A distinctive voice is one in which challenges society’s values and or beliefs within a given context. In the text the life and crimes of harry lavender; Marele day has formed an incredibly distinctive voice in crime fiction. By subverting the elements of the hardboiled detective genre. Day has startled her audience with the distinctive voice of Claudia valentine, a 1980’s female private investigator in Sydney.
The composer has used a range of techniques including first person narration and idioms to successfully make this text distinctive, and by doing this she has subverted the chauvinistic male, and changed the way people perceive women, hence changing the way the men, women and general Australians perceive this particular genre. Marele day has also created not one but two distinctive voices in her text. Through the voice of harry lavender, we are able to see the man behind the villain. In my related text, stolen by Jane Harrison we see another distinctive voice through the characters of ruby, and the other children.
Stolen has surprised us with a view of the stolen generation in which is directly from them, which gives the aboriginals and Australians of today a deeper insight to what it was like for them. Jane Harrison has used techniques such as irony and colloquial language to make this text distinctive. Marele day has appropriated the usual hardboiled detective genre into a very distinctive text using the character of Claudia valentine. Marele day has created a character who is very Australian. Her narration is full of Australian Colloquialisms such as “mate” and idioms such as “hair of the dog”.
She also uses Aussie slang such as “old girls” and “old blokes”. Her narrative includes social commentary about Sydney and its society which reinforces the Australian basis of her perspective and helps to make it distinct from its American counterparts. Claudia makes comparison between her home city and American ones; “Sydney was like san Francisco in many ways except that in Sydney the weirdo’s didn’t carry guns” Claudia’s familiarity with the streets of iconic Sydney places such as Bondi and Pyrmont help to build her image as a modern Sydney sider. We swing down the hill overlooking the black expanse of Bondi beach” Claudia paints quite vivid pictures of life in Sydney although frequently her image is related to death or other negative ideas. “The esplanade metamorphosed into a Kafka novel. The use of imagery and other language techniques have helped to make Claudia’s character distinctive. Another way in which Marele day has made this voice distinctive
