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

[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.