Story review: 'Helen and Julia' by Sarah Waters

[triskellian]

Granta's Best Young British Novelists, story 1

'Helen and Julia' is a section taken from an as-yet-unpublished novel, covering an afternoon and evening: a picnic, an argument and the argument's results. It's a strange choice for inclusion in the anthology, because we never get a chance to care about the characters, they're not sympathetic, and there's not much in the way of resolution. It's not a piece that works on its own, and it contains an odd scene of ickiness, which seems, in the context of this short section, to have been added solely to shock.

All speech is 'said'. Nothing is ever 'confided' or 'replied' or 'demanded' or any of the other dozens of alternatives. (In English class in my second year of high school, we spent some time working on an 'anti-said' project, where we brainstormed large numbers of alternative words to 'said', and played with using them. I should look up my old English teacher and introduce her to Sarah Waters.) Sentences all seem to start with 'the', and are littered with clumsy similes and strangely anachronistic words and phrases. Dialogue feels artificial and clunky, and she sometimes avoids contractions in speech, leaving the alternative feeling unnatural.

I'm not impressed with this. I saw a little bit of the TV adaptation of Tipping the Velvet, by the same author, and thought it was horrendously silly, which I mostly attributed to the adaptation, but I'm now revising my opinion, and laying more of the blame on the author.

Comments

I don't like Mondays

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Ah. Thanks, that probably explains it!

The West Wing was on E4 last night, and was using a female vocal of "I don't like Mondays" for background music throught a fairly long section, but they didn't credit it at the end. Tori would make sense.

Re: I don't like Mondays

[triskellian]

Yup, that was her, that's why I have it in my head. It was the cover version from the Strange Little Girls album.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

I've read many, many successful authors pronouncing that, in stylistic terms, using anything other than "said" pretty much all the time is walking into a minefield which is likely to explode in your face. Certainly I can't think of much worse than a writer whose characters are constantly "opining", "suggesting", "chuckling" and "mumbling". Show not tell really is a cardinal rule, and this sort of thing both breaks it *and* is disruptive to just getting into the story.

I'm a terror for elaborate sentence construction, naturally, but unless you actually have something special to evoke, such as the rulebound stuffiness of Gormenghast (and how I wish I did!), I'd always recommend for a writer to keep everything as plain as they can.

[triskellian]

Yes, good point. I do agree with you, I guess something just made me find it grating in this - I was constantly being jolted out of the world of the story by the writing, and there often seemed to be a 'said' hanging around the vicinity... I think I'd often rather not have any said-equivalent at all, so maybe my complaint is that it was over-used in general, rather than that I'd have preferred a different word sometimes.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I tend to find that the most effective writing in this respect is stuff that gets quite sloppy with the rules of what needs to go between blocks of speech. Inserting stuff like character actions instead of 'said' (or synonyms) makes it clear who is speaking without being too awkward.

"What a bunch of @rse !" Dom threw down the book in disgust, "The grammatical constructions alone are too painful to contemplate !"

[triskellian]

Exactly what I meant, thanks.

[lathany.livejournal.com]

I think that using words other than "said" works fine if you actually mean them. If they add to the book at all - for example, by giving more description to the mood of the character in question - then such things are a good choice.

However, if they don't add anything; if the scene, character moods and everything else are perfectly clear already, then I agree that "said" is better.