I may have given the impression on this blog that all I do all day is sit around drinking coffee and reviewing books. Nothing could be further from the truth. I also sit around all day drinking coffee and editing books.
For several years now, I’ve earned a crust as a freelance copy editor and proofreader. I have to be a stickler for spelling and grammar, of course, but I also need to keep an eye out for inconsistencies – if a character is described as having blue eyes on page 23 of the manuscript, they can’t then suddenly have brown eyes on page 278. I have to query implausibilities too. Is it, for example, possible for a handgun to shoot dozens of bullets without reloading? I love the nitty gritty of all this – picking over minutiae in a dialogue with the author and making those last-minute corrections and improvements to the text to make the book as good as it can possibly be.
I’ve worked with many lovely authors and many wonderful books, but none have ever made it to the Man Booker longlist. Until this year. I was fortunate to be asked to copy edit Anna Burns’s Milkman and proofread Sally Rooney’s Normal People (both published by Faber) and was delighted when both of them were named on the longlist. Now Milkman has made it through to the shortlist. It’s a terrific novel – an account of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970s that is stylistically unlike any other book I’ve ever read, let alone edited. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
The winner will be announced on 16 October, and I’ll be keeping fingers and toes crossed for Milkman.
Ian Critchley 