In paragraph two, we read:
They drive without sirens through Barstow, passing the
ghost mining town of Calico, all clapboard and tin
just
north of the freeway.
"Passing" should have been "and pass"; as it stands, the
text
implies that Calico is inside or right next to Barstow. But
it
isn't -- it's maybe eight or ten miles from town and a good
two
miles from the freeway. (And "ghost mining town" --
hmmm.)
Sloppiness of language and error of fact is a bad omen
this
early in a book that seems (already) to pride itself on
language and detail.
Here's paragraph five, complete:
The wind grows worse, blowing its poisonous alkali
chlorides and carbonates down from Inyo County and
China
Lake. Moving up through the Mojave Desert they pass
the
Calico Early Man Site, where scattered on the shores
of
ancient, dry Coyote Lake are the oldest known remains
of
our ancestors in North America. Here a solitary core
of studied diggers found rudimentary tools of stone
and
arrows, fossilized fletchings, and puzzle parts of
clay jugs. The crude trappings of commerce, the crude
trappings of war.
OK, the first sentence is all right, I guess. But then,
who
are the "they" who move up through the desert and pass
the
Early Man Site? The most recent candidates for an
antecedent
are "chlorides and carbonates", but one suspects,
without
really knowing, that "they" refers to the sheriff's
deputies.
Putting aside a passing doubt as to whether the human
remains
at Calico are actually "scattered on the shores" of Coyote
Lake
(which would seem to imply careless stewardship by the
managers
of the Early Man Site), and another doubt as to whether
Teran
really meant "remains" (as opposed to, say, "artifacts"),
one
pauses puzzled on "our ancestors". (Is Teran, are his
readers,
descended from the Early Men who lived at Calico? Should
he
maybe have written "predecessors", or simply "the oldest
known
human remains in North America"?) And about this
"solitary
core of studied diggers" -- where to begin? Why did it
take
diggers to find things "scattered on the shores"? And a
"core"
of diggers -- what's that? (Did Teran mean "corps",
maybe?)
If there were several diggers, they're not really solitary,
are
they? (Or is it their core that's solitary? What's a
solitary
core?) And "studied"? Surely it's the Early Men who
were
studied, and the diggers perhaps "learned", or
"studious".
"Rudimentary tools of stone and arrows" needs some editing,
or
thought, to avoid the implication that the tools were made
of
stone and arrows, or the arrows made of stone, or
whatever.
And what could "fossilized fletchings" possibly be?
Fletching
is the act of feathering an arrow, not anything that could
be
fossilized. (Although those stone arrows still worry
me.)
In paragraph six, we find:
Their vehicles rock and heave over the sifting climb of
slow dunes.
While this sentence is kind of cool, the adjectives are
spooky;
and by this time I'm inclined to think Teran just likes
the
sounds of all these words, regardless of their
meanings.
Paragraph seven. The boy's
legs arch onto the seat in an almost fetal position.
I'll bet Teran doesn't mean "arch" -- your legs aren't
"arched"
when you're in a fetal position, they're bent or flexed --,
and
surely it's the boy whose position is "almost fetal", not
his
legs'.
The eighth paragraph begins:
The blowing sand is like cut glass against their skin.
Like so much else on these pages, this sounds all right
until
you think about it for a moment. But in what way is
blowing
sand like cut glass? If this means anything, it has to
mean
that the blowing sand against their skin feels like cut
glass;
but that's absurd. (Find some cut glass -- a decanter
or
something. Brush it or press it against your skin. Does
that
feel *anything* like blown sand? No.) My guess is that
the
writer began with a thought something like "The blowing
sand
cut their skin", considered that glass cuts skin, inverted
the
words into "cut glass", and voila`, a meaningless but
wordy
metaphor.
At this point, I was halfway down the second page of the
book,
it was looking like a really long evening, and I hadn't
read
any Chandler for weeks. So I chucked Teran like
pre-stressed
besoms of glittering concrete.
-- Fr. John Woolley
#
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.