Ash

My three major issues fall under one umbrella: believability--which is not the same as realism. Obviously The Black Company is totally unrealistic, yet I believed every word of it.

One: the prose. Again! In short: Mary Gentle is no Ada Palmer. 15th-century (auto)biographies simply do not read like the text Gentle serves us -- not even in the rough first draft of an English translation -- as the frame story frames a big part of the novel. Okay, the scholar -- historian Pierce Ratcliff -- admits that he is quite liberal in the way he translates the Latin text, but even so, the alteration of dialogue, internal thoughts and third person perspective is a form that did not exist in the 15th century, and not one that a translator would be able to concoct on the fly. That form begins to appear at the end of the 18th century, and only reaches its full-fledged version with Jane Austen in the early 19th -- the version Gentle anachronistically uses for Ash.

This is not a trivial matter: most of Ash's detailed thoughts would have basically been invented by the translator, and as such have no scientific value -- even though Ratcliff has clear scientific ambitions with his translations.

So, for all the research about medieval cannons and armor, Gentle could have upped her ante, and done some research into her own craft: writing. That might have made the novel harder to read, but more conceptually sound. A lesser alternative could have been an explicit reference -- in the form of elaborate translator's notes for instance -- to a huge modernization of the text, coupled with a different backstory for the second manuscript, one that would have granted a realistic time frame for the stylistic transformation.

Two: Ratcliff, the scientist, acts like a gullible, whiny child. It's more than a matter of prose, or the way he writes his emails: his psychological profile and scientific rigor simply doesn't fit an experienced, serious late 20th, early 21st-century historian. Anna Longman, his editor, also acts far too gullible about certain aspects of the narrative, aspects that have extremely profound implications for human reality. As both are foundational characters, Gentle's choices for them basically destroy any realistic scaffolding of her framing device. I think this issue could have been fixed, but not without a higher page count.

Three: the overall scientific foundations. Is Ash science fiction, or simply science fantasy in a lab coat?

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