Reading Room - Festival of Lights by Dorinda

[kiwisue.livejournal.com]

Title: Festival of Lights
Author: Dorinda
Pairing: Bodie/Doyle
Link: http://archiveofourown.org/works/1454272 AND http://www.thecircuitarchive.com/tca/archive/2/festivalof.html
Other Notes: according to the author's notes on AO3 the story was written for a holiday celebration on the CI5 (Professionals slash) mailing list in 1996, then published in "Virtual Pros: Christmas Edition," Bovinity Press, 1998.

This is a story that I hadn't re-read for a long time. Being offered the chance to sit in the Reading Room chair* was ideal because all I could remember was that I'd liked the story a lot, but I was sure it had one or two issues that would re-emerge if I went back. So this was the opportunity to test whether my memory was accurate. (*BTW, what do you call a Reading Room Reviewer, more specifically one who steps into anothers' shoes?).

What I found when I went to the story again was something very precious and lovely - a intimate portrait of Bodie and Doyle drawn by their boss, George Cowley. Who happens to be conscious but otherwise immobilised for the duration - a nice plot device that in the author's hands worked a treat:

Cowley held very still. Not that he had much of a choice, not at the moment; he fancied he could feel a faint tingle in the direction of his right knee (ah yes, the leg, always the leg), but the rest, to coin a phrase, was silence. Numbness... or not precisely numbness, not even that, but nothingness. He might have thought he was a brain in a jar, if he leaned toward science fiction.

Head wound. Trauma to the cervical vertebrae. Shock. Temporary paralysis. His rational mind catalogued and filed the information along with the sure and certain knowledge that he and his ace team had sixty seconds more to live.

Everything you need to know, in 111 words. As any cricket aficionado knows, this is an unlucky number which, considering the set-up, might well prefigure the eventual outcome.

( more reviewing under the cut )

Oh, that's enough from me. Go and read!

Tiny notes: There's a nice allusion here "defeating the many with so few; overall the writing is exceptionally fluid, which for me probably disguises other problems, but the American usage of "math" in the second paragraph sticks out every time. I may need to edit a text version, it's quite annoying.

ETA: typos
.

ETA2: a commenter just left some additional interesting information about the Hanukkah motif

ETA3: 111 words? reviewers licence. Nothing deliberate on the part of the author.

You dumb crud. What took you so long?

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

I'm quite excited to have found something out tonight, via A Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 1989, Ed. Paul Beale, Routledge. (From A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English by Eric Partridge, 8th ed. 1984), and prompted by various comments to look something up. Cos I should be working, so... *g* Anyway, I've noted this in the comment thread, but it's come up so often over the years, that I'm going to give it its own post.

It's about "crud", as used by Doyle in Man Without a Past. Most speculation I've seen over the years has been along the lines of its being an American word, adopted by Clemens in a script to help "Americanise" the show to sell to that market. Turns out, it's totally not... *g* Here's what the dictionary of slang tells me. (The names in brackets are references in the dictionary, just for accuracy of my quoting).

"1) 'Equals turd as an expression of contempt for another person. 'What a silly little crud Harry is!'" (Leechman)
Can.: since ca. 1930. Ex Can. (and US) dial., itself ex-English dial., crud, a survival from Middle English crudde.
Also, since late 1930s, common in Aus. (BP); and in Brit. Forces, esp. in the 1960s for 'second-rate, inferior, spoiled' (Towler, 1979).
2) Dried, spilt semen: low: adopted, ex US, mid-C20. (PB)"

So - it started out as a survival from old English, whizzed itself away around the various colonies, was adopted as British army slang in the 1960s - and I'd guess from there to Doyle... *g*

I do love words! And our lads! *g* Speaking of which... (From Bob Rocca's Pros book).