Embarking on a new
historical novel, this one set even farther back in time than The Goose
Road, I have been confronting a
perennial question asked by (and of) storytellers of the past: why bother?
What is so important about
this particular story that makes it worth spending years of one’s ‘wild and
precious life’ re-imagining the dead?
Double-Booker prize winner Hilary
Mantel offers a rich mix of answers to this vexed question in her 2017 BBC
Reith Lectures. I’ve downloaded them onto my laptop and listen to her unique voice
through headphones while cooking or cleaning, or drinking coffee and watching
the wild birds on our feeders.
There is a mystical
quality about her reasoning, a deep, personal connection with her own resurrected
dead; they speak to her across the centuries; she is comfortable in their
company.
But however authoritative
and astute, Dame Hilary’s viewpoint isn’t enough on its own. If the response to
why bother is, essentially, ‘because
Nanny said I could’, that’s not going to keep me going through the long,
difficult (and, doubtless at times, dark) days ahead.
Fortunately, a
cross-section of today’s writing elite who either dwell in the past or visit it
from time to time provided their thoughts as to why to the editors of the Writers’ & Artists’ Companion’s guide,
Writing Historical Fiction.
Naturally, these experts
contradict one another, so we lesser breeds are free to pick and choose, ponder
and reject.
Among those I choose as a guide
on this quest is Ronan Bennett.
Author of Havoc, in its Third Year (what a brilliant title) and The Catastrophist among
other historical novels, TV and film scripts, Bennett rejects the notion that
the past is such a ‘far country’ that its people were fundamentally different
to us.
Instead he quotes the 1st
Duke of Newcastle, William Cavendish (which ain’t something yer average
contemporary novelists gets to do, ya boo). Cavendish apparently told his
pupil, the future King Charles II: ‘What you read, I would have it history so
that you might compare the dead with the living; for the same humours is now as
was then, there is no alteration but in names.’
Boom! We’re just like
them. Some duke said. Resonance between past and present rules.
Bennett continues: ‘The
best fiction prompts self-interrogation. Historical fiction can bring us up
with a jolt, like an eerie deja-vu. This is what I tell myself. I hope
it’s true.’
Amen to that, Mr Bennett.
In the same Writers’ &
Artists’ guide book, Michael Faber drew this useful distinction between two
types of historical novelist: members of a first group, he says, set their
novels in a particular era because they find it thrilling or romantic; they
research every nook and cranny of their favoured period, and satisfy
like-minded fans with full and telling details.
The second kind of historical
writer wants to explore a ‘specific clutch of themes and human conflicts, and …
realises that a particular era, which happens to be in the past, is right for
this story.’
Novelists of this latter
type ‘don’t have to worry as much about over-employment of research. You’ll be
so preoccupied with characterisation and getting to the heart of human
complexity that you’re unlikely to get distracted by crinolines or flintlock
pistols.’
Boom. And there I am, freed
from Dame Hilary’s edict that you can only start to write an authentic
historical novel after you’ve plumbed
every depth of your period and know it off by heart.
Rather, as Michael Faber says,
‘Use whatever historical details help you illuminate your characters’ soul and
ignore the rest.’ It’s a motto I plan to pin to the wall of my writing room.
Not that I intend to skimp
on research; it’s one of the joys of this hobby/writing life. Research is fun
and exciting, with the weave of half-told history unravelling before your eyes and
myths presented as fact disintegrating along the way.
But how can you know what
you need to know from all this lovely research unless you already know your
story? How can you avoid getting lost in the byways of a period when time is
precious?
Personally, I think
research is an iterative process, a conversation between the story as you first
imagine it and the credible details (AKA facts to the unwary) which modify or
overthrow these expectations.
My work-in-progress is, at
one level, based on solid ground: a published pamphlet, lavish in its details
of events. But it is also shifting ground since the story told is preposterous
to our modern mind despite being presented at the time as truth.
Why did my protagonist
write it? Why did people believe him – or pretend they did? Why are false
narratives so compelling throughout time?
As a journalist of the old
school as well as a teller of tales, this last question has never seemed more alive.
@HouseRowena on Twitter
Website: rowenahouse.com
3 comments:
Brilliant and fascinating post - Thank you Rowena for writing it
Nx
Thank you, Ness. It's such a big commitment there has to a jolly good reason to start! Good luck with yours. Xx
Absolutely - it's to show that people are and have always been essentially the same, the world over. I feel (as an erstwhile medievalist) very keenly that this truth is unacknowledged by most people. Some stories need to be in the past because a particular event or circumstances made particular themes important or more potent.
(PS Michel not Michael}
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