It’s a tricky old thing, dialogue, and has an effect which is much like that of background music in television programmes. Done well, it can lift something out of the ordinary. Done adequately, you barely notice it’s there. But done badly and it can jar in the most horrible of ways.
I recently read a Times review of The Seduction by Joanna Briscoe, which described it as having some of the worst dialogue the reviewer had ever heard. That’s throwing down the gauntlet if ever I heard it.
So, this is my choice of the most teeth-clenching dialogue from books I’ve read so far this year.
Patricia Cornwell, Unnatural Exposure
Or, indeed, any other book by Patricia Cornwell. Aside from being the fictional investigator you’d least like to go for a drink with, Cornwell’s medical examiner Dr Kay Scarpetta has the knack of making anything she says sound like it’s being read from an instruction manual for a washer dryer.
“I think there is always a sense of urgency when someone like this is on the loose,” is, for example, her sparkling appraisal of the situation when a serial killer is dismembering the bodies of his victims.
About to embark on an external examination, Scarpetta lets her colleague know that: “I will spend a very long time on that.”
She’s not above the odd aphorism, either, such as: “When violence occurs anywhere, it is everybody’s problem,” from another novel, ‘From Potters Field’.
Humourless and charmless, Scarpetta has the uncanny ability of making the reader switch allegiances and start rooting for the serial killer she’s plodding her way towards apprehending.
She also says things like, “That is none of your business.” Try saying this out loud, and it’s clear how unnatural it is to actually speak this sentence. Anyone in normal life would start the sentence with that’s or it’s.
The hollowness of the dialogue itself, meanwhile is often compounded by the po-faced comments which follow. I said in a friendly but ominous way. I cryptically asked. I said with iron calm.
If you said it in a ‘friendly but ominous way’, Kay, then show us in the dialogue; don’t tell us afterwards.
Debbie Howells, The Death of Her
Howells made her name with her Richard and Judy Book Club choice ‘The Bones of You, and this is her third novel.
There’s an extraordinary section of dialogue in it where our protagonist, Evie/Jen, is recalling her first visit to a house she is thinking of buying.
“I listened, hearing nothing, not a voice, nor a single car,” she says. She continues: “I remember being in one of the bedrooms, pausing, leaning on the windowsill, looking down at the parched lawn, at the flowers bravely holding up in the heat.”
Nobody actually talks like this. No-one says “nor”, or talks about flowers “bravely holding up”. Later, remembering her daughter, the same character says: “We’d been planting bulbs last autumn, her little hands in the crumbling earth next to mine.”
That last line doesn’t belong in speech marks. It’s the ultimate example of an author writing in one way, in one descriptive style, and simply putting speech marks around the parts where the characters are speaking.
Joanna Cannon, The Trouble With Goats and Sheep
I’m slightly loath to put this one in, as the book it’s a book I enjoyed in general. It’s atmospheric and recalls with not inconsiderable skill the long hot summer of 1976.
The problem is Tilly, the best friend of our narrator Grace. We should be suspicious of Tilly, because we are told that she thinks the weather makes everyone happy; “it was the warmth of the sun on people’s faces, and the whispery breeze that came through the leaves of the alder trees”.
Tilly is ten.
Yet when she speaks, she says things like: “I always imagined that when I met Jesus, he’d be quite cheerful. I thought he’d wear a long smock and look people in the eye”; and “Mrs Forbes has been a little unusual lately.”
She also asks questions such as: “Do we need God to keep us safe? Are we not safe just as we are?”
I like Tilly. I just don’t believe there has ever been a ten-year-old in the history of the world who has spoken like this.
All By My Shelf 