Anachronisms

Do you ever find yourself grinding your teeth when a writer's inadequate research or, more often, tin ear interrupts the story with something obviously anachronistic?

I did not think that Death Comes to Pemberley, P. D. James's attempt at a historical novel, was more than mildly entertaining. The Baroness seemed to me to merely be amusing herself playing with the genre - no research required, let's just lift the background details from Pride and Prejudice and let rip with a police procedural. Hardly one of her best works, and I say that a serious fan.

Her editors were either asleep or intimidated to allow calling "the police" in 1803, when according to the OED that term for the constabulary did not come in to use until the 1830s. Worse, they let slip a character using the expression "subconscious"!

Anybody got any other examples? And how much do they bother you anyway?

My major pet peeve is use of modern slang in a historical novel.

Simon Scarrow in his series on Romans in 47AD is bad for this... in Under the Eagle the characters drop F-bombs at will and I doubt the F-bomb existed back the and I doubt it was Roman in origin. In another case a Roman general says he is going to "throw the book at " someone.... I doubt that too... he could smack him with a scroll or hit him upside the head with a tablet... but a book...hahaha... and as an idiom it is many hundreds of years ... probably at least 1800 years at least before that idiom became used.

One of the reasons I've grown out of historical novels is that silly anachronisms are all too common. It takes a really talented writer or one who has really done her research for me to embrace a historical novel now. Too many feel like modern day people dressed up in costumes. As for details, don't get me started.

Not a member of this group but I hope there is no objection to me posting.

>3 Nickelini: Too many feel like modern day people dressed up in costumes.

Yes. Thinking, acting and speaking just like modern people.

One question which always comes up for me in historical battles: would a commander telling his bowmen to start shooting arrows at the enemy really say, "Fire!"? Wouldn't the term "fire" only have come in with gunpowder? I don't know what he would have said, mind you. "Release arrows!"?

>4 John5918: I imagine "release." You don't say "fire bullets!" lol.

>3 Nickelini: Too many feel like modern day people dressed up in costumes.

This is the single biggest reason I don't go out of my way to read historical fiction any more. It's not so much the occasional little details that the writer may get wrong, those are annoying, but incidental. But in order to make characters palatable to the modern ear, authors often give them modern sensibilities, ethics, sympathies and priorities; to the point where they seem to have absorbed nothing of the cultural assumptions and prejudices of their era. It irks me every time, because one of the great fascinations for me is the complexity of the human character -- that can be liberal or visionary in one way, but unquestioning, dogmatic, or even cruel in another. The way we fight our way out of our own prejudices to be better people or make a better world is what's interesting about us. Some character with 21st century morals in 16th century clothes is just lazy writing.

>4 John5918: >5 .Monkey.: I think the proper term would be "loose arrows"

I'm not terribly good at catching these things so I don't think they rise to a level of pet peeve for me, but I do sometimes feel a bit of angst at the end of reading novels from this genre, where I think "I believe I learned a lot - but did I really?" I try to do some googling to verify certain details that make me wonder, but as to the mistakes I don't wonder about - you don't know what you don't know you don't actually know. I have to just live by the general rule of thumb not to believe everything I read.

Re 21st century characters in historical settings, I believe this is (at least often) knowingly done in order to generate sympathy for the protagonists albeit at the cost of accuracy. I saw this most recently while reading World Without End by Kevin Follett. I think the novel does generally a good job at capturing how frustratingly stupid and backwards most people were about what to us are the most obvious things, so at the same time it stands out how unlikely it would be that the protagonists are so clear-sighted about everything. But if they weren't, there wouldn't be much to enjoy in this story.

Historical fiction is really a kind of conjuring trick: the author is never going to be able to reproduce exactly the way people spoke and acted at period X in place Y (and even if it were possible, it would probably be unintelligible or at least unreadable), but has to try to distract us from the present day enough to suspend our disbelief. If the author is good at that, we never stop to ask ourselves "did that word really exist in the 17th century?" or "when were postage stamps introduced?" - when you get the urge to quibble about such things, the distraction technique clearly isn't working, which almost always means it's a badly-written book and you might as well give up.

