I'm reading an enthralling new vampire novel, THE GOD OF ENDINGS, by Jacqueline Holland. The first-person protagonist grew up in the 1830s in a small town in New York, as the daughter of a gravestone carver. Her parents, her brother, and she herself all died in an epidemic of tuberculosis. Thanks to her Hungarian grandfather, however, she didn't stay dead. Over the course of her unnaturally prolonged life, she seems to have acquired an excellent education. (In the 1980s, she's the head of an exclusive preschool.) The novel's style is a pleasure to read, evocatively descriptive, almost lyrical. So far, I haven't come upon a single grammatical error or typo, a rarity nowadays even from major publishers. But then -- at one point the narrator breaks the spell and outrages my suspension of disbelief by using "snuck" for "sneaked," an irregular form that I don't recall ever hearing in my own youth, much less reading in any older prose regardless of its informal tone. How did the author miss that error, considering the in-depth research that seems to lie behind her story? Is that lapse a case of not knowing what one doesn't know?
THE CHOSEN, a streaming series whose first three seasons I enjoyed very much (and I'm waiting with impatience for the next season, not due until sometime in 2024), made me wince at a couple of points for a similar reason. It's a retelling of the life of Jesus with an ensemble cast, focusing on the apostles and other prominent people in the Gospels. It imaginatively creates personalities and backstories for them while expanding on what little information the Bible supplies. As a side issue, I wonder why every non-Roman character speaks with an accent, as if the Judeans and Galileans are foreigners to themselves. instead, shouldn't the Romans, as outsiders in the country, be the people with the accents? That's not my main complaint, though. To make the characters relatable, the script has them talking in colloquial American English. That's fine as far as it goes, even the inclusion of "okay." We can assume their dialogue is being translated from the terminology of their own culture into expressions we're familiar with. But now and then a phrase or figure of speech that would have been impossible in that time and place shatters the illusion of realism. The most blatant example is a character referring to some action "pushing" somebody else's "buttons." That metaphor could not have existed much before the twentieth century, maybe at the earliest in the era of the telegraph. Cringe.
Of course, sometimes words feel anachronistic when they aren't. The case of "Tiffany," a modern-sounding feminine name that in fact dates back to the Middle Ages, is a well-known example. One anthology editor told me not to write that a character "scanned" a room in a story set in the 1890s because that image referred to the action of a video camera. Later I found out "scan" was indeed used in that sense before the invention of movies. I once chided a fellow author for having an eighteenth-century character in a work-in-progress call another man a jerk; I was abashed when she pointed me to a source that confirmed the word did exist as an insult in that period. Should an author of historical fiction refrain from using a term that's accurate for the period but might sound wrong to most readers?
Do you notice that kind of thing in fiction? If so, how much does it bother you?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
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