Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

In the story Jack Connie Willis chooses to tell a tale set in the London of World War II at the height of
the blitz. By and large she evokes the atmosphere very well. She has obviously done her research very
thoroughly and the intimate little details she scatters through the story evoke the time and place very
well indeed. However she makes several mistakes which, for me at least, broke the spell and jerked me
out of the tale far too often.
For example, she uses the American word "gotten" which is a construction that has long vanished from
English speech. According to the BBC's magnificent programme The Story of English this is an archaic
form dating from Elizabethan English. The British stopped using it a long time ago. The Americans, it
seems, continued with it.
One of the characters in the story is supposed to come from Newcastle, but is referred to several times
as a Yorkshireman. A few minutes with a map would soon have sorted this one out. In a discussion
about vegetables one character refers to "rutabagas"; a word which simply does not exist outside of
America and which would never under any circumstances fall from the lips of a native English speaker.
(As far as I can tell, the American rutabaga is the vegetable that an English person would refer to as a
swede, or possibly a turnip). Therefore I cannot really believe that this is England or that these are
English people. Reality breaks into the story and the spell is broken.
All these are small points, I grant you, but it is the culmination of a lot of small points which makes up the
story as a whole. The more you get wrong, the more likely it is that the reader will give up in disgust
before the end of the tale is reached.
To be fair to Connie Willis, I am English by birth and she is not and so I cannot reasonably expect her to
get every single nuance of an English setting correct. Also I have no doubt that the things I have pointed
out would pass a large part of her reading audience by, even those who are English. A considerable
number of Londoners probably do think that Newcastle really is in Yorkshire -- the myth has it that
anything north of Watford isn't real anyway so who cares if you misplace a city or two? The Guardian
newspaper once published a map of England from a Londoner's viewpoint. The arctic circle went
through Manchester and a stagecoach service ran north from Watford where the roads turned into dirt
tracks. So perhaps I do her a disservice; perhaps she misplaced her geography on purpose.
Nevertheless it niggles.
The reverse is almost certainly true of course. When an English writer tries to look, sound and feel
American for whatever reason, it probably all comes out wrong as well, though I am not qualified to tell.
The late Eric Frank Russell used to write a lot of quite funny short stories for Astounding in the John
Campbell years and he often tried to put on an American flavour for the sake of the market. So much so
in fact, that many British fans believed that he really was an American writer.
John Brunner, another British writer, sold many of his stories to American outlets and therefore they
often had an American setting. Indeed, many of his books have never had a British edition at all. To me
his settings feel authentic. Doubtless they do to him as well -- he is a conscientious man and would have
tried his best to get it right.
However in spite of this effort, I have no doubt that both of these writers committed just as many
solecisms from a true American point of view as American writers have from a British point of view.
Probably the worst example I know of getting the setting wrong is a novel called The Investigation by
the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem. Again, the events of the story take place in London, but it is a London
where a police lieutenant (a rank that does not exist in the British police force) drives around London in
Buicks and Oldsmobiles (cars that are virtually never seen on London streets). All the police are armed
(British police are not routinely armed) and I vaguely recall that everyone drives on the right hand side of
the road as well.
There is no way that anyone could ever believe in this -- I don't care how good the story is. Too much of
it is too wrong and as a direct result, nothing else in it can possibly work. I don't know the