Bill Nighy goes to town on Martin Amis's Yellow Dog, voicing everything from a spoof monarch to a porn tycoon in the Booker-nominated 2003 satire.

The novel opens with violence. Xan Meo, a writer and actor, is set upon by two men in a pub who cosh him over the head. Amis gives the moment a precise, theatrical image: “Like the statue of a fallen tyrant, he crashed sideways into the damp paving, and lay still.”

Meo is no random victim. His late father was a dangerous gangster, and the attack is revenge for Meo naming an old associate of his father in print. Meo survives, but the injury changes him. Where he was previously a conscientious husband and father, he now becomes, in the reviewer's phrase, a chip off the old block — the blow has switched something on, or switched something decent off.

Amis does not leave the damage confined to one household. While Meo languishes in hospital, King Henry IX — a monarch struggling to conceal his boredom with the job — learns that images of his 15-year-old daughter in the bath are in circulation. Meanwhile Clint Smoker, star reporter and gossip peddler at the tabloid newspaper the Morning Lark, receives an unexpected tipoff.

These plotlines mark the book's territory: royalty, pornography and the tabloid press, rubbed together until they spark. The Guardian's review, published 24 September, frames the novel as a satire of larger-than-life characters — and it is precisely those characters, from the weary king to the porn tycoon, that give Nighy his material.

The casting makes sense. Yellow Dog is a novel of voices — gangsters, monarchs, hacks — and Nighy has built a career on precisely calibrated comic delivery. A narrator who can pivot from regality to sleaze in a single chapter matches Amis's own tonal whiplash, the shifts between high style and low life that made the book one of the more contested entries on the Booker shortlist.

The review's headline verdict — that Nighy "has a ball" — signals an audiobook that leans into the novel's excesses rather than smoothing them out. For listeners who found Yellow Dog's sprawl forbidding on the page, a performance that relishes each grotesque may be the more natural way in.

Amis remains a writer whose reputation swings between generations, and each new edition of his work tests whether the satire still bites. A high-profile audio edition narrated by one of Britain's most recognisable actors suggests the answer, at least for Yellow Dog, is yes.