Inaccuracies in fiction

[HoppyHat]

Do they bother you? I realise I am annoyed/disappointed by simple "mistakes" which surely a decent editor should notice?

A couple of examples

A very very popular novel. Set in modern day London. Character regularly gets the bus from A to B along a named road all of which exist in real life. But they don't use the correct bus number! Nothing bad happens on the bus, the driver isn't awful, nothing libellous. So why not use the correct bus number?

I've just finished a book which I really liked. The author is American. But part of the book is set in a posh English school in the 1950s. The headteacher calls the season following summer "Fall". And says (more than once) "you need to write your sister" (or similar) not write TO.

To me these things are so obvious and quite jarring. Anyone else?

Nearly every book I've ever read has things wrong that I find irritating!

A Gentleman in Moscow - in the early pages he admires the plump blackberries for sale, then the flowering lilacs in the park. Surely not even in Russia do you get lilac in flower (early summer) and blackberries (late summer/autumn). Why go down that path if you have no knowledge. Other things seemed wrong. I read two chapters.

Yes, a magazine cover. It’s one of the more lurid of her books, I think - the crime is referenced obliquely in Gaudy Night.

SPOILERS
I think the older ladies quietly got on with their lives whilst the victim had a very vocal “pash” - and it’s also not clear if the lurve from her was one way only and she was being exploited.

I think the older ladies quietly got on with their lives whilst the victim had a very vocal “pash” - and it’s also not clear if the lurve from her was one way only and she was being exploited.

I think Miss C thought the (immature, and not very bright) young woman was being influenced by a dominant (and bad) woman and was parrotting her views rather than having her own opinions. Nowadays, one might call it grooming.

With her long experience of boarding house life, Miss C would have seen it all before, and would know what was a genuine relationship and what wasn't.

The mistake I'm most bothered by was in a book by Jonathan Franzen, Freedom. In the first few pages of the book (not sure where exactly, as I gave it away as soon as I'd read it (for book club), he describes Miss Bianca from The Rescuers by Margery Sharp as 'matronly.' Now anyone who's ever read the Miss Bianca books will know that Miss Bianca was a glamorous white mouse, a poet and the pet of the Ambassador's son; she wore a silver chain around her neck and lived in a porcelain pagoda, for goodness sake! About as far from matronly as you can get. She was so glamorous they got Eva Gabor to voice her in the animated Disney film!

I've loved Craig Ferguson since his Bing Hitler days. I read his autobiography and threw it across the floor when it referred to his early gigs in Edinburgh's legendary Assembly Room.

They are plural, and they are the Assembly Rooms. It ruined the whole thing as any comedian would know that, he probably just chucked a few notes at his ghost writer and let them get on with it.

Not a book but we've just binge watched "Those About to Die" on Amazon which is set during the time of the Emperor Titus. It showed the Titus Arch which was built in his memory...

That is shocking! Miss Bianca was an idol of jetsetting sophistication. I wonder which fictional mouse he meant, and also where was the proofreader?!

I am currently listening to The Housekeepers set in 1905. The heroine decides to walk save the bus fare. She was born and bred in London, but instead of saying
“ to save the tuppence fare” she says “to save the two d, (pronounced Dee) fare”

Another Adrian Mole one. The first few books are set in Leicester. It’s mentioned several times. In the later books it’s mentioned his family now live in Ashby-de-la-Zouch. Ok, people move….but so did Pandora’s parents, his school and his whole year group.

Re trains: in the first Bridget Jones film she is seen on a Connex train. At the time they ran what is now the Southern/South Eastern franchises. Her parents were said to live in Northamptonshire. Would have been Silverlink County I think.

In Cold Feet, two of the characters are seen saying goodbye at a train station on an open air platform. The male character is then seen walking to the exit at Manchester Victoria.

Miranda (in ‘Miranda’) decides she will travel to Wick and boards what is clearly a local suburban service at London Marylebone when she’d have needed Kings Cross.

For film/TV - I think things like the platform/train they film on will be much more about who will give them access, whether there’s enough light at the location etc etc. budget will also be a factor.

I watched the behind the scenes of 73 Yards (Doctor Who) - they booked out two carriages on a train from Newport but it was otherwise an actual train, so they had to get their kit onto the train in the time it was at the station, then get set up and film Ruby looking out of the window at fields etc.

In film and TV the station discrepancies are for expedience and/or aesthetics. Paddington for example uses Marylebone station for the entrance because it is much prettier than any of the real entrances to Paddington.

Forget the trains, what about Bridget's disappearing brother? In the first book there were some funny exchanges with her older brother Jamie and she reflected on how he didn't have the same social pressure as she did to get married and have children, and in the second and subsequent books he's nowhere to be seen. Also I'm pretty sure Jeremy and Magda's children were different ages and sexes from the first book to the second.

