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regshoeThe Animals at Lockwood Manor (2020) was this month's book club book, and one I really wanted to like: a historical setting in the early part of the Second World War, Gothic elements, an f/f romance and a plot based around a zoological museum sound like an ideal combination. Unfortunately it was a big disappointment (an opinion generally shared by the book club!), for several reasons, but it's inspired me to think a bit more carefully about why it didn't work and further develop my opinions on commas.
The premise: the collections of the Natural History Museum in London are being evacuated in anticipation of the city getting bombed. The mammal collection goes to the stately home of Lockwood Manor under the supervision of Hetty Cartwright, our main character. Here she meets Lord Lockwood, owner of the manor and a highly unpleasant person; Lucy, his daughter, who is haunted by mysterious nightmares, and with whom Hetty falls in love; a cast of servants; and a lot of Gothic weirdness, which only increases the further we get through the book.
Now, when I think about writing I really love, the quality that stands out the most is what I think of as 'sharpness', and can analyse into two basic things: firstly, deliberate, precise and elegant use of language; secondly, perceptiveness and specificity of personal and social detail in characters and setting. D. K. Broster is good at this; E. W. Hornung is good at it (I'm reading another of his books now, and having my usual 'AARGH HOW do you CONSTRUCT PHRASES so WELL' reaction); Mary Renault, whatever her other faults, is amazing at it; my favourite fanfic authors are good at it! And The Animals at Lockwood Manor is a terribly blunt, dull book. It's the opposite of this good thing.
Perhaps I'm not in a position to complain very much about the historical detail, because I don't actually know enough to say exactly what Healey is getting wrong or what she should do instead (a few things stand out—Lucy shouldn't be Lady Lockwood, that's not how titles work; no, she would never have gone to the 'local school' with the village children; Lord Lockwood being both an established hereditary aristocrat and a businessman also feels off, although I can't say there were never any impoverished lords who tried to replace their old money with new like that). I can only say that it doesn't feel like period fiction, or like very good modern historical fiction, and there are lots of things that feel 'off'. Most noticeable I think are the class dynamics between Hetty, Lord Lockwood, Lucy and the servant characters—there's a whole world of subtle social details that just isn't there, and I can notice when it's not there without being aware of all the specifics. I was comparing it to Mary Renault, who writes around the same period—think of the amazing detail of and social nuance in her books, and the contrast is very obvious. (On the other hand, if Renault was writing this book then the romance would be devastatingly terrible instead of lukewarmly sweet, so, er, strengths and weaknesses?).
Then there's the prose. Again, some specific points of language use are definitely wrong or inappropriate—Healey is very fond of 'the both of us' and 'inside/outside of', both of which are Americanisms that I snobbishly find especially annoying; then there are singular/plural mismatches in longer sentences, 'that' used as a relative pronoun for people, 'who' instead of 'whom', 'girlfriend' does date back this far but I'm fairly sure the characters shouldn't be using it exactly the way we do now, not capitalising 'God' in phrases like 'oh, god', many split infinitives, etc. etc. I didn't look up everything that struck me as off, and probably some of it was fine, but it all adds up into a strong impression of, this is not how the educated upper-middle-class woman from the 1940s you're telling us our first-person narrator is would use language, and the whole story feels distractingly inauthentic as a result.
(When beta reading fic I do look up everything that strikes me as off, and often turn out to be wrong. Why, for instance, does intransitive 'startle' used instead of 'start' seem so obviously bad to me, when the Oxford English Dictionary very clearly shows that it's an established usage dating back centuries? I'm sure I never see it in old books. Oh well).
Then there's the sentence structure and use of commas. Healey absolutely loves a particular way of using commas to add more information to a sentence by going back and starting again from an earlier point in the sentence, sometimes repeating a word or two, like this:
I don't know, all this is probably very obvious. But all the little anachronisms and clumsinesses of language use, particularly when they're consistent across the different characters, add up into an impression that these are not real people from the period, it's just the modern author putting dolls in dressing-up clothes. There is also quite a bit to be said—that was said at the book club meeting!—about the pacing and development of the plot, and the characters and their choices, which certainly didn't help, but I think these details are what really ruined the book for me.
The premise: the collections of the Natural History Museum in London are being evacuated in anticipation of the city getting bombed. The mammal collection goes to the stately home of Lockwood Manor under the supervision of Hetty Cartwright, our main character. Here she meets Lord Lockwood, owner of the manor and a highly unpleasant person; Lucy, his daughter, who is haunted by mysterious nightmares, and with whom Hetty falls in love; a cast of servants; and a lot of Gothic weirdness, which only increases the further we get through the book.
