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?

I've read a handful of books recently by British authors set in Britain where Americanisms such as trash are used.

Really makes me mutter to myself crossly.

Who steals my purse steals trash

Shocking early influence of the Virginia colony or standard English?

Definitely the Virginia colony and its dreadful infiltrating ways. (See also ‘gotten’ and Halloween).😀

I’ve just remembered one set around WWI where bags of crisps were eaten at a picnic. I’m pretty sure they were not around then (unless homemade).

Possible I guess. First commercial production was 1910 in America and I suppose they must have put them in bags, even if they were brown paper bags.

I love Raynor Winn's books but partway through "Landlines", I was virtually yelling "it's Bridgwater, without the "e", not Bridgwater"!
How could the proofreaders have missed spelling the name of the town correctly?

I did exactly the same!!

It’s not exactly an inaccuracy, but I remember reading a book set in a hospital, where the author mentioned a patient having an intra-nasal naso-gastric tube!

I read one recently (set in Wales in WW2) and had the same reaction. I think they were about but I was not convinced that the organisation (school or guides, can't remember which) would have got hold of so many packets in pre cash and carry days.

I don’t know whether this is exactly an inaccuracy, either - more poor usage, really - but it’s amazing how many writers confuse 'prone' and 'supine' (and how many editors don’t notice).

An audiobook error which had me confused then cross: the audiobook had two or three narrators and it took me ages to realise that there was just one character called Summer. It must have been written as Somer which can, of course, be pronounced the same as Summer.

Trouble is one narrator pronounced it Soh-mer and a different narrator pronounced it Summer. I thought they were two different characters for a good half of the book.

I once read a book by an American writer where the main character puts Billy Eliot on for her ballet mad daughter and friend to watch but the girls lose interest because they can't understand the "Scottish accents."

Haha I saw Billy elliot on Broadway, the usher clocked we were "briddish" and said we'd have to let them know what we thought of the accents.....I made sure to avoid him on the way out to avoid being rude 🤐

In Robert Westall's Falling into glory, set in the early 1950s, the main character is about to take his A levels, two years before has taken his O levels, then one morning in assembly they pray for the king and all his ministers.

O and A level replaced General and Higher School Certificate in June 1951; King George VI died in February 1952. So I reckon you can have any two of those things but not all three.

As to American words in British books, I would commend the publishers of the US edition of Jan Mark's Handles, who preserved the full-on British English, Norfolk dialect and all, and simply provided a glossary at the back. I don't want my American books anglicised; US readers should not want their British books americanised.

I guess he could have taken A levels in that small window of June 51.

Yes but not O levels two years before.

John Rowe Townsend's Widdershins Crescent (1965) was later published in an updated version (and retitled Goodbye to Gumble's Yard). In the original, 15 year old Kevin is forced, thanks to his guardian uncle's fecklessness and dishonesty, to leave his secondary modern school and take a job to support the family when he had been hoping for a late transfer to a grammar school. The updated version just has him not going into the sixth form of his comprehensive. The original thus had a political point which the update has lost - and some of the grit of the book with it, even if the political issue is now largely dead.

In A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, teenage Pip applies to Cambridge and gets 'one of the very first offers to come in'.

But Cambridge makes all its offers on a single day in January, so how did she know?

Totally plausible in London too! And everywhere else I’ve lived. Always found it baffling that people thought it wasn’t.

In one of the Chalet School books, someone’s ’name is put down for Oxford’.

When is it set? Oxbridge offers used to drift in over a period of about a fortnight in December.

I don’t think there was an issue with gender being used instead of sex in the recent past - I was born in the 1950s and sexual intercourse was the sex act , sex meant boy or girl. Have been reading some previous posts.

A book I read a few years ago had the main character’s DH “getting his secretary pregnant at the office Christmas party”. The baby is then born on Christmas Day the following year.

Speaking of Oxbridge, can anyone explain the end of Jane Gardam’s Rode by all with Pride to me? Maureen thinks it’s too late for a rejection letter. Are we meant to assume the letter came but only Livie saw it? Or that Livie did get in but was crushed by existence? Or that Livie didn’t get the letter and thought that no letter meant rejection?

Good point, but it's set in 2015 to 2019, from memory.