Posts by Jolisa
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Crikey, I feel a blog post coming on too, Jolisa.
I'm so glad! It's all very well to talk about how historical novelists should do it, but extra lovely and illuminating to hear directly from them how they do do it.
I am particularly interested in the wondering about novels borrowing from other novels, because I have done just that in my new book, without attribution, because I wanted to leave it up to the reader to spot
I'd call that allusion, rather than plagiarism. Conscious, deliberate intertextuality. Homage. Because the thing is, the literature you're citing has an organic relationship to the literature you're writing, an affiliation, so you're invoking the ancestors, as it were, and inviting the reader into an expanded relationship with your story and its progenitors. It's like a staircase wall lined with photos of several generations of the family. (NB I haven't yet read your new novel, but I've read about it).
Whereas most of the borrowings in The Trowenna Sea sit there like placards in a silent film, explaining things to the reader.
I read one novel recently that had a character thinking about an unimportant fact about some piece of public transport ("why am I thinking this unimportant fact?" the character thought)
I read one novel recently that had a character thinking about an unimportant fact about some piece of public transport ("why am I thinking this unimportant fact?" the character thought)
There was a fair amount of this in the novel - including the old chestnut about Victorians covering their piano legs, and an extended meditation about how very long the mail took to arrive at the other end of the world, on account of having to travel by boat, you see. I so much prefer it when authors presume a certain level of knowledge of the times, and only use the encyclopedia bits that actually bear on the plot.
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I'd prefer "tough, but fair" myself.
Like Dinsdale Piranha? (NB plagiarising myself there).
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It's a bit dispiriting, all this. I really want to think the best of everyone involved, but I also want to expect the best.
Echoing Craig and JoJo: I remain perplexed about the editorial process in this case. Who knocked the manuscript into shape? Who compiled the list of sources, and who checked it against the author's own notes? Was the manuscript read page by page?
Is all of Penguin's fiction (and non-fiction) given the same degree of editorial treatment? Or does it depend on the book? What can and should authors expect in the way of help tidying up their manuscripts?
Craig, that's exactly the quote I was thinking of (the Auden). And the Updike list is excellent. One regret about the Trowenna Sea review as it ran in the Listener was that I did not have space for a properly representative quotation. But here's one, from Ismay describing her arrival in Tasmania:
"What Trowenna represented was freedom, and it was what I considered freedom must look like: impossibly blue, merging into a faraway sky, limitless, going on to the end of forever. After all, is that not what unhappy people do when they wish to escape the harsh reality of their lives -- imagine another place to go to?
When I saw the glorious southern seascape, glittering by day with sun-stars and glowing by night under the gleaming Southern Cross and that arching canopy of a million stars, I knew that I had found it. In that moment, just before dusk, when the sea filled with dark purple spheres like many crystal glasses spilling their rich wine into the sea, I myself overflowed with a great sense of completion."
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Ian D: truly, you are the Bard of our Avon. Sing, (a)muse!
Sacha, Craig, David: thank you for chiming in along those lines. If it was crucifixion I was after, I'd have.. actually, that sentence doesn't even compute. I'm just not in the crucifixion business. I strive to write about living authors as if they were reading, and to treat their work even-handedly. Because the conversation is always with readers in the broadest sense, and writers are readers too.
I was flippant, once or twice, as a young reviewer, and while it's enormous fun, it's not fair. So these days I'm a bit of a sobersides and try to err on the side of gentle and polite. We can't all be Michiko Kakutani, and nor should we.
(I do fantasize about a Digested-Read type anon blog in which to blow off steam, but style recognition software would blow my cover in five minutes flat).
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+ permute? Is that a word?
You don't need to ask our permussion to make up new ones around here. We are neologism central, dude.
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But that's still more permutations than atoms in the observable universe.
Yay, somebody did the maths! We are nowhere near the Creative Event Horizon. In fact, by Dr Haywood's calculations, the heat death of the universe will occur before we exhaust our typewriters AND our monkeys.
