Saturnalia (32 page)

AFTERWORD--'ALL POSY POSY ON THE VIA DERELICTA'

'Words are real,' says Falco to Albia in Chapter XVIII of this novel, 'if other people understand their meaning.'

'Is this,' enquires my editor in the margin of the manuscript, 'your defence for your many neologisms?' (most of which he has singled out with underlining and exclamation marks). I pacify him with a promise of an Afterword and talk of lunch.

I write about another culture, where people spoke another language, one which has mainly survived either in a literary form or as tavern wall graffiti. Many an argot must have existed in between. People sometimes discuss whether the Romans would really sound as I portray them--forgetting firstly that the Romans spoke Latin not English, and that on the streets and in the provinces they must have spoken versions of Latin that did not survive. I have to find my own ways to make narrative and dialogue convincing. I use various methods. Much of it is done by 'ear', and is difficult to describe even if! wanted to reveal the secret. Sometimes I merely deploy metaphors and similes, but even that can cause difficulties; I treasure the conversation with my Swedish translator who was puzzled by Thalia referring to male genitalia as 'a three-piece manicure set' and who had gone so far as to consult a medical friend...

Sometimes I invent words; sometimes I am not even aware I have done it, but through nineteen books my British editor has diligendy challenged me when he believes I have erred. Some years ago we reached an agreement that each manuscript might contain one neologism, or
Lindseyism.

For a time I stuck to that. Once, there was even a competition where readers could identify the invented words. It foundered rather, because many American readers suggested perfectly good items of English vocabulary and in any case I could no longer remember what some of the allowed Lindseyisms were; however, I feel that 'nicknackeroonies' was identified at that time as the word some of us would most like to see absorbed into real life. (Let me credit my late Auntie Gladys with providing the inspiration.) A movement to establish 'nicknackeroonies' in current idiom began in Australia, where delicate finger-food is of course a speciality.

Then there was Fusculus. He loves words as much as I do. It has always been clear to me that there must have been Roman street language, specialist underworld cant in Latin and vigiles' slang expressions, all of which are so far lost to us but all of which Fusculus would know. It is no use hoping that the carbonised papyri from Herculaneum that are now being so painstakingly unravelled by scholars will produce clues; so far they are all Greek to me, and indeed to everyone. If Calpurnius Piso, thought to be the villa's owner, owned a Slang Thesaurus, we have not found it. I am on my own with this. I cannot use the rich seams of English and American equivalent terms from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, for the secret languages of coney-catchers, spivs and drug barons are tied too closely to their periods. So when Fusculus speaks, odd words appear.

It will be noted by bean-counters that Chapter XVIII of
Saturnalia
contains more than my strict allowance of neologisms. Chapter XVIII is a celebration of the tolerance and understanding that have always been shown to me by my editors. Literary novelists, fuelled by booze and their own pretensions, are customarily permitted to write gobbledegook yet to be praised for their high-flown inventiveness, but in the field of the light page-turner, it is generally assumed that nothing offered by an author will offend a publisher's standard spellchecker. Time and again I have been allowed to deviate. Apart from the lady who felt 'The' was 'too heavy' for her readers in the United States (a severe prescription that I constantly bear in mind, I promise), my editors have been models of restraint in the face of heartless prose misrule. In this Afterword, I salute them. In particular I salute Oliver Johnson, who is a serious, cultured Englishman and in his heart does not want flighty bits of author messing him about with funny stuff. This man has spent nearly twenty years patiently training me in plot development and chronological description, listening to my prejudice against Chardonnay, and crossing out distasteful sex. He knows I can't spell 'alter', when it's 'altar'. He accepted the one-word chapter. He let me kill the lion. He himself devised 'tribute plagiarism', which we hope will become recognised legal terminology for bandit usage of another author's material. (Of course I know 'bandit' is improper adjectival use of a noun. Still- good, isn't it?) I am rightly devoted to my editor, and this is where I get the chance to say: don't blame him!

I would also like to apologise to all my translators and to acknowledge their ingenuity in their constant battle with my vocabulary. It will take real woozlers to devise graceful equivalents for 'fragonage' and 'ferrikin' in Spanish, Turkish, Japanese and all the other languages in which Falco novels are published; the special use in the Fusculus context of 'nipping' and 'foisting'--though real words in theory--won't be easy either. Sometimes one of you honest men and women is drawn to approach me diffidently about a really impossible word or phrase and I want to say thank you for the courtesy with which you do this--and for not gloating when it turns out that the answer is, 'That is not a Lindseyism; it is a previously undiscovered typing error.'

'Wonk' is real, by the by. My new American editor used it, then defined it for me, and it is here to fulfil my promise to try and 'get it past Oliver'. (He saw it. He exclaimed at it, but he has not crossed it out, so it stays.)

Chapter XVIII was a deliberate bit of fun. There is an official Lindseyism in another chapter. I know my rights.

I think very carefully about my choice of words--even when I make them up. When I do, I think they work. Try them out if you like, though do heed Falco's caution: it is not necessary to know these words to be a Roman and you don't want people thinking you are eccentric...

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