So Many Books... - My umbrella may not be red, but it's packed.

11:15 pm - My umbrella may not be red, but it's packed.

Off to Bristol tomorrow, to the Diana Wynne Jones conference which starts on Friday. Up until now, I've been helping steepholm organise only to the extent of saying things like 'So-and-so's talk has been moved so it clashes with Such-and-such's? That's a pity!'. Okay, not totally - I did suggest we go visit a few restaurants in person to see about gluten-free and vegetarian catering, and have visited the campus so I'm all set for Friday meeting-and-greeting with fjm and chilperic, while steepholm is external examining Elsewhere.

Everybody on my flist probably knows about this con already, from one source or another, but may not know that we're off to Wales on Monday to another conference! This one is the rather nicely named Asterisks and Obelisks in Lampeter. steepholm is giving a paper there, again nicely named 'The Eagle Has Landed'.

Packed? Ha. Not a chance. Though my mobile phone charger, camera are, and I've got yarn wound up (Shibui Sock, in Dragonfly) and pattern (CanCan fingerless gloves, for Y.D.) printed out! Good time to go organise, right? Instead, a quick - no really! this time quick - write-up of The Patriot Witch. Finished that on the way back from Bristol last time, and though I very much enjoyed many aspects of it, and thought the setting was wonderful, there were two things that kept bouncing me out of the book. One was an unevenness of narrative, as we'd go from seeing things quite naturally from Proctor's POV to seeing things from a very much older, rather flat-in-tone omniscient narrator moving Proctor's lips, as it were.

The other, though, was the language, and that's a constant interest because of the famed History Project. (Famed, right? Okay, I've rattled on about it a bit from time to time. Historical books set in Britain for children/teens. As per steepholm's talk mentioned above.) Others have said it before us, but the register used for historical fiction always presents the author with an interesting choice - and Rosemary Sutcliff may have set a high standard, but her style of writing historicals isn't the only way to do it. Consistency, though, is surely almost always required - unless the author's playing an intentionally twisty game, and is using a startlingly modern term to indicate alternate universe or the like. But for all Finlay's historical Revolutionary War America is different in the existence of magic, he doesn't seem to be playing on that difference in the use of anachronisms. Because the characters generally talk as might be expected for the time and place, the anachronistic words really stand out. steepholm made a list, and as always, we checked his O.E.D. online. There were a few surprises, but only one (which I've totally forgotten now) about which we were wrong and the term far older than either of us had thought. I do remember a couple of 'Hi's, which were doubly wrong in context, a bunch of 'Yeah's, and a night watchman who called "Nine fifty pee em', and then 'Nine fifty-five...' . I think the three worst for us were 'Enough with the second-guessing', ''The way I figure it, we've got a little window here' (that being a window of opportunity), and 'Hack it off already!' (that's her hair, lest anyone be left boggling). The one place where it really got in the way of characterisation was when Proctor's mother and aunt switched into -- oh, I can't think of any way of putting this except to say that they sounded like a seriously stereotypical Jewish (or Irish!) mother and aunt. Right down to his aunt 'on a roll now', telling Proctor how many hours his mother was in labour with him, and then - then - he didn't even wear the good linen jacket she'd given him!

It was only frustrating because so much was good in the story, and a lot of historical research showing, and there's a lot to look forward to in the two books to follow. But every time - bounced out hard. So - did we miss something? Or misread something? (Mind you, the blame is mine if so, as steepholm hasn't read the book itself yet, and just took interest because I never shut up about something like this when he's handy!) Other perspectives welcomed.