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?

Oh God, “Sir Smith” gives me the rage so much!

Re the author not remembering their own plots, Bridget Jones’ brother completely disappeared from the second book, as did her schizophrenic granny, and Jeremy & Magda’s children kept changing ages.

I remember being irritated by a series on tv set in World War II, when a body is found with some ‘2nd class stamps in her pocket’.
1st and 2nd class post only started in 1968 - before that there was only one class.

It’s the minor errors that tend to get me.

Can’t remember the titles of the books, but remember one where someone was travelling by train to Bath and the train somehow went from Paddington to Didcot to Reading.

Also an apparently non-fiction book set in an office building I worked in which kept referring to some department being on the 17th floor. The building only had 14 floors…

I remember reading a book set in the elizabethan court where the author had one of the major female characters not only marry her husbands in the wrong order, but actually married her to her own son, as she clearly hadn't looked at the timeline properly. It completely threw me out of the story, it was such a basic thing to get wrong!

But his aren’t mostly plain inaccuracies.

@BronzeAge no but in the spirit of things not sitting right. Plus interesting if literature is your thing.

This is a wonderful thread. Love the one about sheltering in the Jubilee Line during the Blitz.

’The Other Boleyn Girl’ makes Mary Anne’s younger sister when she was actually the elder of the two. Why? It doesn’t make any difference to the plot, but it had me spitting tin tacks.

It wasn’t a bad book as these non historical novels go, but the pointless switching just annoyed me on every page.

Also, there is no evidence that Thomas Cromwell was in favour of women’s education, whereas Thomas More was famous for it ( and regarded as a bit mad, tbh, although it may have influenced Henry VIII to ensure both Mary and Elizabeth’s very rigorous education in languages). Hilary Mantel shouldn’t alter history imho

Grrrr

Oh, I agree they’re brilliant.(Or mostly — there are a few he’s just misreading or plain wrong about, but the ‘enjoyably silly speculation’ ones are great fun, like whether Black Beauty is a gelding and whether Lady Bertram’s pug is male or female etc.

I totally agree OP. I've read a couple of books set in towns I've lived in. Both made such irritatingly simple geographical errors that I couldn't finish them.

I mean, Scottish people do go out for walks! As long as they described it as dark, freezing, and miserable then it seems fair enough.

I got very irritated by the inaccuracies in that stupid book called The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society or something like that.

It's supposed to take place in the UK and Guernsey in 1946, at a time when the country was pretty much bankrupt, there was full-on rationing and people had next to nothing.

One of the characters, an editor, has some business to do in Australia and goes there by air several times during the story. The thing is that in 1946 very few people were flying anywhere from the UK. Heathrow was still just a few huts in a field. Flying to Australia would have taken weeks and cost an absolute fortune! The book lost all credibility at that point (not that it had much to begin with, to be honest)!

Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth has a character in England grinding horse chestnuts into flour in 1135. I read it immediately after Phillips Gregory’s Earthly Joy which has the Tradescants introducing horse chestnuts to Britain in the 1400s.

One of them must be wrong.

Both of them, according to this. Late 16th century.

Re Americanisms, Douglas Stuart ( I can't recall if it was in Shuggie Bain or Young Mungo) mentions one character "visiting with" another.

I rate him as a writer - although I'm hoping for a different theme in his third book - however nobody in Scotland visits "with" someone else. You've lived in the US too long Douglas.

I’ve heard Peter Wimsey complaining about a ‘garbage dump'.

And I think that this sort of translation is completely unnecessary. I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of Americans who read Dorothy Sayers have a basic knowledge of British English. Or can figure it out from context.

Does anyone here look at the "Goofs" section of IMDb? They are amazing and some of the people are quite harsh with their strictness.

It's one thing when they point out a continuity error or something glaring but some are, I paraphrase, "the character was driving a blue mark 1 lagonda and it had a hexagonal rear view mirror. However, this film is set in November 1933 and that particular rear view mirror was not available until December 1933 in the blue colour”

I mean, it is an error, but somewhat more pedantic when some props person has had to source a period car. Rather than just an author needing to do some research!

I think it was The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve when a character needed their passport to cross the Irish border from North to South (or vice versa). That has never been needed, and it really irritated me.

I've been trying to read a book on and off for the past year but keep having to stop because it contains so many inaccuracies that drive me up the wall. The book is Code Name Helene by Ariel Lawhon, it's had great reviews, it's a novel based on the life of the WW2 spy Nancy Wake.
The author ( an American) admits she has changed some details and timings but it's not that that bothers me, it's things like a wartime RAF officer having mayonnaise in his sandwiches, when it would have been salad cream as mayonnaise didn't arrive in the UK till 20 years later, British people talking about flatware instead of cutlery, or using the American names for vegetables in their conversation, and constantly making wartime British people use Americanisms and phrasing from the modern day.
That's just a few examples of what I remember but it was happening throughout the book which stopped me from getting into it because my blood was boiling every few pages. I've never before seen a book which has done this but I can't recall reading many, if any by Americans about British characters. I think her editing team has done an appalling job, I suspect they're all American and young and haven't got a clue about Britain and certainly Britain in wartime. I keep thinking I'll write to her publisher to tell them what a bad editing job they've done.

There is actually some debate over who was the older sister. The evidence shows either could be true.

On the cover of the (v. grim but brilliantly written) Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn, the word ‘startlingly’ is misspelled ‘startlingy’, startlingly.

I recently felt smug discovering an inaccuracy by ‘Robert Galbraith’ (JK Rowling). In one of her Cormoran Strike detective novels, Strike, who is an Arsenal fan, settles down to watch the 3pm match on television.

But he couldn’t have, because Premier League, Football League or FA Cup matches between 2:45pm - 5:15pm are not shown on TV in compliance with Article 48 of the UEFA statutes.

I remember feeling absolutely enraged when I read it because I love the series so much!

It's a nightmare, though. I'm trying to write a historical story and it's taking (literally) years because I have to keep finding out about trivial details 😬 If the story weren't so embedded in my head, I'd have abandoned it - when my imagination built the thing, it didn't stop to wonder what fruit & veg were available in the UK at that time, how shoes were made, whether this or that road existed, and on and on and on ...

I made an early decision not to attempt contemporary speech, thank god, but wish I'd anticipated the days of research on EVERY LITTLE DETAIL of everybody's lives! I've acquired a new respect for historical authors and a great deal more tolerance for daft errors!

A few years ago I read a novel set in a town I'd lived in for decades. The lead character moved into a 'lovely little flat' round the corner from the station. The author even described the route from the station to this delightful little flat. Except there are no flats there, just offices, the police station and a huge Waitrose car park.

Wouldn’t that have been normal chestnuts? Horse chestnuts are inedible as far as I know ( poisonous).