Too Many Solecisms
Jan. 19th, 2012 09:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselJun 2011
Dissolution - C.J. Sansom - Pan, 2007
* * *
It occurred to me that I have not read a whodunnit or thriller in quite some time, and finding myself in the unusual position of having no bedside bookstack, I hit Amazon and other review sites to see who is currently trendy. The name C.J. Sansom rapidly came to the fore for his sequence of mysteries starring the hunchback Tudor lawyer Matthew Shardlake. So I thought I would give the first a try.
It's not bad. Not good either, but okay. The setting and characters are well done and the plot is reasonable. But it hardly shakes the foundations of the genre and there are so many solecisms that it spoiled my reading experience.
The story is set at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries. Shardlake is sent by Thomas Cromwell to investigate the murder by decapitation of a Commissioner who was investigating “irregularities” at Scarnsea monastery on the Sussex coast. By the Law of Morse, Shardlake, being middle-aged and ugly, cannot possibly lead the novel on his own, so he takes along his young, handsome and frankly rather dim sidekick Mark Poer. There he finds the inevitable gaggle of dodgy monks with Dark Secrets, including the out-of-it Abbott, the slippery bursar, the gay choir master (cliched but at least handled sympathetically) and the brutally disciplinarian Prior. But which one of them had the means and the motive to murder the King’s man?
Any whodunnit set in a monastery will inevitably invite comparisons with Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, and it will come as no surprise that this feels like an inferior re-tread. Which is not to say that it is incompetently put together. The depiction of a monastery in the depths of winter is atmospheric and memorable (and there is a decent map), the characters are perfectly acceptable and there is plenty of well-described action. I don’t think it’s possible to work out whodunnit until just before the end, but the perp or perps were at least near the top of my mental list of suspects so it didn’t feel like a cheat. There is a nice twist to the tale which gives some excitement and emotion to the ending.
However, something has to be said about the lack of polish. Now I am not generally a grammar martinet, but in places the writing, particularly the dialogue, is painful. Ironically, Sansom's decision to have his characters converse in modern English points up his tin ear for how people actually speak. He might have got away with a more ornate cod-historical style. His most egregious fault is comma-chaining, where two separate thoughts are shoved together into a single sentence. Some examples, all taken from a single chapter:
'Simon Whelplay!' he snapped. 'Your penance is not over, you will have no dinner tonight. Take your place in that corner.' (p 99)
'Gabriel of Ashford, Commissioner. I am the sacrist, and also the precentor; I have charge of the church and library as well as the music. We have to combine the offices, our numbers are not what they were." (p101)
'would have brother Jerome kept here, I may wish to question him. Tell me, did he treat Master Singleton to such discourse as I have had?" (p 104)
The second example above illustrates his other maddening quirk, which is the heavy-handed dumping of background information about Tudor life. Another painful example:
'The All Souls' service,' Mark observed.
'Yes, the whole village will be in church praying for the relief of their dead in purgatory." (p 33)
At which point I had to close the book briefly to fume. Both of the characters would know perfectly well what the All Souls' service is. To have one define it to the other for the benefit of the reader is entirely unrealistic.
These are such rookie mistakes that I am puzzled that neither Sansom nor his editor spotted them. I fear that the reason is because genre fiction is perceived as the preserve of less demanding readers who are happy to ignore solecisms such as these. Well, it's not acceptable. Good writing is good writing, regardless of genre. These kinds of mistakes would not be permitted in literary novels and shouldn’t be here either. Genre fiction can and should be better than this.
Dissolution - C.J. Sansom - Pan, 2007
* * *
It occurred to me that I have not read a whodunnit or thriller in quite some time, and finding myself in the unusual position of having no bedside bookstack, I hit Amazon and other review sites to see who is currently trendy. The name C.J. Sansom rapidly came to the fore for his sequence of mysteries starring the hunchback Tudor lawyer Matthew Shardlake. So I thought I would give the first a try.
It's not bad. Not good either, but okay. The setting and characters are well done and the plot is reasonable. But it hardly shakes the foundations of the genre and there are so many solecisms that it spoiled my reading experience.
The story is set at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries. Shardlake is sent by Thomas Cromwell to investigate the murder by decapitation of a Commissioner who was investigating “irregularities” at Scarnsea monastery on the Sussex coast. By the Law of Morse, Shardlake, being middle-aged and ugly, cannot possibly lead the novel on his own, so he takes along his young, handsome and frankly rather dim sidekick Mark Poer. There he finds the inevitable gaggle of dodgy monks with Dark Secrets, including the out-of-it Abbott, the slippery bursar, the gay choir master (cliched but at least handled sympathetically) and the brutally disciplinarian Prior. But which one of them had the means and the motive to murder the King’s man?
Any whodunnit set in a monastery will inevitably invite comparisons with Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, and it will come as no surprise that this feels like an inferior re-tread. Which is not to say that it is incompetently put together. The depiction of a monastery in the depths of winter is atmospheric and memorable (and there is a decent map), the characters are perfectly acceptable and there is plenty of well-described action. I don’t think it’s possible to work out whodunnit until just before the end, but the perp or perps were at least near the top of my mental list of suspects so it didn’t feel like a cheat. There is a nice twist to the tale which gives some excitement and emotion to the ending.
However, something has to be said about the lack of polish. Now I am not generally a grammar martinet, but in places the writing, particularly the dialogue, is painful. Ironically, Sansom's decision to have his characters converse in modern English points up his tin ear for how people actually speak. He might have got away with a more ornate cod-historical style. His most egregious fault is comma-chaining, where two separate thoughts are shoved together into a single sentence. Some examples, all taken from a single chapter:
'Simon Whelplay!' he snapped. 'Your penance is not over, you will have no dinner tonight. Take your place in that corner.' (p 99)
'Gabriel of Ashford, Commissioner. I am the sacrist, and also the precentor; I have charge of the church and library as well as the music. We have to combine the offices, our numbers are not what they were." (p101)
'would have brother Jerome kept here, I may wish to question him. Tell me, did he treat Master Singleton to such discourse as I have had?" (p 104)
The second example above illustrates his other maddening quirk, which is the heavy-handed dumping of background information about Tudor life. Another painful example:
'The All Souls' service,' Mark observed.
'Yes, the whole village will be in church praying for the relief of their dead in purgatory." (p 33)
At which point I had to close the book briefly to fume. Both of the characters would know perfectly well what the All Souls' service is. To have one define it to the other for the benefit of the reader is entirely unrealistic.
These are such rookie mistakes that I am puzzled that neither Sansom nor his editor spotted them. I fear that the reason is because genre fiction is perceived as the preserve of less demanding readers who are happy to ignore solecisms such as these. Well, it's not acceptable. Good writing is good writing, regardless of genre. These kinds of mistakes would not be permitted in literary novels and shouldn’t be here either. Genre fiction can and should be better than this.