Book Review Peter Caddick-Adams: 'Sand and Steel', a partial review.

There seems to be some disagreement over whether to add a comma between a subject's name and his post-nominal letters.

Should it be Flying Officer James Hudson, DFC or Flying Officer James Hudson DFC?

I genuinely don't know, and there's a complete mix of practice online. Does anybody here know for certain?

The commas both before and after 'DFC' are undesirable--they make the award seem like an aside.

As you say, the semicolons (or semi-colons, for that matter) are simply wrong.

There are legitimate situations in which to employ two in a single sentence, but this is not one of them.

 

You can use semi-colons to list things in a sentence (like the names of a crew) and it can be argued that the semi-colon is better suited to this than the colon. It can also be used, as here, to separate out a clause that is related to the main point but not necessarily part of it. In some cases you can use more than one instance of a semi-colon in a sentence but you really need to know how and when, and generally speaking it is frowned upon because it has the tendency, as here, to make the sentence over-long, tedious, unclear and confused.

As for the problematic comma before and after the DFC, if he'd written the sentence properly this shouldn't even be an issue. Just taking the sentence as a standalone piece it really ought to have been written something like this:

"Lancaster Navigator, Flying Officer James Hudson DFC, flew his thirtieth, and last, combat mission on D-Day. Earlier in the war he had been shot down, whilst over-flying Tunisia, and interned by the Vichy French. Following repatriation he joined No. 100 Squadron at Waltham in Lincolnshire."

I'm presuming he was shot-down, he could also have simply run out of fuel or had engine difficulties and been forced to make an emergency landing. Of course we don't know because the sentence is just so opaque! It's not difficult to make that whole thing clear and uncomplicated, it just requires a slight bit of thinking beforehand.

I cannot think of another book that I have read that has annoyed me as much as this one, and on so very many levels. Of course the more issues I find with it the more hyper-critical I am likely to be, ... c'est la vie!

 

Sand, Steel. S, S.

Steel, Storm. S, S.

Some coincidence, shurely.

All the best

Andreas