Babel Q7: Writing and characters

NeilNjae

Back to looking at the book as a piece of literature. Any thoughts on the writing, the pacing, the characters, the footnotes? It's a long book. Did it outstay its welcome? Could it have been shorter?

RichardAbbott

Hmm, mixed feelings here. I found the writing itself to be good - fluent, competent, well-researched and so on. Well edited too: I don't recall any glaring typos or grammatical flops.

I've already said how I found that the characters became less plausible to me as the book went on, so no more of that here.

I did feel it was too long - I'd be hard-pushed to pick specific events etc that could have been axed, but as a whole I reckoned I could have shed about a third without losing much. A bit like the third book in the His Dark Materials trilogy (which I have just reread) it felt like the author got carried away with their own particular vision, and let that overwhelm other thoughts and considerations.

Apocryphal

Yes, it felt too long to me, and there was an entire section (Act 2, I think) that I thought could have been chopped out almost entirely.

Also, in terms of writing, I mentioned before that the use of modern terms and phrases kept throwing me out of the 19th century, which made the book less immersive for me. For example, from page 268: "I know you're better than this." This is really a rather recent cliche to say "He's better than this" etc.

Later in the novel, the footnotes go from being tools to give a bit of flavour (and language studies) to the text and start to be used to deliver backstory, which I found odd. I think by then she had begun to fall in love with her characters.

There's one odd point where the Haitian character, Victoire, is asked what the big storms in the Caribbean are called, and she answers "typhoon". But the word should have been Hurricane (which I think even originated on Hispaniola). A Hurricane is an atlantic cyclonic storm. A typhoon is the name for cyclonic storms in the north pacific, I think a word of Chinese origin. This whole exchange surprised me, given the author's course of studies, and even now I wonder if it's me that is missing something about it.

RichardAbbott

@Apocryphal said:
Later in the novel, the footnotes go from being tools to give a bit of flavour (and language studies) to the text and start to be used to deliver backstory, which I found odd. I think by then she had begun to fall in love with her characters.

Yes, that bothered me a bit - the footnotes waver between giving information that's true in the real world to information that's only true in the sub-created world, and I found this inconsistency annoying.

There's one odd point where the Haitian character, Victoire, is asked what the big storms in the Caribbean are called, and she answers "typhoon". But the word should have been Hurricane (which I think even originated on Hispaniola). A Hurricane is an atlantic cyclonic storm. A typhoon is the name for cyclonic storms in the north pacific, I think a word of Chinese origin. This whole exchange surprised me, given the author's course of studies, and even now I wonder if it's me that is missing something about it.

What a great catch! According to Oxford Languages (!) hurricane is mid 16th century: from Spanish huracán, probably from Taino hurakán ‘god of the storm’.