I think we need at least some characters in an historical novel who are able to look at the attitudes and conventions of their own time from the outside, otherwise there's not much point in setting the book in the past, but the author should be able to do that without us seeing "21st century attitudes". (Incidentally, I seem to remember Sir Walter Scott complaining about authors who dress modern-day people up in historical costumes - even in historical fiction, plus ça change....)

Having said that, there is a good deal of evil pleasure in spotting the unintentional howlers, especially if they are subtle enough to make you feel really clever to have noticed them. But sometimes you wonder if the author has any feel at all for the language of the period the book is supposed to be set in. How can you use "train station" in a book set before the first world war and not notice something wrong, for instance? Especially if you're old enough to remember when that horrible expression first started to appear...

>9 thorold: "when you get the urge to quibble about such things, the distraction technique clearly isn't working, which almost always means it's a badly-written book and you might as well give up."

This is a great point!

I personally don't mind anachronisms if the story and writing are otherwise good. Case in point; I just finished The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson last week. It is tagged as Historical Fiction, Alternate History, Science-Fiction, even as Fantasy. The books are full of anachronistic nonsense - but I still found them entertaining and informative of the time period. Many of the anachronisms are clearly intentional, (modern idioms and such abound). Stephenson also takes much poetic license with what I would call the 'secret history' approach, (real events in history being manipulated or affected by fictional characters invented by the author). However, I don't think anyone could possibly accuse him of poor research. If anything, many negative reviews complain that there is too much historical fact getting in the way of what is otherwise a pretty good yarn.

Anyway, if a story is well-written and intelligent, then I personally don't care that much if the author plays loosely with rigid historical settings. In fact, if I wanted rigid history, I would stick with non-fiction books. After all, it's the fiction that I find entertaining.

>9 thorold: Nice post.

Anymore I try not to expect too much of fiction writers. Writing a novel is tough enough. Writing a historical novel, and doing an accurate job, as accurate as some people want, is really tough.

I don't recall cringing at the historical novels I've read by Steven Pressfield or Jeff Shaara.

I know I've mentioned these in other discussions, but I'm going to repeat them anyway! Eloise Jarvis McGraw's Eighteenth Dynasty Egyptians use coins, gold or copper depending on their status, but still currency in Egypt a millennium too soon. (And referring to copper "ring-coins" doesn't get her off the hook. It's still wrong. One of my Egyptian language teachers said he gave up on Pharaoh--a truly dreadful tale--as soon as one of the characters pulled out a gold coin to pay for his beer.) And there were goldfish in the pools at the palace in Mara, Daughter of the Nile (another clunker)--a mistake that caught my attention when I first read it at the age of ten. Pharaoh has Thutmose III sent off to Babylon at the age of five (what was that woman smoking anyway?) and promptly getting separated from his nursemaid or whoever she was supposed to be.

Nick Drake has written some contemporary thrillers and set them at the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty. There's an opium cartel (!) operating in Thebes and littering the place with headless corpses. And an evil military dictator. (Poor Horemheb! First he gets associated with Victor Mature and now this.) Drake's detective hero is a policeman who is a committed atheist. In 1325 BCE or thereabouts. That's where I had to fight to keep from throwing that dreck (in this case, Nefertiti: the Book of the Dead) across the room (it belonged to the public library) To make matters worse, some "Egyptophile" reviewer in KMT magazine claimed that the hero's atheism made him more likeable and believable. That, along with the ridiculous plots that have more to do with contemporary Miami or Glasgow than any place in the ancient world, is what makes Drake's stuff highly suitable for recycling into kitty litter.

