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?

Whenever I see an area I have worked in shown on TV or in books it is always wrong. Which leads me to think that all other jobs must be portrayed incorrectly too.

Perhaps, but it's worth remembering that a lot of work is really dull. No doubt police officers sit and watch crime dramas muttering, "There'd be a lot more paperwork in real life!" and "normally you'd wait two weeks to get those results!" But that would make for a pretty tedious TV programme.

DDad (admissions don) used to recall the splendid phone call he’d had in the early 80s from a ‘Edwardian gentleman’ who’d rung to explain that his first granddaughter had just been born and whilst his daughters hadn’t been able to come to his old college (as they hadn’t admitted women in the 60s) he’d like to put his new granddaughter’s name down for c2000 entry. DDad said he explained very very gently that she’d need to apply in her U6 year. So sometime between the 1920s and the 1980s things changed…

It was Irish people complaining about it on here.

The father was Scottish, wasn't he?

Also Irish people saying the complaint was batshit - or coming from someone in one of the more expensive Dublin suburbs, which is much the same thing.

Just thought of one, and I don't know if it is in the books but watching 'Tripods' on TV.

Dystopian future or past, difficult to tell. The main characters are in France and end up at a farm house or similar. The owner is Scottish but says her daughters all speak English. Their only means of learning this was from mum as no TV / radio / little travel.

But they all had English accents.

I don’t think it was, mostly. The comments I saw were not on Craicnet, nor from people who identified themselves as Irish, and appeared to be underpinned with the kind of assumptions about ‘good schools’ I see as culturally English (have never lived in Wales or Scotland, so don’t know to what extent the same pertains.) I imagine middle-class south Dubliners might also find it implausible.

But those of us living elsewhere in Ireland don’t find it at all implausible. Yes, Marianne could have been driven to the nearest big town daily or boarded, and that would have been perfectly plausible, too, but it’s not at all implausible the daughter of a smalltown solicitor just went to the local school.

It definitely would be normal in Wales too. Everywhere except Cardiff, I'd say schools are quite mixed. In Cardiff there are enough different state comprehensives that aspirational people can 'game' the system by living in certain areas and a small minority go to private schools.

It was an Irish person I saw arguing that the female character would have gone to a convent school.

I ran into a reference to 'robin's egg blue' the other day, and remembered this thread. It was a completely different book, Dorothy Dunnett's 'Pawn in Frankincense' and I think the colour was used of the sky in Zakynthos. I wonder if it was one of those things which had entered the language without being checked by anyone. For instance. lightning was described in many places a smelling of sulphur, (it doesn't) until ozone was discovered, when all of a sudden, it smells of that. Robins egg could have been used as a colour description for paint, or fabric.

But ‘convent schools’ as such don’t have any particular cachet in Ireland. I went to convent schools all the way through my education, and they were just bog standard Catholic parish schools in WC areas, with a remaining nun or two as Head or on the board of management. Some convent schools, I grant you, have prestige, often boarding schools or former boarding schools run by European orders (thinking of somewhere like Laurel Hill in Limerick), but they’re not prestigious just because of being a ‘convent’.

And absolutely, Marianne could have boarded somewhere, or been driven to a non-local school, its just not at all implausible that she went to the local school.

Was it an American book?

Just looked it up and clearly not! Ah well.

"But ‘convent schools’ as such don’t have any particular cachet in Ireland. "

I'm not saying they do. It was the Irish person arguing that.

I think I was the first person to point this out . And I am neither suburban Dublin nor unacquainted with small town life.

The point about boarding schools for dysfunction supports what I say. Marianne’s family are very dysfunctional. They also had enough money to buy a holiday home in Italy when even middle class Irish people hadn’t two pennies to rub together.

When I ask other Irish people “Would Connell and Marianne have been At the same school?” the most typical answer is scoffing. If you go through it county by county you know where she went- maybe she was supposed to be from Leitrim!

The worst bit was I watched it with Dutch subtitles and they turned them off for that bit even though it was completely unintelligible!

Late to the thread - two series I enjoy but also annoy the crap out of me are Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher and Corinna Chapman series. Greenwood is completely incapable of keeping her stories straight. She changes major events in her characters’ pasts - so in one book we have Phryne’s first love being in Paris post-war, and a few books later being a different man in a different time and place. Her cat Ember is by turns a tom, neutered, and female. The most annoying thing, though, is her imposition of 1990s libfem ideas onto a 1920s character.

With the Corinna Chapman, there are episodes where characters catch trams down major roads they never use. I used Melbourne trams all my adult life and no, that tram does not go down St Kilda Rd! She lives in Melbourne, this is extremely basic stuff.

I don't like Kerry Greenwood's books at all. I also found her a bit obnoxious at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

That doesn't surprise me, reading between the lines in her books - and wasn't she a lawyer?

A minor but irritating point... in Richard Osman's 'The Last Devil To Die', he mentions that a character is in Hemel Hempstead hospital with a fractured jaw - HH hospital only has a small Urgent Care unit, for treatment of fractures and breaks you would need to go to Watford General hospital. (Voice of bitter experience here!)

In the same book - and I will be a bit cagey here as I don't want to give away any plot points - Character A breaks into a building thinking that Character B might be there, but notes that there's no CCTV. Character B is found dead inside the building and Character A is later told that there's CCTV footage showing them breaking in. No one can work out who killed Character B, but why didn't the CCTV footage show the killer breaking in?

A minor but irritating point... in Richard Osman's 'The Last Devil To Die', he mentions that a character is in Hemel Hempstead hospital with a fractured jaw - HH hospital only has a small Urgent Care unit, for treatment of fractures and breaks you would need to go to Watford General hospital. (Voice of bitter experience here!)

In the same book - and I will be a bit cagey here as I don't want to give away any plot points - Character A breaks into a building thinking that Character B might be there, but notes that there's no CCTV. Character B is found dead inside the building and Character A is later told that there's CCTV footage showing them breaking in. No one can work out who killed Character B, but why didn't the CCTV footage show the killer breaking in?

Well, I don’t know any other Irish people, whether they boarded or not, who had any issue with Connell and Marianne attending the same smalltown school. It wouldn’t have been implausible for M not to have gone to the local school, either, obviously.

Yes, her family are dysfunctional, and have plenty of money, but having enough money to send your child to a boarding school doesn’t translate into necessarily doing it. You might think M’s unpleasant mother would like her to go away for large chunks of time, but for whatever reason, her obnoxious older brother clearly attended the same town school, and you can imagine their mother, who favours her son, not wanting to do anything to suggest M is ‘special’, or deserving of a better education.

A character is in ICU on life support in a private wing INSIDE an NHS hospital. I am not sure that you would get a seperate wing within an NHS hospital, pretty sure private hospitals have ICUs?

Not many of them do. I don't know numbers, but in my experience the majority of private hospitals ship patients out to the NHS if they need intensive care. Some do have HDU/ICU facilities but even these are mostly geared towards post-op surgical care with a relatively quick turnaround, rather than complex multi-specialty medical cases.

Some NHS hospitals do have private wings (e.g. the Lindo wing at St Mary's) but I'm not sure if they have their own ICU, or share facilities with the NHS part.

It always amused me that Bertie Wooster, one of the biggest airheads in literature, went to Magdalen College, Oxford