The experience of being read to, whether it’s toddlers nodding off to “Goodnight Moon” at bedtime or 19th-century families gathering to hear the latest serial installment of “Great Expectations,” is a deep-rooted element of a love for books. A reader’s performance can add further layers of artistry and meaning to a story, and because listeners have their hands and eyes free, they can do something useful while they listen. Being read to while washing dishes, shoveling snow or working out feels like a bonus, a book-lover’s exacta of pleasure and efficiency.

Audiobooks are the fastest-growing segment of the publishing industry, and the masterpiece of the form to date may well be Roy Dotrice’s reading of George R. R. Martin’s epic fantasy series, “A Song of Ice and Fire,” the source material for HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” The five audiobooks, totaling 201 hours, have all the strengths of Martin’s novels, which plumb the grim subjectivity of their many principal characters with patient thoroughness. And because you have approximately $11 trillion to spend on special effects in your mind’s eye, you can stage a spectacle in your head that puts to shame anything seen on a TV screen. Martin, who worked with Dotrice on the TV series “Beauty and the Beast,” recruited him to record his books because he recognized Dotrice’s voice as an instrument of sorcerous potency.

Dotrice’s bravura rendering of hundreds of characters — male and female, young and old, nobles and commoners, Westerosi and Dothraki and a score of other nationalities and tribes — has generated a good deal of acclaim. Permutatively blending a dizzying variety of intonations, timbres and cadences while borrowing regional and class inflections from across the British Isles, he gives each speaker a “distinct and distinguishable” voice, according to the citation from Guinness World Records for “most character voices for an audiobook — individual” (224 for “A Game of Thrones”). His Tyrion Lannister, the Machiavellian imp, has a Welsh lilt that manages to convey a substrate of moral rigor beneath all the scheming and whoring. His Arya Stark really does sound like a girl trying to pass as a boy in the company of violent men, and he puts just the right touch of steel in her tone to convey her dawning realization that vengeance may yet be hers. Dotrice’s command of character voices grows especially virtuosic when unlike types converse: Tyrion and the regular-guy sellsword Bronn, the castrato spymaster Varys and the doddering savant Grand Maester Pycelle.

But it’s Dotrice’s narration, even more than his facility with characters, that puts his mark on “A Song of Ice and Fire.” There’s a creaking note in his voice redolent not only of long-ago-and-far-away but also of dinge and rot, the thick sense of lived-in everydayness that most distinguishes Martin’s grubby fantasy world from J. R. R. Tolkien’s idealized Middle-earth. And Dotrice’s own aging became part of the developing richness of the series. He was 80 when he recorded the first three audiobooks and pushing 90 when he finished the fourth and the fifth, and he had an old man’s voice — still robust, but imbued with experience and the long view. His character voices lose suppleness and range in the last two books, but his elders sound more fantastically wizened than ever, and the extra quaver and rasp in his narration only heighten its gravitas.

Dotrice was a relative newcomer to the audiobook as an art form when Martin recruited him, but over his long career he had done many other sorts of acting. He played Fairy Godmother in a production of “Cinderella” in the German stalag where he was imprisoned after being shot down over the Baltic in 1942, and he went on to perform in hundreds of plays in English repertory companies. He played Hamlet and other leading men in the troupe that eventually became the Royal Shakespeare Company and appeared many times on the London stage and on Broadway. He played Mozart’s disapproving father in “Amadeus,” Charles Dickens in Masterpiece Theatre’s “Dickens of London,” Abraham Lincoln and the 17th-century writer John Aubrey in acclaimed one-man shows and the pallid firebug Hallyne the Pyromancer in “Game of Thrones.”

Listening to Dotrice read “A Song of Ice and Fire,” you can hear him reaching back into his deep life-catalog of voices — evoking a dotty relation, say, or a guard at the stalag — to impart distinctiveness to each character. You can hear that he has known many people and heard and told many good stories. He was such a compelling raconteur that work would come to a halt in the Penguin Random House Audio studios in Los Angeles when everybody crowded into the break room to hear him tell tales. It’s the opposite, of course, for many of his listeners: Faced with floors to scrub or weights to lift, they put in earbuds and let Dotrice’s voice carry away their minds to fantasy lands while their bodies go about the workaday business of living.