create clarity to a mark destined to create
confusion’. We see its origins in 1494, when
Aldus Manutius first presented it, and then
the way it came to be treated in the convo-
luted ‘grammar wars’ of later centuries, as
writers struggled without success to reduce
its complexities to simple rules. Two fascinat-
ing chapters show the way semicolons have
playe d a central role in court cases — includ-
ing the horrifying story of Salvatore Merra,
in which the much-debated legal interpre-
tation of a sentence containing a semicolon
ultimately led to his execution.
The power of the book lies in its leisurely
literary illustrations of the way writers have
used semicolons to great effect, including
Irvine Welsh, Raymond Chandler, Herman
Melville, and brilliantly in Martin Luther
King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ —
a moving sequence of semicolon-separated
plaints that build to one of the most power-
ful climaxes I have ever read. I’d defy anyone
to repunctuate this and retain the rhetorical
effect. The extracts from Welsh and Chandler
are especially well chosen, for they give the
lie to those, like Vonnegut, who thought that
the only purpose of semicolons is to show
that the writer has ‘been to college’. Her
example from Trainspotting is as far away
from college as you can get, and Mark Ren-
ton’s description is all the more powerful
for the use of a semicolon. (‘The sweat wis
lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling.’)
A great deal that Watson says is basic
linguistics, and especially stylistics —
domains that, curiously, she doesn’t men-
tion. And yet she would find huge support
for her approach there, especially in the way
a semantic and pragmatic perspective helps
to remove the restricting effect of a naive
grammaticism. It’s the approach I’ve used
myself in Making a Point: you see the system
in language by observing the options that
the language makes available. Punctuation is
a system, though not subject to the same kind
of rules that we see in some other areas of
language. Watson’s examples of contrasting
marks illustrate this very clearly.
This is no pedestrian account of how
semicolons work, with boring sentences
taken out of context and their marks defined
in an abstract way. The author wants us to
appreciate the ‘beauty in language that rules
can’t comprehend’. She wants us to see that
trying to put a ‘protective fence’ around
punctuation is a limiting response that
doesn’t allow us to see the true power of lan-
guage in communication. Recognising this is
liberating. We begin to realise that instead of
punctuation controlling us, we can control it.
Watson thinks of herself more as a punc-
tuation therapist than a punctuation theorist,
and her clarity and good humour pervade
the book, along with some cheeky illustra-
tions by Anthony Russo. Some people will
hate her for even trying to make us appreci-
ate semicolons, but not me. As I say, I loved
this book; I really did.Dot your commas
David Crystal
Semicolon: How a Misunderstood
Punctuation Mark Can Improve Your
Writing, Enrich Your Reading and
Maybe Even Change Your Life
by Cecelia Watson
4th Estate, £10, pp. 212Now, how shall I start this review?
I loved this book. I really did. (Too
abrupt.)
I loved this book, I really did. (Too
rushed.)
I loved this book: I really did. (Too
planned.)
I loved this book — I really did. (Too
afterthoughty.)
I loved this book... I really did. (Too
uncertain.)
I loved this book; I really did.
Ah, that’s more like it. The semicolon
gives me the best of both worlds. It helps me
pause, and have a think, and yet pushes me
forward to what I want to say next. It sepa-
rates and unites simultaneously. It does a job
that no other punctuation mark does. And
the way to see this is to develop a sense of
the contrast. What happens if we punctuate
a sentence differently?
This isn’t something that can be summed
up in a simple rule, and those who have tried
over the past 200 years to find rules govern-
ing punctuation have failed miserably, as
Cecelia Watson shows in the opening chap-
ters of her insightful book. Punctuation
tries to capture two incompatible drives:
the desire to mark grammatical structure,
and the desire to express the dynamic of the
speaking voice. The tension between them
means that no two people share exactly the
same set of preferences. That’s easy to dem-
onstrate. Give a group an unpunctuated page
and ask them to mark it up, and you’d be
lucky to find two who would do it in exactly
the same way.
Watson approaches her subject historical-
ly. She begins by recalling writers who have
gone on record as hating the semicolon, such
as Kurt Vonnegut, and traces its history of
transformation ‘from a mark designed toOut of sight, out of mind
Anna Aslanyan
The Memory Police
by Yoko Ogawa, translated from
the Japanese by Stephen Snyder
Harvill Secker, £12.99, pp. 274
Yoko Ogawa’s new novel takes us to
a Japanese island where things keep dis-
appearing: ribbons, birds, musical instru-
ments, fruit. People, too, are at the mercy
of the Memory Police, an efficient lot hunt-
ing for those who can’t shake off their
memories. Each disappearance involves
not just getting rid of the physical object,
but also of every trace of it in everyone’s
mind. The unnamed narrator’s mother
is among the disappeared, but things she
collected remain in the house where the
daughter still lives, writing novels about
people losing something. ‘Everyone likes
that sort of thing,’ she says of her books, as
if to imply that every island has the writers
it deserves.
It’s tempting to see the book as a remake
of Nineteen Eighty-Four, although here the
regime is more humane: there are no betray-
als or torture, and brainwashing is not entire-
ly the fault of the police. One thing that has
miraculously survived is the process whereby
an author and an editor sit down together to
go over a manuscript. The most important
person in the narrator’s life is R, her edi-
tor, another hoarder of memories, and after
a new crackdown she hides him in her home.
Is it to save him, or to be able to continue
writing novels? Does she need R as a reader,
a source of memories or merely as a lover?
The community grows poorer with every
disappearance, but people quickly get used
to these ‘cavities’, replacing or simply ignor-
ing them. When photographs are banished,
for instance, the heroine says that they are
‘nothing more than pieces of paper’. It’s
a self-perpetuating process: memories of
things fade, leaving everyone more immune
to each next loss. The novel that the narra-
tor is writing, meanwhile, begins with a typist
losing her voice and gradually acquires more
and more shades of grey.
And then (you guessed it) novels disap-
pear too. The act of flinging books into the
fire resembles an avant-garde performance:
‘The pages had caught the breeze, and it flut-
tered as it flew, as if dancing on air.’ With
novels gone, words become ‘just characters
on the manuscript page’, and eventually the
line between real and imaginary losses is no
more. Like the heroine of the novel within,
who ‘lacked courage to rejoin the outside
world’, the narrator remains in a prison of
her own making.
In Stephen Snyder’s fluid translation,
the names of vanished things are sometimes
italicised, sometimes put in quotation marks.
The things themselves are sometimes com-
pletely forgotten, sometimes not. In one
scene, the police check people’s IDs, scruti-
nising the photos, even though they should
have been burned by now. When it comes to
human memory, it seems, no one — not even
those trying to police it — can ever remem-
ber everything.The Memory Police is like
a rem ak e of Nin et een Eighty-Four,
without the betrayals or torture