Apologies for being away for so long but holidays, finances and cars have got in the way of writing and blogging just recently. Thank you to the lone viewer from Canada. I could do with more of that and also anyone from other English speaking countries (Australia, New Zealand, South Africa etc) and also those with good English from Scandanavia to join the two from Sweden. And is it really true that Kazakhstan and Mongolia are internet dead spots...?
Anyway, on with the blog.
I have been reading The Deceit by Tom Knox (Harper 2013), and it highlights a couple of important points even in chapter one.
Consider this, right at the start, were the viewpoint character is on th outskirts of Cairo:
The taxi stopped in the City of the Dead. Victor Sassoon stared out of the dusty cab window, adjusting his spectacles, and cursing his seventy-five-year-old eyesight.
Great first sentence, but who misread the name as Vidal Sassoon, the famous hairstylist? The present participles could be replaced by past participles but, this time at least, the simultaneity is OK.
Later we have this:
The drive took merely ten minutes, past the last of the Fstimid ossuaries, past the final tombs of the Abbasid nobles, past an Ottoman mausoleum adapted into a car repair workshop.
I get it - the author has been there and actually seen these things. And Sassoon is an expert on such things. But does the reader really care? Or bother looking these things up? I had this problem with a main character of mine where her bedroom was filled with Georgian furniture. Yes, she loved it, but who else gave a shit if it was deigned by William Gomm? Nobody, I bet. That's why I had to introduce it to the reader by her having a new friend round, Besides it made it more immediate. I was wondering if Knox could perhaps have introduced his facts in diary entries or letters and perhaps concentrated on how impatient or uncomfortable the Sassoon character felt in the grubby taxi.
Jacl Orchison
August 30, 2014
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