Re: The Old Favorite

On 8/1/14 7:17 PM, Wayne Morrison wrote:
> Now that I've whined, here are some *good* things I've been reading lately:
>
> Ben Aaronovitch's "Rivers of London" series

Have you read the third yet, "Whispers Underground"? Aaronovitch is
doing something rather odd with the Peter's grammar, even making an
overt point of it, and I'm trying to figure out what he's doing. (I'm at
about 35% now). He didn't do it, I believe, in the first two books: I'm
sure I'd have noticed, though I'm used to odd things in dialogue for the
purpose of delineating the speaker's personality, character and
background. But it's the kind of thing that makes my proofreader's eye
itch, deliberate or not. It's the use of subjective vs. objective case:
Peter is starting to get it wrong in this book, sometimes wildly
wrong. He even made an explanatory aside once, saying that Nightingale
had told him to say it differently--and the way that he indirectly
quoted Nightingale as instructing him on it was also wrong, in a
different direction! Nightingale wouldn't do that -- I'm 90% sure that
it isn't a difference between British and American English grammar: I'd
have noticed before this in my life. At 35%, Peter is still doing it,
at this point without any extraneous comment. "The General Library is
where me and Lesley do most of our studying." It's so obvious that he
must be trying to do something subtle with it. Any thoughts? Maybe
something on Peter's relationship with Lesley, post-face? It would have
been so easy to dodge the grammar thing entirely with "we" and "us", and
it does always seem to happen when Lesley is the other person involved.
But Aaronovitch seems not to _want_ to dodge it, but rather to make a
point of it.

In all three books, I'm getting buried in idiosyncratic Modern British
slang and idiom. Occasionally I can't figure out what Peter means, even
after coming to a complete stop and thinking about it, much less getting
it from context on the fly. But that's a different thing.

Are you doing this series for the same reason that I am, CdL
recommending it his review column in the most recent F&SF? He must be
selling a lot of books for Aaronovitch suddenly, turning on all his own
fans.

I'd interrupted the series after II, when the Hetley that I'd been
waiting for on the edge of my chair popped up in the Kindle Store. (I'm
a serious Hetley fan, also James A. Burton, pseudonym).



--
Sibyl Smirl
I will take no bull from your house! Psalms 50:9a
mailto:polycarpa3@ckt.net

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