Neanderthal might be easier than my current project - yes, it is part of the PhD - which is the 15th Century. They seem so English, and yet they're so not the same as us! But that's the question that always fascinates me about history: what's the same, and what isn't, which is how I got caught by the parallel narrative bug: exploring the same questions and human dilemmas in different times, and pinning down the differences. I'm endlessly fascinated by narrative structure, and of course parallel narrative is in a way the ultimate structural problem. Even when I try to write contemporary stuff, it always ends up being about history. Makes for great, big, complicated novels though.

I haven't read the Crimson Petal - my last excursion into that genre was Fingersmith, which I enjoyed very much, and also admired for its technical control. Personally, I get terribly bored with bodily functions - in fiction at least - because so often I feel that the author just wants to shock, or that s/he has a thoroughly Freudian problem that he ought to be psychoanalysed for, rather than inflicting it on me. It has to fit with the ways the novel describes and sees the rest of its world, before I stop being annoyed and - well, I was about to say, go with the flow, but maybe I won't!

Emma

Emma, you spoke earlier of the problem of representing how people talk (when writing 'historical'. I imagine this must be especially difficult with the 15th C ?

Joe

A very valid and interesting point, Jane.

Jane, good point. I think what really gets up their noses are the ones who don't bother to do their homework, not the ones whose writing just isn't good enough. Misspelt names, messy manuscripts, poetry sent to non-poetry publishers, very obvious mass-mailings to fifty or sixty agents saying 'Dear Sir or Madam', people who don't bother to find out the most basic facts about how the trade works. Apart from anything else, it doesn't say much for an aspirant writer's research skills or eye for detail.

Joe, yes, it's hard. Anything back to Jane Austen or so is relatively easy. Earlier than that, and you start having to think in terms of equivalence, not imitation. If I did do a pastiche of 15th century prose - spelling corrected - it might be comprehensible, but no-one would bother to read more than a page. (believe me, I've tried!) Georgette Heyer, who is a wonderful prose stylist in her regency novels, is disastrously bad in her (mercifully few) medieval books.

It's finding a language that has one foot in that period, and one foot in this. It's one of the few writing processes I have to do that I really don't know how it works - I read period stuff, and start writing, and see what I get. Often it's awful, sounding like the feeblest Victorian melodrama. It helps to have been brought up on Shakespeare in a fairly major way, but even he's 100 years too late, and how historically accurate am I obliged to be, with the etymological equivalent of the potato? Vocabulary words help, because they're comprehensible, but when you start monkeying around with the syntax, then it's dangerous territory. It's the thing I feel was the biggest failure in my previous go at this period, and I'm definitely worried about how to get it right this time.

Emma

Emma

There's a dfficulty also with representing any speech pattern - you have the idiolect (the peculiar style of the individual) within the dialect (the language of the tribe), and then there's accent - but one's own prejudices about language are in danger of getting in the way. For example, in listening to the bilingual (Irish/English) John Doherty (RIP), fiddle player and story-teller from Donegal, I was struck by how close to 'standard' English his speech is - that is, in dialect terms. Of course, his idiolect is by definition unique, and then all sorts of factors come into play - not least his practised and highly conscious art as a story-teller ... and this when he might be talking of nothing more than going to the shop for a twist of tobacco or whatever. But if I described John Doherty to someone, rather than playing a tape of him, they might bring all sorts of sterotypes to their mind - what they would expect a man of John's time and class to sound like. And this sort of prejudice can even survive an encounter with the speech itself, as experiment shows.

So what's the implication for a writer, historical or otherwise? To be very careful about 'marking' speech away from standard at all - but sometimes it has to be done.

Joe

What JoPo said about idiolect and dialect is very interesting. It really is relevant to the novel I'm reading, Thursbitch (sorry to bang on about that) as Garner's historical bits involve a lot of dialect words (in the dialogue, mainly, as opposed to the narrative itself) and regional place names. It's set in Cheshire in the 18th Century. There is a parallel story set in the present day, on the same ground. Maybe one of the interesting things about the passage of time, and the introduction of mass media, is the homogenisation of language. This is something that comes across very clearly as the modern day characters speak in a way that we all understand, whereas the historical characters are cut off from us both by time and region. (Ie, it would have been as hard for someone of the same period who came from a different part of the country to understand them as it is for me!) The main character, Jack Turner, is someone who travels away from his community, trading silk and salt, and comes back with lots of influences from the outside world, which obviously have an impact on his community.

It's very interesting, though it is not the easiest book to read.

Likewise The Inheritors (or should that be Inheriters?). What I noticed was that was that Golding seemed to be eschewing simile in his writing. Presumably because he believed the neanderthals lacked the concept of 'like' . Plus it was hard to think of things that he could compare stuff to that was valid in the prehistoric setting and also meant something to the modern reader. That was my theory and then suddenly he slipped in a simile. And then later he had one of the characters consciously grasping the concept of 'like'. Maybe I was on to something after all - just he was doing it in a very subtle way.

By the way, I heard a novelist on the radio who writes historical novels but has all her characters talk in modern idiom. Her argument was that when they were talking their language wouldn't have sounded archaic or odd to them. (A little bit like if I wrote, in English, a book set in Poland - it would be odd if I had the characters slipping into Polish, or even more so if I gave them an accent like some crap old war film.) This novelist, sorry no idea who it was, basically said she couldn't be arsed with all those 'forsooths' and whatevers.

Roger - the Inheritors crossed my mind - but I haven't read it. Didn't Anthony Burgess make up a 'language' for some cave-people flick (with Raquel Welch?) once?

I think I would go for a modern 'Standard' on the lines you indicate - and obviously if I was writing about the 17th C Levant, I would avoid 'hanging with my homies' and such. And yea verily, none shall frequent a crack-den - and so on. Let's hear it for unmarked Standard!

But there's more than one way to approach this, I guess. Must take a look at Old Mortality (Scott).

Joe

I think there is a kind of 'neutral' voice for any period - not slang, but not self-consciously 'historical' either.

On the other hand, I've just read some of Anthony Burgess's Dead Man in Deptford, about Marlowe. Wow! Neutral's the last word you'd think of, and you'd never think it was real 16th cent., but boy does it work as language!

Must go back and read the last few posts properly when I've got more time!

Emma

<Added>

Last time I tackled the 15th century I tried to find a voice which had enough very period-sounding vocabulary and sentence structure that the reader would 'hear' it as authentic as they read - rather as you might when you're writing someone speaking English with a French accent. You don't want to maul the spelling to try to represent it phonetically (it's not as if English spelling is very phonetic itself, after all) so you have to trigger the reader's own ear. But I found that most of the words which were unarguably period, but comprehensible, had been pinched by earlier writers trying to do the same thing. I'm sure that's why they used 'Gadzooks' or 'Forsooth', before lapsing into something relatively normal, because even if you don't know what they mean, they sound right, and don't hamper your understanding, as a truly unknown work, or an authentic bit of grammar, would. But I'd certainly eschew anything that seemed very 2005, though it's a terribly subjective decision.

I never did solve the problem for the dialogue, though I think the voice I found for the narrative worked fairly well.

Emma

Haven't read 'Dead Man ...' but 'Nothing Like The Sun' was impressive. And 'A Clockwork Orange' is a riot of language ... he was pretty damn good, Burgess, most of the time.

Joe