LITERARY HOWLERS
The illustrious history of writers falling short on fact-checking — from the Bard to John Boyne
The novelist John Boyne has been caught out in a piece of halfbaked research. In his new novel, A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom, Boyne describes a character making red dye at the court of Attila the Hun in 453 AD.
Boyne provides a long list of the ingredients that go into the dye, including such bizarre-sounding items as “Octorok eyeball” “Lizalfo tail,” and “Hylian shrooms.” After what happened next, you’d need an awful lot of Hylian shrooms to make a dye as red as John Boyne’s face.
The writer Dana Schwartz pointed out on Twitter that Octoroks, Lizalfos and the rest were creatures in the video game franchise The Legend of Zelda. She went on to note that if you type “how to dye clothes red” into Google, a recipe for red dye from the 2017 Zelda game Breath of the Wild is one of the first results.
Was this some kind of in-joke, or had Boyne, the bestselling author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Heart’s Invisible Furies, been less than assiduous in the research for this new historical novel?
The latter. In tweets peppered with laughter emojis, Boyne admitted the critics had him dead to rights: “I don’t remember but I must have just googled it ... Hey, sometimes you just gotta throw your hands up and say, ‘Yup! My bad!’”
It’s not the sort of error one can imagine, say, Hilary Mantel making. Still, Boyne is a fine writer, and he can at least comfort himself that there is a great tradition of literary giants making factual howlers, with slightly less distinguished figures pointing them out.
For example, Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson — the Jacobean equivalent of today’s Twitter pedants — complained that in The Winter’s Tale, the Bard “brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia — where there is no sea near by some 100 miles.”
Shakespeare was not a details man — witness his having Cassius in Julius Caesar say, “The clock hath stricken three,” a millennium or so before mechanical clocks were invented.
Boyne may be in for a long haul of complaints from readers. William Golding endured decades of correspondence with smug schoolboys concerning the scene in Lord of the Flies in which Piggy’s glasses are used to concentrate the sun’s rays and start a fire — Piggy being short-sighted, his glasses would have been concave, so it wouldn’t have worked. Golding always replied politely, but was scathing in private: “What a horrible little boy. Let’s hope he takes up drug smuggling in Turkey,” he said of one pint-sized pedant.
The quibbling seems even more unfair when you consider the licence afforded to film directors. When the makers of Braveheart put their 12th-century warriors in kilts 500 years before they were invented, it wasn’t because of ignorance: they thought kilts looked good and the audience wouldn’t care.
But there is something about the intimate experience of reading a novel that is ruined by a factual mistake. Sebastian Faulks has said that his mother-in-law never got beyond page two of his masterpiece Birdsong because of a reference to “a vase of blue peonies” — as these don’t exist in nature, this was changed in the paperback to the bet-hedging “wild flowers.”
Of course, only a small proportion of howlers make it into print — the raison d’etre of copy editors is to whip out this sort of thing.
The critic Mike Ripley recently emailed me a choice quote from an advance proof copy of an American thriller, in which one character was describing a famous gunsmith: “When you see the Prince of Wales attending the annual fox hunt, [he’s] the guy who customized his shotgun.”
I’m not sure even Google could be blamed for that level of confusion; but when the book was published, the offending sentence had happily been removed.
Linguistic inaccuracies can be particularly perilous. Robert Browning came across the lines “They talk’d of his having a Cardinal’s Hat/ They’d send him as soon an Old Nun’s Tw-t” in a 17th-century satirical poem; he innocently assumed that the unfamiliar word was an item of clerical headgear, with the result that there is an unfortunate reference in his poem Pippa Passes to monks and nuns sporting “cowls and tw-ts”.
One of my favourite errors in fiction occurs in the opening chapter of Great Expectations, when the escaped convict Magwitch frightens the young Pip into stealing a file so that he can cut off his leg-iron. But how exactly had Magwitch swum to freedom from a prison ship with a massive weight on his leg?
As professor John Sutherland has noted, “for Victorians of Dickens’s generation, ‘swimming’ (as opposed to ‘bathing’), was an unusual practice.” Nobody noticed because, “Dickens’s readers shared his vagueness about what human limits are in the water.” It’s a wonderful mistake because it sheds a little chink of light on how human preoccupations, what we know or care about, have changed over 150odd years.
Ian McEwan is a serial mistake-maker, or at least is unusually candid in admitting to them. He’s had characters admiring the constellation Orion in Venice in summer (a correspondent informed him they’d have to go to New Zealand); others discussing The Beatles and The Rolling Stones in 1961; and on one occasion a car dealer wrote to tell him that he was wrong not to make a Mercedes 500SE an automatic: “Rich men don’t want to be messing with gear sticks.”
However, as McEwan has said, “anyone who writes 500 words of prose ... will almost always make a mistake.” (Well done if you spot the two and a half mistakes in this article). Errors are easy to make and should be easy to forgive.
That doesn’t mean that we should stop pointing them out — and it might make you immortal. A firearms expert called Geoffrey Boothroyd contacted Ian Fleming after he had written the early James Bond novels, complaining that Bond would not use a. 25 Beretta. “This sort of gun is really a lady’s gun, and not a really nice lady at that,” he quipped.
Fleming took Boothroyd on as an adviser (re-equipping Bond with the famous Walther PPK), and introduced “Major Boothroyd” as the armourer in the later books — who was developed into the character known in the films as “Q.”
Might I suggest to John Boyne that his next novel feature an expert on popular culture called Ms. Schwartz?
The Telegraph