Please don't quote me...

[Biskit]

Really odd experience today - reading a book (not sff) with lots of 'non quoted' dialog, and what you might call pseudo-dialog.

I had just finished reading "Carpe Jugulum" (again) and fancied something different. I spotted a book on the shelf which I bought 10+ years ago and, for whatever reason, never got around to reading - "The Little Drummer Girl" by John Le Carre. I found the writing style a little odd for the first page or so, but then just got into it.

By the time I was about twenty pages in, I noticed that a lot of the dialog was done without quote-marks, often without explicitly 'X said' indicators on who was talking. Scenes that would have taken pages of dialog to do 'conventionally' were wrapped up in a paragraph or two.

Has anyone else seen this style? Is it something unique to Le Carre? (It's years since I read any of his books.)

I've attached a scanned couple of pages that I waved at the Biskitetta as example.

 

[Warren_Paul]

Skimming over it, unless I'm mistaken, it appears the narrator is remembering the dialogue; the scene is a flashback. Still strange, but I guess it's all treated as internal thoughts because he is thinking it. What does throw me off a bit is the quoted dialogue halfway down one of the pages, which breaks from the trend for no real apparent reason.

 

[Gumboot]

My thought from reading those two pages is that as a reader you're supposed to get the impression that the dialogue is being paraphrased rather than directly quoted, in which case the writer is correct not to use quotation marks.

 

[Abernovo]

I agree that, from this excerpt, it does seem to be recounting the conversation. However, I've seen conversation without quotation marks occasionally in more 'literary' works.

Le Carre, despite being a genre writer was reasonably literary, perhaps partly due to the time and his background. On a similar note, Ian Sales uses the technique in Adrift on the Sea of Rains, for which I owe him a review (I hadn't forgotten it, Ian - it'll be up soon ). A good read by the way.

 

[Gary Compton]

Ian Sales who is a long time member here and acclaimed author doesn't use quote marks at all in his "Adrift on the Sea of Rains Apollo Quartet 1"

You can look inside here

You can ask him. I imagine if he's used that method it will be an accepted method of writing.

EDIT!

You beat me too it Aber

 

[Gumboot]

Lolita has a similar thing where most of the dialogue is paraphrased and only one or two scattered lines are directly quoted in quotation marks.

 

[billhafan]

Ian Sales who is a long time member here and acclaimed author doesn't use quote marks at all in his "Adrift on the Sea of Rains Apollo Quartet 1"

You can look inside here

You can ask him. I imagine if he's used that method it will be an accepted method of writing.

EDIT!

You beat me too it Aber

As Gary says, Ian Sales uses this style in Adrift on the Sea of Rains (and like Aber - a review will be forthcoming; following a review I'm doing right now -- and its an excellent read).

I don't know if there is a specific title for this style, but I would describe it as a full narrative style. If, as Ian does, it's written well, then it it certainly gives a book a different feel. It's akin to a real story-telling method - like a tale at a camp-fire, maybe? Worked for me.

 

[Ursa major]

In the John Le Carré example, it started out pretty clearly as recalled/recounted/condensed dialogue, so when the more obviously dialoguey dialogue also omitted the quotations marks, my brain was already conditioned to accept it.

I found Ian Sales's quotation-less dialogue slightly harder to come to terms with, because:

• it's simply straight dialogue without the quotation marks, so there's no lead in to the style as there is with the Le Carré;
• the narrative is in the present tense, i.e. the natural tense for dialogue, so the speech tags are more important in Adrift on the Sea of Rains than in other books.

Despite this, the brain soon adapts to the style, so it isn't a problem. (And I'd recommend Ian's book to anyone.)

 

[Vertigo]

I have been reading Roberto Bolano's 2666 recently (still got a bit to go) and he uses this sort of technique extensively. Here's an extract:

She was shot in the back of the head, too, he said when Juan de Dios came up next to him, but I don't think that was the cause of death. So why did they shoot her then? asked Juan de Dios. To make sure she was dead. I want everybody out of the house who isn't a tech, shouted Juan de Dios. The cops filed out slowly. In the living room two hunched men, looking exhausted, searched for fingerprints. Everybody out! shouted Juan de Dios. Lino Rivera was sitting on the sofa reading a boxing magazine. Here are the ropes, boss, said one of the cops. Thanks, said Juan de Dios, and now get out, man, I only want the techs here. The photographer lowered his camera and winked at him. There's no end to it, is there, Juan de Dios? No end, no end, answered Juan de Dios as he dropped onto the sofa where Lino Rivera was sitting and lit a cigarette. Take it easy, the inspector said.

Then he does use a lot of unusual techniques: He doesn't really use paragraphs at all and he sometimes uses very long sentences (particularly for dreams and recounting stories) which gives a kind of unstoppable momentum to the narrative. Remarkably, considering one of his sentences spanned several pages, it was never difficult to follow the flow of the sentence.

Here's another example where de deliberately repeats "he said" multiple times for emphasis:

Haas said: I've been investigating. He said: I've gotten tips. He said: nothing's secret in prison. He said: friends of friends are your friends and they tell you things. He said: friends of friends of friends get around and do you favors. No one laughed. Chuy Pimentel kept taking pictures. They show the lawyer, who seems about to shed a few tears. Of rage. The reporters have the gaze of reptiles: they watch Haas, who stares at the gray walls as if his lines are written on the crumbling cement.

I must be honest; I found his style intimidating at first but as I got used to it I have come to love it. Each technique always seems to suit whatever he is telling the reader at the time. Also, strangely, it is easier to read on my eReader (I have both the printed book and the ebook), probably because I have it set to a moderately large font so I'm not confronted by such a wall of text, as a result I only really noticed it when reading the printed book.

 

[Tecdavid]

If it's actually a matter of paraphrasing, wouldn't it be strange to include so much of it right at the start (assuming this is the start we're reading), for the very reasons Biskit made this thread? Readers would think "Hang on, is this the way dialogue's handled here?" and could get a little confused, couldn't they? That is, until the first line of genuine dialogue comes about and clears things up.
I'm going to go ahead and guess that dialogue's done this way in the book, since Biskit's probably read on a bit further to know that this isn't just some internal stream of thoughts.
If it is dialogue, though, I wouldn't know whether it's downright "against the rules". A bit confusing, though.