‘You’re a wizard, Harry – or somethin’ – Book Club

A GOOD narrator can make or break an audio book and in this case, Off to be the Wizard is infinitely enhanced due to Luke Daniels’s input.

That isn’t to say Scott Meyer’s novel is substandard (it isn’t) but rather, Daniels’s nuanced interpretation of the story about a computer hacker who winds up in medieval England, makes the story all the more thrilling and the humour all the funnier and everything  else, all the better.

Then there are his many, different voices and accents for each of the characters – a facet of an audio book which is not to be underestimated. Think of a story combining the Matrix and Ready Player One and then consider that a geek wrote the tale – that’s some way to describing what Off to be the Wizard is like.

Martin (the would-be computer hacker) discovers a glitch within an online system which, if tweaked, changes
aspects of real life. Apart from immediately making himself taller, Martin makes his bank balance a little more
healthy and via a few twists of fate, winds up in the aforementioned medieval England pretending to be the
aforementioned wizard.

The strange thing is: Martin is not the first person to arrive in the middle ages claiming to know
magic. If all of this sounds a little silly, that’s because it certainly is – and is all the sillier for Daniels’s
narration.

The result is an audio book which, first and foremost, is a lot of fun and because of the
outlandish but brilliant concept, spawned a whole set of sequels.

Off to be the Wizard isn’t going to win the next Booker Prize but it may well hook you into the next
instalment, aptly named, Spell or High Water.

And yes, Luke Daniels continues where he left off.

AUDIOBOOK: OFF TO BE THE WIZARD (2012)
AUTHOR: Scott Meyer
NARRATOR: Luke Daniels