Dangers of the Vernacular Vortex
- Apr 19, 2015
- 2 min read
In a dusty village in Northern India, I ran into a man with a secret weapon.
He came from somewhere in the south of England and hinted darkly that he was lying doggo in the subcontinent till some unnamed heat wore off. For a little guy, he had some big badass stories, mostly featuring himself and Her Majesty’s constabulary, but if he really wanted to put the fear of God into somebody, that was when he’d pull out the worst Scottish accent I’d ever heard and brandish it like a switchblade. He couldn’t pronounce his “r”s, so he’d substitute a sort of rough gargle, ending up with what was a passable impression of the Star Ship Enterprise’s chief engineer with a fish bone stuck in his throat. It wasn’t menacing at all, just unintelligible for the bewildered local he was snarling at and mortifying for the rest of us.
All that was almost thirty years ago and I’d pretty much forgotten about him until I came to write the Ivory Grinder. It’s hard enough to write convincing dialogue at the best of times, but if the author throws a heavy accent or dialect into the mix, they’re really stacking the odds against themselves. It’s certainly not impossible - Irvine Welsh is a good example of a writer who achieves it masterfully with his gritty Edinburgh patois – but there’s a danger that even if the speech flows believably, a large portion of the readership simply won’t be able to understand it.
It’s a risk I wasn’t prepared to take in The Ivory Grinder, as I didn’t feel the story would be particularly enhanced by half the characters talking in broad eighteenth century scots, which, with an almost completely distinct vocabulary, would be pretty much incomprehensible for most people, even locals. Instead, I played safe by using colloquialisms in their conversations to reflect their class and nationality. Hopefully, that will be enough to give readers a sense of the characters’ flow without them feeling the need to perform a virtual Heimlich manoeuvre on the ebook.
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