Exactly. People are often just shooting where they can on cost or permits grounds, or for aesthetics. Disproportionate amounts of later Morse was shot in Wadham quad because it’s more anonymous-looking than other more distinctive (and expensive to shoot in) colleges. So Morse and Lewis would go through the entrance of Jesus or Brasenose and end up in different angles of Wadham. It gave rise to a drinking game, where you drank every time a college played another college, or they turned down Longwall St and were suddenly in Jericho, or drove the wrong way down a one-way street etc.

In "Bergerac" the one little length of road-tunnel on Jersey would frequently link different locations. Magic!

Speaking of Dorothy L Sayers, one of the Wimsey continuations really annoyed me, because Jill Paton Walsh should have known better. In a book set post-war, Peter and Harriet's teenage son addresses Mr Bunter as 'Mervyn', the idea being to show how egalitarian they all are now. But circa 1950 a public schoolboy would never address a much older man by his first name unless invited to do so. It would be considered impertinent, and to Bunter it was an insult, because under-servants were addressed by their first names. Upper servants had surnames, with an additional 'Mrs' when it was the cook or housekeeper.

People are often just shooting where they can on cost or permits grounds, or for aesthetics.

An episode of The Crown had Rochester in Kent standing in for Windsor. But an adaptation of Great Expectations, which should have been filmed in Rochester, wasn't. And in a previous adaptation, Pip's first meeting with Magwitch, which was in Cooling churchyard, was filmed at Fairfield, the other side of the county.

I agree re the Mervyn thing - I don’t think LPW would have let Bredon get away with that, even if he was trying to be achingly cool or summat.

That’s an excellent point about the Mervyn thing and I never thought of it when reading the books.

Multi catch-up

People didn't use the word 'gender' except in terms of grammar until the late 1970s when it started featuring in academic theory. 'Gender' as something a person could manifest was not a concept. They used 'sex'. Women were 'the fair sex' not 'the fair gender' which would have been seen as bafflingly meaningless. They also didn't use 'having sex' in the way that has come to be used since the 1960s. 'Sexual intercourse' was used from the early 1960s on, before then a range of phrases, but it was not spoken of as much, and often in the most oblique terms.

The book that annoyed me most of one of those Anthony Horowitz mysteries, maybe Magpie Murders - there were loads of things, a person with a plastic shopping bag long before such things existed (too much pre-1950 plastic altogether - it's a new thing) and nightfall at least an hour too early. It was so egregious that I convinced myself it was a clue and I'd been very clever in spotting it (there was a story-within-a-story element) and was furious when it wasn't and I hadn't. Won't be reading any more of his.

I have no problem with Marianne going to the Community School - one that I know was founded when the Sacred Heart convent combined with a couple of other local schools and the legacy of Sacred Heart poshness is definitely still there. There's also a strong feeling in Ireland that although boarding schools can be useful for people who want to swot uninterrupted and get their Leaving Cert points up, they also have a disproportionate number of pupils from broken homes / dysfunctional families and that can make them - complicated and not very sound environments, particularly for girls.

And my copy of Gaudy Night, third edition, November 8th 1935, Gollancz London (1st edition was November 4th) has the Corporation garbage dump on page 307.

The 'fair sex' was also sometimes abbreviated simply to 'the sex' implying the ladies, that chaps should be chivalric towards but also somewhat wary of. Thinking Major Benjy in the Mapp & Lucia novels, and sundry other early 20th century light fiction.

The people who think middle-class Marianne going to the same school as the working-class Connell in Normal People is a 'mistake' either aren't Irish or are, Dubliners without much experience of small town life. It isn't a mistake. It's entirely plausible.

Also, the people who think 'gender' is the polite word for 'sex' are likely to be the same people who think 'myself' is a more formal/polite version of 'me' eg 'That would be myself, Lord Sugar'.

SPOILERS

I’d forgotten Bridget Jones had a brother! Long time since I read it though.

The Agatha Raisin books were terrible for continuity and plausibility at times. A few characters disappeared without explanation or had completely different back stories to when they were first introduced.

The plots just got sillier too; in ‘The Dead Ringer’ someone clonks her over the head, she wakes up in a coffin at her own funeral. No one to declare her dead, no death certificate, being buried in a strange parish by a vicar she doesn’t know in a church she doesn’t attend and all her friends just turn up and accept this as normal.

I used to love Agatha, she got me through some tough times but I couldn’t even be arsed to read the latest one as the plots became far too ridiculous.

I’d forgotten Bridget Jones had a brother!

So did Helen Fielding....

😆