Devil in the Detail

Away from home and wanting something to read, I picked up a copy of The Black Moth by Georgette Heyer. As a teenager I read many of Miss Heyer's romances. Favourites were Beauvallet, These Old Shades and Devil's Cub, none of which are set in the Regency, and Cotillion which is.

Fifty and more years later I expected to find a book by her so dated that I would put it down after a few pages.

How wrong I was!

I was immediately drawn into the beau monde of Georgian high society through the detailed descriptions of manners and mores not to mention the evocation of the English countryside and its stately homes. I am now definitely in the National Trust demographic. This was familiar landscape.

More than that, the characters were vivid and alive, so very engaging even in their flawed humanity yet seeming part of their own time not translated into ours. This is intelligent and skilful writing which has not dated.

Intrigued, I looked Georgette Heyer up in Wikipedia. There I learned that, on the one hand, she is castigated for putting much informative detail into her writing and, on the other, applauded for being so knowledgable that she can bring a period to life for those who are unfamiliar with it. Jane Austin's novels, set in a similar period, do not include so much information about clothes and furnishings - but then Jane Austen's novels are set at the time she writes, so her readers are familiar with the context. Miss Heyer on the other hand is writing for an audience who are quite unfamiliar with the costumes and customs of Georgian society.

Coincidentally and in a completely different genre, I had just read one of Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels and remarked that so much of his story-telling is basically listing information. But, he does it with that extra twist of interest that explains why this detailed explanation of the type of gun being used to kill someone is relevant.

Some time ago, I visited Lullingstone Roman Villa in Kent and enjoyed looking at the informative exhibition. But, I thought, I already know much of what they are telling me about Roman life. And then I realised that I had absorbed this knowledge, almost without noticing it, through reading the Falco novels of Lindsey Davis.

Similarly, CJ Sansom's Matthew Shardlake series has taught me much about the life and times of Henry VIII so that visits to museums in York and Oxford brought the pleasure of coming face to face with artefacts I had previously seen in fictional 'real life'.

In The Black Moth, the characters' costumes are sketched in words, a feast for the eye of imagination. Yet, another book I read recently, set in my own time, bored me with its detailed descriptions of the heroine's agonising over which precise outfit to wear. Somehow, the initial delight at the author's ability to give sufficient detail to bring a scene to life became irritation at the repetitive and superfluous information. After all, in Mary Stewart's thrillers, all a girl needed was her coral lipstick!

So, it seems that detail in writing has to be handled with subtle skill if it is to work the magic of bringing a story to life instead of killing it off. Enough to paint the scene vividly, not so much that the author's scholarly research becomes the story.

And The Black Moth? Even Miss Heyer's skill could not avoid a certain dating in the story; the recognition that what once I might have accepted as thrilling romance, now I recognise as unromantic and criminal behaviour. Interestingly, whereas the human interactions are never allowed to get too passionately beyond good taste and the maiden is rescued before the villain has his wicked way (very tame by the standards of modern scandi-noir), the description of the hero encouraging his horse in the mad ride to rescue the kidnapped heroine throbs with understated eroticism. Perhaps some aspects of English country life never date.

The author of this blog Janet Bone also has her own website which can be found at the link below where she regularly shares her thoughts on writing, book reviews and her own work for you to read at leisure.

http://www.janetbone.co.uk/JanetsJottings/

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