What is the 'it'?

Here we are in January, one of the rare times of the year when my head should be well clear of judgments, grammatical forms and spelling mistakes – a time that I can set aside for, amongst other things, reading for pleasure.

And yet.

Last night I was sitting on the couch, making good progress with Nick Harkaway’s new novel, “Karla’s Choice”. I was skeptical at first as to whether this was a good idea, but it only took a few pages to convince me. Harkaway is a very different writer from his father, but he convincingly inhabits the world of George Smiley and the Circus, and by extension the London of the 1960s, and the Cold War. Not a John Le Carre novel, then, but definitely a George Smiley novel.

On page 65, lines 5-6, I read the following:

“You could hear the ribs of the building creek and the water pipes moan …”

I must have let out some kind of inhuman howling sound. Adrienne came running in from the next room, saying, “What’s wrong?” Carl, who was sitting on the other couch, and who knows me better than is probably good for either of us, just looked at me and said, “You found a mistake”. I pointed it out to him, whereupon he made a similar noise to the one I had made.

As mistakes go, this is, admittedly, a particularly bad one. What “you” could hear was a “creak”, not a “creek”. Spell Check wouldn’t have picked it up, but surely this is the kind of thing that editors at major publishing houses would be on alert for. I am filing it away for the next time I allow a glaringly obvious mistake to find its way into a published judgment, in the hope that it might provide me with some tiny modicum of comfort. I doubt that this will work, but it’s worth a try.

In the meantime, “Karla’s Choice” is sitting on the coffee table, where I am giving it the side eye every time I walk past it, as if it was a Huntsman spider sitting up in the corner of the room. I don’t feel ready to come back to it just yet. The necessary relationship of trust between book and reader has, I’m afraid, been irrevocably harmed.

Sucks to be me, I guess.

#neveroffduty