’s and the 1970’s when he wrote the book are interesting.

Most interesting are the people with whom Herriot interacts: the farmers, the pet owners, and some of the other vets.  Some farmers are so old-fashion they don’t believe in telephones.  They have their own traditional names for animal ailments that Herriot must learn in order to work with them.  The pet owners can be very eccentric such as this woman who owns dozens of cats.  One of Herriot’s vet colleagues always takes him out for drinks after doing difficult surgery and Herriot always drinks too much under pressure of the hospitality.  The actor reading the book, Christopher Timothy, does a great job with all the English countryside accents and he captures the emotions and sets the scene of each episode.  Timothy portrayed Herriot on the TV series so he has a strong connection with him.

I found the book to be a nice change from the previous one.  It helped me on my long drive home through traffic and helped get some chores done.  I recognized many of the vignettes from the storylines of the TV series, though not all of them made it to TV.  There are some differences between the characters in the book and the TV series such as their ages and their descriptions and portrayals.  The TV show focuses more on an ensemble of characters while the book is told entirely from Herriot’s point of view.  All the happy endings may make it a bit sappy and the vintage setting may seem fuddy-duddy but sometimes that’s what I need.