Tomorrow
I’m talking about the magic of place in historical fiction at the Winchester
Writers’ Festival.
It’s
a big day for me as this festival helped me no end to achieve my ambition of
becoming a published author, with notes I took from talks by such luminaries as
Beverley Birch, Sarah Mussi and Lorna Fergusson still treasured possessions.
It
was there I first heard about the Society of Children’s Book Writers and
Illustrators and the Bath Spa MA in writing for young people – both of which
remain key supports as I move on from my WW1 debut, The Goose Road – while the energy and comradeship of fellow
wannabees kept me going when my resolve flagged.
Thus
I owe a lot to Winchester, and want to pay that back a little by giving as good
a presentation as I can. Where, then, to start?
Since
this is a writers’ conference, I’ll begin with the particular value of getting historical
places ‘right’ from the novelist’s point of view.
Place,
for me, is the third pillar of story: a solid, knowable anchorage in the storms
of imagination. The first two pillars, plot and character, are grounded in
place; it is where the story plays out and influences behaviour, thoughts,
emotions and events.
Creating
credible settings is a core skill for any writer, and also a tool of our trade:
a mountain is an obstacle, a secret hideaway the protagonist’s haven from the
villain.
For
historical fiction, where authenticity is one of the few conventions in an
otherwise sprawling genre, place offers additional benefits, too.
First,
it is made of the same stuff as now: stone and earth, water and weather. Artefacts
come and go, materials too (think of pewter and plastic) but hills and rivers,
coasts and even settlements remain.
Second,
and perhaps more importantly, human beings have, since time immemorial, shared a
common anatomy, including the nervous system.
You
and I experience heat and cold in the same way as Odysseus. Climbing over the
Alps takes more effort than walking along the shore, just as it did in Hannibal’s
time. Hunger gnaws the same way today as it did during ancient famines.
We
cannot know the mentality of the past half as well – a fraction, even – as this
shared physicality, this visceral, sensory awareness. When we describe a character’s
subjective experience of place with apt, original and evocative language, we do
so with veracity.
For
people who don’t write historical fiction this veracity might seem trivial. But anyone
who’s researched the past will know that almost everything about it is
contested – from the partial, biased accounts of history’s ‘winners’ to who has
the right to retell the stories of marginalised, misunderstood or forgotten
ancestors.
Thus
any certainties are to be cherished.
Yet
even at the less literary end of things, place sets the tone. Open your story
in a woodcutter’s hut in a Germanic forest and immediately we know we’re in the
land of folklore.
Put
a beautiful French chatelaine by a mullion window, and a reader will get pretty
hacked off if she doesn’t end up in bed with the handsome knight who’s trotting
past her castle on his way back from the Crusades.
In
my own historical writing I’m persuaded by the argument that place is best seen
(and felt, smelt, heard and tasted) through the protagonist.
In
my first person narratives, place is therefore subjective, with world-building
done through hints and snippets of salient detail, the sort of small things which
would be noticed by that kind of person at that point in their lives, and in
the particular state of mind the reader finds them.
There
are, however, very good reasons for writing about place in other ways, too.
When
looking for contemporary models of excellence in omniscient third person
narration, I came across this amazing opening for Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate:
“The
North is the dark place.
It
is not safe to be buried on the north side of the church and the North Door is
the way of the Dead.
The
north of England is untamed. It can be subdued but it cannot be tamed.
Lancashire is the wild part of the untamed.
The
Forest of Pendle used to be a hunting ground, but some say that the hill is the
hunter – alive in its black-and-green coat cropped like an animal pelt.
[…]
Stand
on the flat top of Pendle Hill and you can see everything of the county of
Lancashire, and some say you can see other things too. This is a haunted place.
The living and the dead come together on the hill.
[…]
There
is still a tradition, or a superstition, that a girl-child born in Pendle
Forest should be twice baptized; once in church and once in a black pool at the
foot of the hill. The hill will know her then. She will be its trophy and its
sacrifice. She must make her peace with her birth-right, whatever that means.”
Wow.
I love it. No one could doubt for an instant from this description of place that
a dark, witchy tale is about to unfold.
Compare
it to the more traditional (and to me overly prosaic) third person opening to
Robert Harris’s Fatherland:
“Thick
cloud had pressed down on Berlin all night, and now it was lingering into what
passed for the morning. On the city’s western outskirts, plumes of rain drifted
across the surface of Lake Havel, like smoke.
Sky
and water merged into a sheet of grey, broken only by the dark line of the
opposite bank. Nothing stirred there. No lights showed.”
Personally,
I think you have to trust that Harris’s story will get better – which it does.
Admittedly,
I am a huge fan of Hilary Mantel’s poetic prose in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. I used to devour
Thomas Hardy, too, and (mostly) remain wedded to literary historical fiction.
But,
for me, Winterson demonstrates perfectly that poetry isn’t necessary to evoke an
historic place exquisitely – and hook the reader from page one.
PS
I’d like to thank fellow historical writer for young people, Ally Sherrick,
author of Black Powder and The Buried Crown, for putting me in touch with
Winchester when she couldn’t make this slot, and to Winchester for having me in
her stead. Ta, Ally!