Now, when I think about writing I really love, the quality that stands out the most is what I think of as 'sharpness', and can analyse into two basic things: firstly, deliberate, precise and elegant use of language; secondly, perceptiveness and specificity of personal and social detail in characters and setting. D. K. Broster is good at this; E. W. Hornung is good at it (I'm reading another of his books now, and having my usual 'AARGH HOW do you CONSTRUCT PHRASES so WELL' reaction); Mary Renault, whatever her other faults, is amazing at it; my favourite fanfic authors are good at it! And The Animals at Lockwood Manor is a terribly blunt, dull book. It's the opposite of this good thing.
Perhaps I'm not in a position to complain very much about the historical detail, because I don't actually know enough to say exactly what Healey is getting wrong or what she should do instead (a few things stand out—Lucy shouldn't be Lady Lockwood, that's not how titles work; no, she would never have gone to the 'local school' with the village children; Lord Lockwood being both an established hereditary aristocrat and a businessman also feels off, although I can't say there were never any impoverished lords who tried to replace their old money with new like that). I can only say that it doesn't feel like period fiction, or like very good modern historical fiction, and there are lots of things that feel 'off'. Most noticeable I think are the class dynamics between Hetty, Lord Lockwood, Lucy and the servant characters—there's a whole world of subtle social details that just isn't there, and I can notice when it's not there without being aware of all the specifics. I was comparing it to Mary Renault, who writes around the same period—think of the amazing detail of and social nuance in her books, and the contrast is very obvious. (On the other hand, if Renault was writing this book then the romance would be devastatingly terrible instead of lukewarmly sweet, so, er, strengths and weaknesses?).
Then there's the prose. Again, some specific points of language use are definitely wrong or inappropriate—Healey is very fond of 'the both of us' and 'inside/outside of', both of which are Americanisms that I snobbishly find especially annoying; then there are singular/plural mismatches in longer sentences, 'that' used as a relative pronoun for people, 'who' instead of 'whom', 'girlfriend' does date back this far but I'm fairly sure the characters shouldn't be using it exactly the way we do now, not capitalising 'God' in phrases like 'oh, god', many split infinitives, etc. etc. I didn't look up everything that struck me as off, and probably some of it was fine, but it all adds up into a strong impression of, this is not how the educated upper-middle-class woman from the 1940s you're telling us our first-person narrator is would use language, and the whole story feels distractingly inauthentic as a result.
(When beta reading fic I do look up everything that strikes me as off, and often turn out to be wrong. Why, for instance, does intransitive 'startle' used instead of 'start' seem so obviously bad to me, when the Oxford English Dictionary very clearly shows that it's an established usage dating back centuries? I'm sure I never see it in old books. Oh well).
Then there's the sentence structure and use of commas. Healey absolutely loves a particular way of using commas to add more information to a sentence by going back and starting again from an earlier point in the sentence, sometimes repeating a word or two, like this:
I should have demanded that the mammal collection was moved the moment the infestation got out of control, the moment the thefts began.She does this several times a page, and once I'd started noticing it I couldn't stop, and it maddened me. I don't think it's actually wrong, but it's certainly colloquial and a bit sloppy, and partly what bothers me about it is, again, period writing doesn't tend to do this and so it feels jarringly modern. Partly I think it's that arranging the content of a sentence like this can have various different precise meanings, and this particular way of adding and restating things fails to clarify the meaning in a way that feels lazy and indecisive—if she separated the two continuations of the sentence with 'and', it'd be clear that they're two separate and complementary descriptions; if she used 'or' it would be clear that the narrator thinks it's one or the other, or is vacillating between the two; not using a conjunction feels like failing to make a decision about what she's actually saying as a writer.
I don't know, all this is probably very obvious. But all the little anachronisms and clumsinesses of language use, particularly when they're consistent across the different characters, add up into an impression that these are not real people from the period, it's just the modern author putting dolls in dressing-up clothes. There is also quite a bit to be said—that was said at the book club meeting!—about the pacing and development of the plot, and the characters and their choices, which certainly didn't help, but I think these details are what really ruined the book for me.
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Date: Dec. 15th, 2021 09:06 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: Dec. 15th, 2021 09:30 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: Dec. 20th, 2021 07:55 pm (UTC)I don't know why a professionally published author would do a worse job at this than a humble amateur fanfic writer? Or maybe the answer is simply that not all people care about language in the same way. Maybe the author cares more about other elements of the book, or doesn't want to challenge the reader by less contemporary language. Ah well.
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Date: Dec. 20th, 2021 08:20 pm (UTC)(Really, I'd put it the other way round—why shouldn't a humble amateur fanfic writer, who puts effort and attention into understanding and imitating period style, be really good at it, regardless of how bad professional authors can be? :) )