Due to the fact that the novel was written in the early part of the 1900s, the language in this novel tends to be stiff and awkward for the modern reader. The novel is written in English, but is an old fashioned style of English that often puts together sentences in a structure that readers are not familiar with. The novel also includes passages in foreign languages that the reader is expected to be able to decipher, leaving the linguistically challenged reader lost as to the content of the foreign phrase.