The controversial classic is still as bracing — and funny — as ever.
In one of the most obvious bits of stuntcasting in recent memory, Jeremy Irons played Humbert Humbert in Adrian Lyne’s lumpy 1998 film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 masterpiece Lolita. The patron saint of grotesque sexuality since playing twin pervs in Dead Ringers, Irons lends his silken wisp to this recording of Nabokov’s infamous novel — the one that Martin Amis extolled as “a cruel book about cruelty.” Neither time nor familiarity has dulled the story’s impact: a professor of literature becomes obsessed with the latest and most beguiling of a series of young girls, the daughter of kitsch-queen Charlotte Haze. Nabokov’s story is really a tragedy of a ridiculous man, but a tragedy that blurs the distinctions between farce and prurience; Nabokov’s triumph is to shade a merely monstrous stereotype into a creature of savage lusts capable of awesome wit yet susceptible to bathos.

Irons’ narration embodies these qualities, and a few more beside; he’s right at home with Nabokov’s prose, the lushest since F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s. Note the dessicated splendor with which he enunciates pearls like “My little cup brims with tiddles.” Since Nabokov’s novel is as much about Humbert’s blinkered response to an America at the peak of its own obsession with cheap consumer goods, Irons evokes just the right amount of detachment. “You can always count on a murderer having a fancy prose style,” Humbert says. Say this for Irons: you can always count on a Very Serious British Actor having a fancy acting style.