Mauger what I've said before ...

I know I've said to be shy of old-fashioning dialogue, but I think the methodology here (combing through old sources for unusual uses of words) is pretty sound. Plus, it's amusing.

How to Speak Nineteenth Century.

Given Sucking

Tim Willock's new novel (that of the "historical dialogue" mentioned last week), The Religion, gets reviewed in the Independent. It sounds about as bad as I feared:

When not slaking his lusts, Willocks contents himself with mounting an assault on the English language that puts the Ottoman hordes to shame. The narrative voice in The Religion is prevailingly that of the pulp historical romance - babes are "given suck", people wave "damask blades", women "sashay", men "swive" - but it can occasionally rise to the kind of Basic English that Kingsley Amis used to write as a joke, especially when speaking of the great imponderables of manhood and existence. "This was what it was to be a man," intones Willocks, "this, and not some thing other than this."

I told thee so.

HistFic Follies: Dialogue

From an article in last week's Independent flogging Tim Willocks's latest:

It was very freeing to work in a different time, to work with language in a different way. Modern dialogue is a bit stunted - it has to be. It's nice with historical fiction to be a little more flowery.

Now, I know it's unfair to grab a soundbite from an interview that really exists only sell the author's latest and then rant and rave against it, but this is one of those constantly repeated truths about historical fiction that drastically oversimplifies what the genre (to the extent that it is a genre) can do.

Yes, there is no question that historical fiction allows you to get flowery with language. David Milch has been doing it on TV with the excellent Deadwood, and writers as good and diverse as William Shakespeare (Henry V) and Atturo Perez Reverte (The Fencing Master) have been doing it on the stage and the page. But other writers, like Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose) and Neal Stephenson (Quicksilver) have done well with blunter or simpler dialogue in historical fiction. And Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49) and Peter Carey (My Life as a Fake) have certain shown that you can use ornate, or "flowerly," dialogue to great effect in fiction with a modern setting.

I'm going to come back to this one a lot, but I thought I'd get it out there as soon as possible. Historical dialogue does not have to be flowery. Not if it's accurate, and not if it's designed to let you know that something happened in the past. There are valid reasons to make dialogue -- past or present -- either blunt or ornate. But writing flowery dialogue for no other reason than to make it sound "historical" is misinformed and lazy.