There are practical reasons for writing books set in the past. For one thing, you don't have to grapple with modern technology - if you're writing in the present, and your hero/heroine is stuck up a mountain or has missed the last bus, you can easily - too easily - extricate him/her by means of a quick text or phone call. On the other hand, you know your context - the world of your story. Whereas I remember when I was writing Warrior King - about Alfred the Great and his daughter, I'd been researching for months, if not years. Finally, I came to the point where I was actually ready to start writing my story. In the first chapter, Alfred reaches for a drink. But what would he be drinking out of? A goblet made of metal? Wood? What? Or would it be a cup? And later, someone serves cakes (no, not THOSE cakes!). What would they cakes be made of? No sugar around then - honey, perhaps? What would make them rise? Or would they just be flat?
And then, of course, there's finding out, as far as possible, the truth about what was happening in your chosen period. Of course, the closer to the present you're looking at, the more information there is available. With Jack Fortune, for instance, which is about a plant hunter and his young nephew who set off for the Himalayas, I found online a detailed journal written by Joseph Hooker about his own adventures doing the same thing. Hurrah! But then that all gets complicated. You have access to how a person of that time perceived the world - but nowadays, looking through the lens of a 21st century view of imperialism, and recognising that Hooker's thrilling adventures were carried out in the sevice of the Empire with all that that entails - well, do you write from the point of view of a person of his/her time, or do you take account of a contemporary view of the same issues and actions?
And then there's the language. Do you try to approximate to the language as it was spoken in the time period of your story? If you're writing about the Elizabethan era, do you scatter your dialogue with 'thees' and 'thous' and the occasional 'Odds bodykins, forsooth'? To me, that's a no-brainer. If you're wrting about the 9th century, they would all have been speaking Anglo-Saxon, or some variant of it. So of course, your dialogue has to be in modern English. But it's not as simple as that. You have to avoid modern slang, obviously; you have to attempt to get the right sort of register for the person who's speaking - Alfred, for instance, will speak differently to a shepherd. Well, probably... So much to think about.
What's set all this off? Well, I've just read Ken Follett's latest book, which is about the building of Stonehenge and is called The Circle of Days. So it's set several thousand years BCE.
Now, I've been fascinated for a very long time by the era of prehistory. In particular, I'm intrigued by the cave paintings of south west France. They are so beautiful, so sensitively done - and how does this square with the version of the Stone Age that I was taught in school, with brutish early humans struggling to survive and engaged in a constant struggle with nature and with each other? Well, it doesn't of course, and that view of the distant past is being constantly revised. But when you start to write conversations between people of that era - how do you do it? How complex was their language - were their thoughts? Did they have similar notions about relationships to us - and about so many other things, like loyalty, friendship, duty, community?
So I found Follett's book interesting in terms of how he dealt with such issues. I'm still mulling it over - but I'm certainly impressed by the confidence and imagination with which he re-creates a world about which, really, we know very little. It's interesting that he uses very simple language and short sentences throughout - is that a nod to a simpler time?
As L P Hartley famously said, 'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.' But how different, really, in terms of what people were like, was the past? It's an interesting question - I think! - and one to which there are no easy answers.
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