Activity

This is a lightweight blog.

I was just settling down after reading about the astonishing performance by George R R Martin at the Hugo awards, when my son approached brandishing his phone.

‘Look at that,’ he said.

I looked. My son has been a fan of the Zelda video games since he was little. I played a few along with him in the last few years, including the rather good Breath of the Wild. On his phone was a page from the latest book by John Boyne, A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom. In this epic novel, set over a period of 2000 years, there is a page where a character living at the time of Attila the Hun, talks about the dye used in dressmaking. The passage reads:

The dyes that I used in my dressmaking were composed from various ingredients, depending on the colour required, but almost all required, nightshade, sapphire, keese wing, the leaves of the silent princess plant, Oktorok eyeball, swift violet, thistle and hightail lizard. In addition, for the red I had used for Abrila’s dress, I employed spicy pepper, the tail of the red lizalfos and four Hylian shrooms.

It was at this point that the titular gasp escaped me. The list Boyne uses, comprises the dying process as set out in Zelda, Breath of the Wild. The items are all fantastic plants and animals within the game. There is no such beast as an Oktorok. Neither is there a keese or a Lizalfos. There are no Hylian shrooms, because Hylians are the fictional race in the fictional land of Hyrule.

Now I can imagine that a casual reader, finding this passage online, might conclude that it describes some actual process, especially since some of the terms, nightshade and sapphire for instance, are actual English words, and others bear a passing resemblance to names for (possibly) real things. A casual reader. I find it hard to believe that a serious reader, say an author looking for material for a serious work of literature, wouldn’t take the simplest and most elementary step of doing some checking. In fact, I would gasp at the cavalier laziness of such a person. It is gasp-worthy. At the very least I would check on terms I had never heard of, such as “Octorok”. This needs no more than typing the word into the very search engine that found the process in the first place – the work of a few seconds. Please, have a go. I promise you swathes of material, including pictures, that make it clear that this is not a living creature that was ever really involved in dying cloth.

Boyne was criticised in the past, amongst other things, for the lack of research in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. He describes a concentration camp and circumstances that would never have existed, in order to better fit his story. He was accused of other things too, but it is his apparent readiness to go to print with only superficial preparation that concerns me here.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a great researcher when I write. I’m only too happy to use search engines, but I hope I have sufficient respect for plausibility not to just grab the first “hit” I find and use it verbatim.

Boyne has taken as relaxed a view of his error when it was pointed out, as he presumably had when he did the “research” in the first place.

He writes, ‘Yeah, I’ll leave it as it is. I actually think it’s quite funny and you’re totally right. I don’t remember but I must have just googled it. Hey, sometimes you just gotta throw your hands up and say “yup! My bad!”‘

I confess, I don’t see it as quite so funny. At best I find it surprising and rather sad. At worst it irritates and annoys me. I certainly think it’s revealing of attitude and suggests a lack of concern or sensitivity to past critique.