Sloppiness can ruin the pleasure of a book. I was totally absorbed in Ian McEwan’s “Chesil Beach” when I hit this piece:
“She sat dead still and listened patiently with closed eyes and too much concentration, to Chuck Berry. He thought she might dislike Roll Over Beethoven, but she found it hilarious. He played her ‘clumsy but honourable’ cover versions of Chuck Berry songs by the Beatles and Rolling Stones.”
(Ian McEwan, Chesil Beach, page 127)
“Chesil Beach” takes place in July 1962, and tells the tale of the wedding night of a pair of virgins in a Dorset hotel. The incident he’s describing refers back to the previous summer, so must have been July or August 1961.
Has everyone spotted the problem? The Beatles first single was released in October 1962, the first album with a Chuck Berry cover was “With the Beatles” in November 1963. The Rolling Stones played their first gig in June 1962, Wyman and Watts didn’t join until January 1963, and their first album was April 1964. This information took me approximately five minutes to trace and check on the internet. I knew he was two or three years adrift as soon as I read it. Is that because I have a train-spotter’s knowledge of rock? No, I checked the offending passage with five or six contemporaries by reading it aloud and they all spotted the error at once.
Ian McEwan is a year younger than me. For our generation, thinking that The Beatles and Rolling Stones had records available in July 1961 is akin to thinking that World War II started in 1937. It’s astonishing that McEwan is that ignorant of popular culture, even more astonishing that he couldn’t be bothered to check it out.
Once you’ve read something that daft, the fictional world falls to pieces. I never quite got back into the story with the same attention.
I posted this comment on his website, and I notice the offending passage was removed from subsequent editions and now remains the best way of telling whether your copy is a genuine first edition.
I recall an Angela Carter novel where right at the start someone arrived in a brand-new SAAB Estate in that part of the 1980s when SAAB were ten years away in either direction from producing an estate car. I will admit that one’s petty and trainspotterish, and my excuse is that I had a SAAB at the time and knew their range, but the automatic belief in the author’s world was shaken by the error.
Coming up to date, David Nicholls’ One Day is full of astute observations. I love his note that there’s always an Englishman in a kilt at a wedding. That’s true … and he means Englishman, not Scot. And the most boring conversations are with driving bores who have memorised every road number in Britain (just as you come off the M4 onto the A34, you’ll se a little pub on the roundabout where the B3087 meets the A359 and …). I didn’t check those road numbers. This is a blog. If I’d put them in a novel I would. But David Nicholls has his characters in Chichester, about to “carry on down the M3 to Cornwall.” No. They’ll join the M27 for a few miles, then no more motorways. They won’t go on the M3 at all. It doesn’t go on to Cornwall. I’m not a memoriser of road numbers, but I go past Chichester often in my travels, heading west. It’s a very minor irritation, but irritation it is.
A similar one happens in Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem. Maybe this error is that legendary wrong thread in a Persian carpet. Perfection is reserved for God. The writer, Jez Butterworth, explains in the programme notes that he moved to Wiltshire in 1994. Why then does he have them talk about the A14 road at Upavon? Roads with “1” numbers are all east of the M1, and in the north and Scotland. Roads in the south-west universally have “3” and “4” numbers. I drive that way from Salisbury to Marlborough frequently. Fortunately I don’t retain road numbers, but I know it’ll begin with “3”. (I Googled … A345 or A342).
The geographical bug goes into Will Davenport’s A Perfect Sinner. Davenport is actually James Long, author of Ferney. He’s one of my favourite authors, and his books are meticulously researched. We went to see Penselwood, the location of Ferney and it’s all as described. Similarly the history in A Perfect Sinner all checks out. The book was fascinating enough to make me Google some of the location and history stuff afterwards. Fascinating? I read the lot in just three reading sessions. I couldn’t put it down. This is a characteristic of James Long (aka Will Davenport) books. I read this as an eBook, not being able to find a copy. There are several eBooks oddities in the text. The village of Slapton is sometimes Slap Ton, and a couple of other words have odd gaps like that. I guess it may be line breaks being ‘hard set’ in one view (e.g. landscape) and then retaining the break in portrait view. Crêcy , scene of the battle, is sometimes crêcy. But eBooks didn’t do this one. In language teaching we make a distinction between an error (someone doesn’t know) and a slip (person does know, slips, realizes themself.) I regard the McEwan as an error, but this one as a slip!
They’re in Slapton, in Devon, near Dartmouth, talking about Purbeck marble (p83 of eBook in portrait view on an iPad):
‘Have you ever been to Purbeck?’
‘No.’
‘On the Dorset Coast? Maybe, oh, I don’t know, sixty miles east of here. The Isle of Purbeck? It’s not really an island. They just call it that. It’s this side of Weymouth.’