Some authors obviously feel that not much is known about ancient Egypt, so they don't have to do much research and they can invent all kinds of nonsense. Blue and gold kilts (lovely idea, true, but probably not possible with the cloth and dyes available in 1480 BC), marble water steps (thanks to a sharp-eyed student for catching that mistake of Pauline Gedge), women painting themselves yellow all over (Hi Pauline!), Ramesses II"s office desk (Pauline Gedge again), and--a far more serious error--a civil war and invasion in the middle of the Eighteenth Dynasty (Janis Susan May). Now look, Janis, there were a couple of civil wars in Egyptian history. You want one, set your time-travel romance in that period. Oh yes, highly unlikely that an American tourist (I do believe a blonde American tourist) is going to be able to masquerade as an Eighteenth Dynasty princess from an Upper Egyptian family.

>12 orsolina: Blue and gold kilts? Why not? Blue is indigo or woad, both of which were used in prehistoric times. Gold thread for weaving is described in Exodus. Admittedly, we don't have examples of gold thread from that early, but these textiles would not have just been thrown away. The gold was recoverable. At the very least rows of beads or sequins could have been sewn on.

>12 orsolina: I can't understand why anyone would settle for goldfish when they could have sacred crocodiles - anachronism or not!

>14 thorold:

And I believe crocodiles have been around since long before humans, so they can comfortably fit into a historical novel set in any era of human development!

There's a Daphne du Maurier novel where the 16th- or 17th-century heroine uses the word "gerrymandering" but I can't remember which one, maybe The King's General.

>12 orsolina: is what makes Drake's stuff highly suitable for recycling into kitty litter.

Love that solution. I usually suggest papier mache, but there's only so much papier mache one needs to do. Kitty litter, on the other hand . . .

>13 MarthaJeanne: I think the garment in question appeared in one of Gedge's melodramatic novels, and I believe it was supposed to be linen dyed blue and worked with gold thread. I suppose the gold thread is possible, but linen doesn't take ancient dyes very well. There is one example of tapestry-woven fabric from the Eighteenth Dynasty tomb of Thutmose IV (KV 43). But that's not what Gedge had imagined.

>14 thorold: Sacred crocodiles would indeed be expected in some temple lakes during the Ptolemaic Period! But not in ornamental fish ponds in the Eighteenth Dynasty--there are quite a few native fish that might have been found there, but McGraw probably just didn't think about it. Palace ponds, goldfish, what could be more logical? (Crocodiles would be a welcome element in many a mystery novel, I expect--they turn up at the Egyptian embassy in Rome in one of John Maddox Roberts's stories.)

Linen takes indigo. In fact, there were blue garments in Tut's tomb. Say any other colour and I'll go along. Blue from indigo or woad (chemically the same dye) is a complicated process, but results in colourfast, permanent colour unlike the other plant dyes.

One of Richard Woodman's 18th century sea dog novels (which I do recommend) has a character paying for something with a florin (an attempt during the Victorian era to go decimal, with this coin only introduced in 1849).

And there's the clock that strikes in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar...running more than a thousand years fast...

I am reading Gates of Fire a novel set in 480BC... Greece is called Greece...which it was not then, and modern British slang is oddly sprinkled through reasonably oldish language... the phrase "punching bag" has been used as well as f-bombs.

It jars my senses every time I read such things but it is supposed to be a good account of the Battle of Thermopylae so we soldier on.

>19 MarthaJeanne: There was at least one garment, a tunic, with tapestry-weave embellishments in several different colors, including blue. Howard Carter was very impressed with it and refers to it as a "dalmatic." According to Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries, indigo was available to the ancient Egyptians but not cultivated. But I don't remember seeing anything about an entirely blue garment, so if you have a reference, I am all ears, so to speak.

As I remember, Gedge (I'm pretty sure it was she--don't have any of these novels lying around for easy reference) wrote of an all-blue kilt that was shot through with gold thread. I thought she was just being (snort) "shamelessly gorgeous," as one reviewer put it