Gimplife with Book: A Long-deferred Rant

[akirlu]

The Achilles tendon I somehow pulled yesterday is worse today, and though in some part, I'd like to get back to Foolscap, walking is a bit of a challenge. And so I am taking a slow morning curled up with a book. Specifically, Charlie Stross's Family Trade. It's proving a frustrating experience. Charlie's an engaging writer. He pulls me in and makes me want to find out what happens next. But he's a Briton writing American characters in a nominally American voice. It's a process that can only end in tears.

It's not, thankfully, as egregious as Chris Priest's The eXtremes in which at one point he has a pair of '50s San Diego patrol cops discussing a football side -- for my non-Britophone American readers, that's British for team--ferchrissakes, or referring to a sedan as a saloon car, or inventing a burger chain with a name obviously modeled in the style of Ansaphone, a brand that doesn't exist in the US. Still, I'm finding myself thrown out of the narrative as often as twice per page by locutions that are clearly British placed in American-speaking mouths. A cell-phone jammer set up in the back garden, rather than the back yard. A waitress offering a choice of bacon or sausages rather than bacon or sausage. Interlocutors discussing when they were at college, rather than in college. And so on and so forth. (Never mind an American snub-nose .38 revolver that somehow has a safety catch? On a revolver?) And I don't know what to think of the constant references to "a coffee" rather than "coffee" or "a cup of coffee" (or the spectacle of two slender, single American women getting multiple boxes of pizza for a single meal for themselves alone--without apology or comment--and having coffee with it) but it distracts me every time.

I know there are other pressures involved in getting a novel proofed and published that make getting every detail of an unfamiliar idiom seem pretty nugatory, but if you don't speak the lingo, why write characters who do? And if you feel you must write in someone else's actual idiom, can't you get someone with an ear for it to give it a read through and catch this stuff before it goes to press? They're all easy fixes if you just know to make them. Surely David Hartwell has a copy editor who speaks American English? As it is, I find myself wanting to grab a pen and make the corrections myself, and once I'm in that mode it's hard to read for enjoyment, or stop myself from wanting to nitpick the cultural-correctness and detail accuracy of everything in sight.

I'm sure Americans writing Britons are just as awful. I do increasingly sympathize with brisingamen's allergy to Fire Watch for getting the physical details of Oxford wrong. And as I say, Charlie is far from the worst offender (though he is a repeat offender). And I'm probably several standard deviations out from the norm in being bothered by this stuff. Still, it's wrong, and it would be so easy to get it right. And so I say unto you, argh.

Comments

[replyhazy.livejournal.com]

Et moi, je dit "argh" aussi.

Actually, the thing I find more frustrating than idiomatic sore thumbs in a book is the occasional person you run across who is pretending to have a British accent -- apparently in an effort to fascinate the opposite sex. Argh!

[profundo-rosso.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised these problems weren't highlighted by Chris's wife, Leigh Kennedy, since she was born in Denver and only moved over here in 1985.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

It's dead easy, if you have any ear at all and you're immersed in another idiom or language, to start thinking in that idiom/language for preference to your own. It happened to me almost the moment I arrived in the UK. As I took notes for my trip report, I would do things like recognize that I wouldn't previously have described myself as "gobsmacked" but be unable to readily think what I would have called it instead. If Leigh's been in the UK for 20 years, I'd be very surprised if the sort of things I'm talking about would strike her, particularly.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I seem not to have been nearly so much bothered by this aspect, partly because Stross is such a good story-teller but mostly because I decided that the Family series is set in a slightly-alternate universe -- one in which Big Businesses are somewhat more Mafia-like than most of them are in ours, and in which there was much more UK-to-US cultural influence. I think I'll try to stick with that while reading the rest of the series.

[alicebentley]

The two terms that threw Mike the most were "aluminium" and "electric shower". I, on the other hand, barely noticed the discontinuities as I blipped over them.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I sure as hell didn't buy the protagonist as American, but I kind of forgot I was supposed to be and just ignored all the information that claimed she was one. I had her pegged in my mind as an ex-pat Brit. But that may have been part of why I had a hard time staying "in" the book on occasion. I do love that series anyway.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Too funny! But jarring, yes. The sausage/sausages one is subtle. Another I've run across is Middle West. Emphatically not the same as Midwest. Had an ex-pat American tour guide in London once who said this -- he had clearly crossed over.

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

You could e-mail him and offer to be a beta-reader ;-)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I suppose. I mean, I'm willing to do it, it just seems rather a pushing thing to do after bitching about it.

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

Have you let autopope know about this?

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Other than putting it in a public post in my LJ?

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

Sorry; I hadn't noticed he was on your friendslist.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

There are a couple of makes of revolver with a safety, one's British (and out of production). There is also one make of revolver which can have a silencer attached, it's Russian, and also out of production (though much less rare).

There was also a Webley variant which was self-cocking, if one kept one's wrist and arm very stiff. Otherwise it functioned as a standard double/single action.

But, as a rule, such things drive me buggy. Bacon in rashers, eating kidneys (because an American who eats them will say, "I had kidney.") and the like just break the illusion.

Worse, for me, is bad Russian accents (we shan't even go into the oddities of actual Russian in movies and the like) in print.

TK

[joyful-storm.livejournal.com]

I don't on the whole disagree with you, because I have had some times reading the series when I paused with the same general issue. I can generally buy Miriam being from the greater Boston area, though. Something to make some allowances for is the variations on American English in different places around the country.

As someone who lived in Central Massachusetts until going to college, reading something like "Do you want to go get a coffee?" seems perfectly normal to me. I think the "at college" rather than "in college" may be plausible too, but I'm not as bone-deep certain of it. It's one of those things where if you think too hard about it you really can't remember.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

That's part of why I said I didn't know what to think of his usage of "a coffee." I certainly know there are New Yorkers who would use that construction in some cases, but the particular places Charlie dropped it in were just jarring and felt wrong. I'm pretty dubious about "at college" though, and in general, given the many references to "trolley"s where an American would say cart, and "shops" where an American would say stores, I found it too much of a piece with the general flavor of Britishness. If it were the only case of funky construction, I'm sure I wouldn't have called attention to it particularly, but after a while I got hyper-sensitized.