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A few words to say...
Post originally by Cassander at 2004-02-26 02:13:43
Converted from Phorums BB System
“Begging your pardon, ma’am,” said ary, “but I trust those people not a whit.” Mary’s accent gave her judgment the semblance of a pronouncement from some medieval midwife or even, if one overlooked gender, a rural sheriff.
***
Perhaps my judgement is a little skewed, but I can't have been the only person to think that the writing style of the book was just plain awful. Take the above example, which descends into purple prose without meaning much. In it you have:
* The informed attribute. Instead of giving the character an accent, the reader is informed that they have an accent and that the accent gives the statement some kind of gravity.
* The redundancy. Do we need to know that the sheriff is a rural one, as opposed to an urban sheriff?
* The cultural misunderstanding. In England a sheriff was an important figure, a minor nobleman or suchlike and certainly not someone making rustic pronouncements.
* Pretentious rubbish. This should need no explanation.
Of course, most of the book isn't as bad as the paragraph above, but it isn't much better either. The book is a throwing together of cheap stereotypes that a hack writer of Victorian sensation fiction would be rightly ashamed of. It dwells unhealthily on sex and violence with the schlocky immoderation of an Italian B-movie. It just isn't good.
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