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triskellianGranta'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'Helen and Julia' is a section taken from an as-yet-unpublished novel, covering an afternoon and evening: a picnic, an argument and the argument's results.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.
'Helen and Julia' is a section taken from an as-yet-unpublished novel, covering an afternoon and evening: a picnic, an argument and the argument's results.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.
