Recently I mused on the topic of removing flaws from a novel: in my case, it was flaws of timing with a skiing scene happening in summer and a fun park swim going on in the middle of winter, a confusion which was a result of some heavy rearranging and not enough attention to detail.

The odd thing is that since I discovered this difficulty myself, I keep finding it in books that I expect better from – but I certainly know how tricky it is now and shouldn’t complain, I guess. Nonetheless, finding this kind of error in a novel certainly jolts you away from the “suspension of disbelief” that makes you lose yourself in a novel, and in one case it nearly made me put the book down completely.

Timeline trick in The Good Parents

One of the (many) great books I’ve read lately is Joan London’s The Good Parents, her newest novel and one I saw her speak about at the Perth Writers Festival. (On a sidenote, with no negative reflection on London, that session was the worst I saw at the festival – the moderator, who I won’t shame by naming, spoke about 90% of the time, barely letting us hear from the author herself – to the point where complete strangers were turning to each other in this (very polite) audience and complaining to each other).

In any case, The Good Parents is a read I highly recommend, especially if you’re a fan of Australian literature – the setting jumps around between Perth, country WA, Melbourne and even a little of Brisbane. There are great characters and an equally great storyline. But because I’m trying to write myself, then the thing I’m remembering most at the moment is a tiny timeline flaw in the middle of the novel!

I guess it’s like when I was a proofreader and incorrect apostrophes drove me utterly insane, and I wish I could turn off this radar, but here it is, in the middle of an excellent second novel, nominated for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and clearly otherwise a great piece of literature. If you’ve read it, I wonder if you noticed this tiny problem: in Chapter 10, Toni goes out to buy cakes for morning tea, as a pretext for getting Jacob’s phone number from his mother. The narrative goes on to say that she rang him in the early evening, but that section ends with a reminder that she’s about to go and buy cakes. I was violently thrown back to the morning, and had to re-read those couple of pages in confusion.

Geographical confusion in The Shark Net

Not a novel, but a memoir, Robert Drewe’s The Shark Net was another book I read in preparation for the Perth Writers Festival, where I saw Drewe speak about his short story collection The Rip (a very Aussie collection and all connected to the sea – also recommended!). Quite early on in the book, the narrator is musing about the position of Australia in relation to the rest of the world and says:

It was an exciting idea that Africa was the next continent, just over the horizon. In the atlas it was a straight line from us to Namibia in southwest Africa or, going the other way, Valparaiso, Chile.

Now, being a mad keen traveller, I tend to know my geography. I also spent a long time a few years back planning a trip to  Namibia (which unfortunately I didn’t get to take, but that’s another story). And I know full well that while Africa is definitely the next continent if you travel west from the west coast of Australia, you sure won’t hit Namibia – you’ll hit the southeast corner of Africa instead. I know, this seems like such a little thing, and again I feel unreasonably picky as I type this, but I almost put the book down at this point. If he doesn’t know where Namibia is, I thought, how can I trust anything else he says?

Now I really understand why I have to edit and re-edit

My apologies to these otherwise excellent writers who I’ve meanly picked on here; it’s just that these two examples came up in my recent reading. The main lesson for me is not to never read Joan London or Robert Drewe again (far from it – I think they’re two of Australia’s best writers), but to be really aware of how damaging it can be to have inconsistencies or errors in your story. I know all too well how easily they slip in, especially in the rewriting process. But as I have a definite tendency to be a bit lazy about finishing touches, this is an important reminder to me to take the time to re-read and re-edit my work thoroughly.

What about you? Have you ever put a book down because you stopped believing the author, or because there were mistakes or inconsistencies that you just couldn’t live with? Or am I just incredibly picky and mean? Let me know in the comments.