On the map, A is Wareham, at the edge of the Isle of Purbeck. B is Slapton in Devon.
Uh, huh. Well, by road, it’s well over 100 miles. It might be 60 miles as the seagull flies though. But looking from Slapton it’s not THIS side of Weymouth, it’s THE FAR side of Weymouth. It’s misplaced by about forty miles. That one’s easily done if James Long were writing the text somewhere east of Weymouth, like Poole, where I live, from where you can look over the harbour directly at the Isle of Purbeck, as I do on a daily basis. I’ve just realised that Weymouth is right next to Chesil Beach, connecting to the McEwan novel I started with.
That’s the essence of nitpicking on books. The reader in Sydney or San Francisco won’t know or care, but anyone on the south coast of England should pick it up. Anyway, I’d guess that’s another wrong thread in the otherwise perfect Persian carpet.
On the other hand … thirty years ago, the Teacher’s Book to Streamline English Connections one of my best-selling textbooks had the line: Have students read silently aloud. Fifteen years after it was published, a teacher said ‘That wrong instruction always gives me a laugh.’ I flushed, ‘What wrong instruction?’ She pointed it out. No one else ever had. There were forty teachers who were using the Teacher’s Book in the room, and not one had ever noticed it. I phoned the publisher and said, ‘We need to change this on the next impression …’ I was told very politely to ‘Get real.’ Changing stuff costs money.
Paul Newman reviewed Chesil Beach in April 2008, and came to similar conclusions (Full review added):
ON CHESIL BEACH by Ian McEwan, Jonathan Cape, London, 2007
The sad story of a disastrous honeymoon night for two young sexually ill matched newly-weds in 1962, in a hotel overlooking Dorset’s Chesil Beach. The date of 1962 is carefully chosen and perhaps (I don’t know) McEwan is of the generation brought up in the remaining milieu of sexual naivety and saving oneself for the wedding night, but with the world poised to change forever in a few short years. The story is in essence deceptively simple. It follows the couple in intricate detail through each awkward and faltering move as the wedding night progresses, from the private serving of their supper in the honeymoon suite to the scene on the stones on the dark beach outside. The narrative does branch off in places to fill in some back history on Edward and Florence individually and in the previous happy year of their courtship, and the writing skill is so great we do not resent these detours, as we often do in lesser novels. No exact reasons are given for Florence’s fear of intimacy. There are hints that something may have happened in the past but however many times you re-read these ambiguous fragments the recollections remain inconclusive. It could mean nothing; it could mean everything. Rightly though the story keeps its focus from the couple’s perspective. It is their immediate impressions and remembrances that we are privy to, not the objective observations of an omniscient outsider.
This is not a long book – 166 pages of spaced type; somewhere in the region of 38,000 words I reckon – but thoroughly satisfying and complete in itself. We sense from the first pages that however much these two youngsters love each other we may not be heading for a totally happy ending. Yet the ending is satisfying.
The ONLY fault, and it seems picky to even mention it, is one of factual research – or McEwan’s memory playing tricks. Florence is a classical music lover (and player) while Edward prefers soul and rock. In the year preceding the wedding, which would have been 1961, Edward is mentioned at one point as playing some of his records of Chuck Berry (okay but not likely) and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones (definitely not likely, they hadn’t made any records yet). McEwan is thinking of 1964 there, or at a push 1963). Sorry, but where years in the Sixties are concerned these facts have to be pointed out as they go hand in hand with the rapid social changes and differences in attitude of which our sexually immature heroes were painfully victim.
[...] me his April 2008 review of “Chesil Beach” by Ian McEwan which I’ve added to the Sloppy Fiction article. He picked up on the same point about Beatles / Rolling Stones records that I did. [...]
[...] added a couple of paragraphs to my ever-growing article on Sloppy Fiction. I feel guilty doing it because everything else in the book, A Perfect Sinner, by Will Davenport, [...]
Well spotted, as usual, Peter. I remember a book from Jack Higgins, writing under his real name of Harry Patterson, where our hero angrily stubs out a cigarette and then, two pages later, angrily stubs out what may or may not be the same cigarette.
Sloppy writing but also sloppy editing, no?
There were a fair few things in The Perfect Sinner eBook that an editor is to blame for. ‘They could see a Tower’ (with cap) was one, as well as Crêcy / crêcy. Older editors were always expected to check every fact too!
“For our generation, thinking that The Beatles and Rolling Stones had records available in July 1961 is akin to thinking that World War II started in 1937.” Great analogy… and I’m from the generation after, but the quoted McEwan passage would have jumped out at me too as glaringly wrong. In fact, when reading any novel set in the 1960s, I’m likely going to have then-current music come to mind to help me set the time and place, in a way that I wouldn’t if reading a novel set in 1982 or 1992. Amazing that no editors caught it.