Goodbye to All That

By: Robert Graves

Narrated by: Martin Jarvis

A famous autobiographical account of life as a young soldier in the first World War trenches. Robert Graves, who went on to write I, Claudius, has given to posterity here one of the all-time great insights into the experience of war.©2007 CSA Telltapes Ltd. (P)2007 CSA Telltapes Ltd.

Good minus flute

The story was well written and well narrated, but the constant flute music between sections was unnecessary and a bit irritating.

British light-hearted look at WWI

Would you consider the audio edition of Goodbye to All That to be better than the print version?

This is Robert Graves telling his experiences in WWI, a terrible war in which millions died. But you wouldn't know it from this book. It sounds like a walk in the park. I guess he was trying to spare his readers reliving a war all wanted to forget (it was published in the late 20s). One gets a feeling for the war, but these are rare instances. More often we get a form of British good humor when the officers go over the top with nothing but a swagger stick. He has many humorous stories, some of which sound gruesome today. It's like a gentle, quick tour of the trenches, which he survived by great good luck.

What about Martin Jarvis’s performance did you like?

The narration is jaunty, clean and emotive. Good work by Martin Jarvis, narrator.

Great book, offensive and off-putting narration

Why is it still acceptable for audiobook narrators to use fake foreign accents? The narrator's sardonic, upper-crust British accent was fine for the voice of Robert Graves, himself a sardonic, upper-crust Brit, but dramatizing Germans as speaking in a kind of Sergeant Schultz-Dummkopf accent is both offensive and cringeworthy. A moment's reflection tells you that Germans speak German, not English with a German accent. It is even worse when the narrator speaks in a Welsh accent-- I couldn't understand a word of it. The narration alone killed this book for me. I'll read it on my own.

An honest and well-written--ABRIDGED--WWI Memoir

I loved Robert Graves' I Claudius and Hercules My Shipmate when I was young, and so had been wanting to read his autobiography, Good-bye to All That. Graves covers his painful school boy education (stale tradition, sadistic bullying, and usually platonic homosexuality), his transformative service with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers during World War I (training, waiting, the Battle of Loos, and the Somme Offensive), and then his immediate post-war life (a teaching job in Egypt and the making and losing of a family).

Throughout, Graves' writing is accurate, witty, and spare. His description of trench warfare, complete with constant shelling, hidden snipers, poison gas, shoddy equipment, foolish commanders, suicidal charges, meaningless battles, prolific rats, and seemingly random deaths and reprieves, is horrifying. He exposes the full range of human behavior in wartime: bravery, cowardice, infidelity, loyalty, increasing brotherly bonding and enemy loathing, and ignorant patriotism fed by mass media propaganda. I keenly listened to details like Graves and his friends feeling good (rather than envious) when one of their number got wounded enough to be taken safely out of the action, Graves choosing which new recruits would make good officers by watching them play rugby, his being so awfully young when his war service began (by 21 he had seen heavy fighting and had been promoted to Captain), and his suffering from PTSD for years after his war service ended.

I was also interested in the cultural context of his memoir, of the growth of pacifism and feminism and modern poetry. And I enjoyed his sketches of various important literary figures like Siegfried Sassoon, T. E. Lawrence, and John Masefield.

Martin Jarvis' reading is impeccable and engaging, and pleasant period music ends one chapter to begin the next.

But--I didn't notice when I bought this book that it was abridged! Grrr! It does feel incomplete and I feel foolish.

Not the full book

Skips around a bit, not the entire text, but overall I really liked the story so it’s worth the read/listen overall