Phew. As a wee mistletoe on the world-tree of literature, I feel better now.
Nice calculating, Dr Haywood, but it's not too late to go back for that B.A., and then you can foucault with the rest of us artsy types. Maybe a B. Mus. (Perf) in banjo while you're at it.
"Did you crack a smile?"
I did. Several times, and like Nicholas Reid, not always at the right times. But there is a vein of humour in the novel that, were I an editor, I would encourage the author to embrace more fully. The thing is, he's clearly having fun with his historical figures, but also wants to mine them for maximum sentiment. It's an uncomfortable marriage, but it could be done well - you'd just have to go RIGHT over the top into a sort of pomo poco farce with a tragic heart to it (cf the late great Epeli Hau'ofa's Kisses in the Nederends, which everyone should read at least once a year). There's not nearly enough of that around.
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Oh dear. I found a few more examples last night, in less than half an hour...
I must say, every day for the last couple of weeks, I have flipped back and forth between "surely I'm mistaken, and even if I'm not, is this really the novel's greatest failing?" and "but this is outrageous! it's just not done!"
I want to believe the best of people. But also, I want to expect the best.
I'm wondering about just putting the parallel quotes online, for academic purposes, since there is such vigorous debate about how much "counts" and what the standard of originality is in a literary work.
At this point, I'm inclined to think the novel should be withdrawn and rewritten, just to clear the slate, y'know? If, as an author, I found myself in such a position, I'd be eager to do right by myself and by the story.
By the way, is there a lawyer in the house who could clarify the rules about citing other people's copyrighted words in a novel? I know that song lyrics, for example, and lines of poetry from living poets are always acknowledged on the copyright page these days. But how about plain old other books? Epigraphs, I think, are exempt? And should excerpts always be marked in some manner in the text, or can they be spliced in as long as you note somewhere that you consulted the book?
If nothing else, this would be a very useful refresher for the writers among us.
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Astonishing that someone (was it Jolisa? I didn't squint at that bit) actually described it as a 'great book'
Spike, if it was me, I might have said (on the radio?) that it was a "great story," which is crucially different. In fact, you might be thinking of this phrase from the review: "This heartfelt novel illuminates a little known moment in Antipodean history, while [also] aspiring to be a jolly good read."
P'raps I'm too subtle or too kind. The thing is, though, there is a really cool story inside this novel struggling to get out from under the weight of all that "research." And the bits that strike me as genuinely "Witi," while not to everyone's tastes, are where that potentially great novel is hiding in plain sight.
Clarification: the detailed disquisition on child labour in the mines is delivered by the child in question ("Sally Jenkins, miss"), while everyone rushes about trying to rescue her father, who is trapped in the mine. Although only "a slip of a girl," she volunteers to go back down the mine with our feisty heroine who wishes to be a doctor (if only the sexist and patriarchal mores of her time would let her!).
The miner, while gravely injured, survives, only to subsequently lose his leg in a gruesome (and very textbook) amputation scene set in a Victorian medical school.
Later on, the moppet, Sally Jenkins, pops up again very conveniently in Tasmania, having been transported for stealing... why yes, a loaf of bread. Sigh. We know such things happened, but why not surprise us with something we don't know?
Now the 64K question: if the University is genuinely serious (cough!cough!) they must ask the good professor for an electronic copy of The Trowenna Sea so they can pay for thirty to fifty hours of someone's time to check the entire text for plagiarised content. Then let them accept that this was a minor oversight constituting .04% of the total text. I volunteer right now to do the work.
That would indeed be a start, although see my earlier note about how a plagiarism detection service actually missed most of the quotes I had found at that point. Some of the borrowed material (see my latest blog) was accessible via Google, but others were only found after actually reading (some of) the books listed in the bibliography.
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Thanks, Steve. Obscure but crucial information.
Bedtime in my time zone, but carry on regardless!
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Do you dowse for it?
Oh, very well put.
(Well, geddit?)