Reading and Writing Historicals - Faction

I’ve recently read two ‘faction’ works, and I enjoyed both.  The first was a novella, All The Freshness Of The Morning by David Black, the second full-length, The Secret Life Of The Elephant Man, by Milford Grove.

All The Freshness Of The Morning is a dramatisation of the time spent in the Pacific during WW2 of a young Lieutenant Jack Kennedy – later known to history as the United States President John F Kennedy. It is written in an accessible, chatty style, conveyed by a fictitious narrator years later remembering his time aboard the same PT boat.

In contrast, The Secret Life Of The Elephant Man takes the progressively deforming Joseph Merrick from his birth in Leicester to his death in the London Hospital in 1890. Although Merrick is the focus, and the story is conveyed from his viewpoint and that of his contemporaries, the book explores Victorian attitudes to the vulnerable, therefore deftly mirroring attitudes prevalent today.

‘Faction’ is the art of fictionalising recorded facts about real people, usually now dead, to give an insight into their life and times, written in such a way as to challenge the reader to discern the fact from the fiction. This is why it’s a genre I’ve shied away from. No matter the amount of research undertaken, no writer is ever going to get the detail correct. As if to underline this, both works mentioned above state that they are a work of fiction based on historical fact. They have, however, made me muse on the way I do write history.

For Hostage of the Heart the big picture, the events of the latter part of 1066, were researched, as was the life of ordinary people – the primary pull of history for me – yet no character existed in history. Does this make it less of a story, less of a truth?

For Beneath The Shining Mountains I also concentrated on the life of the Apsaroke people of the American northern plains. Its pre-European expansion backdrop I knew a great deal about as for many years I’d been a re-enactor giving talks to schools and community groups. Did these people live and breathe? Yes, but not under the names or settings depicted.

Each novel in the supernatural Torc of Moonlight trilogy has a different historical thread which resonates with the main contemporary timeline. Binding the two are the real-life settings which were researched down to the colour of the paint on a door.

In all, anachronisms were scrubbed spotless, yet in each the depth of history portrayed varied. Do I still believe I made a decent fist of writing the history? Yes. So why am I now musing on the different forms of conveying it?

This year I discovered information about my grandmother’s life at the close of WW1, a piece of jigsaw that has unexpectedly connected family hearsay. I want to portray her story in fiction, yet I have little more than a few black and white photographs of her in later years and a couple of bald census pages. I could certainly conjure a historical novel, though it would deviate from her day-to-day trials. Could I write faction? I’m not sure I have enough to make a choice. Maybe when I start researching the period and the places, she’ll tell me.

How Historical Should Be Your Historical?

I have been following an earnest debate in a Facebook group regarding how close to factual history Historical novels should stay.

On the one side there’s the fiction is never fact and shouldn’t be taken as such. On the other there’s the fiction should stick to the fact until the fact gets in the way of the fiction. And a lot of differing views threading in, around and between.

My stance is that authors have to be true to themselves and their prospective readers, as far as their publishers will allow.

I’ve never wanted to write about historical figures, or even historical events. I’m much more interested in how ordinary people lived their lives in what we might call a historical era, but that certainly doesn’t mean that I can make it up as I go. Just as modern London can’t be set in modern Poland for the sake of a fictional story, named places that existed as historical fact both have to be set in their true place and have an authenticity to them corresponding to the stated date. And not just in looks or smell.

I remember being in a cinema watching Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. RH (Kevin Costner) had just landed on English sands below the unmistakeable white cliffs of the country's southern shore when he uttered words to the effect of: Tonight I will dine at my father’s table – ie in Nottingham. The  cinema erupted in gales of laughter, with someone behind me quipping, ‘Got a helicopter waiting on the cliff-top, has he?’ And that was it for the film. The suspension of disbelief had been well and truly trashed, the audience more intent on chortling over the succession of gaffes than concentrating on the story.

Cinema-goers do that. Readers don’t. They throw the offending novel at a wall, give it a one-star review for wasting their time, and never read that author again. So novelists play fast and loose with history at their peril, while Hollywood adds the euphemism Based on... and runs all the way to the bank, massacring History as it goes.

Yet every Historical novel is also based on… people, events, places, eras, that once existed. History – the factual History we novelists take as primary or secondary source material – is based on… documents that are based on… hearsay or, if we’re lucky, eye-witness accounts, transcribed by… translated from… and we would be foolish not to accept that everyone along that line is relating facts as they saw them, or was instructed to see them. Truth, after all, is a many-faceted light in the darkness.

This is one of the reasons historical novelists add a Historical Note to the back of their  books, gently separating the history from the fiction for interested readers. You’ll find one in each of the Torc of Moonlight trilogy, to both separate and dovetail the past and the present storylines.

But there’s not one added to Beneath The Shining Mountains, a true based on… the remembrance of a then old woman, translated to an American ethnographer to be set down in a foreign tongue, doubtless edited for understanding, and doubtless edited again two generations later for a thin volume of “tales” from a people who lived yet whose life had perished, her story re-envisioned by me with the help of a wide range of secondary sources that might, or might not, have been as historically accurate as maintained.

How historical is your Historical?

Mine? I do my best. In the end its all any novelist can do. We’ve just got to ensure that we do it.

How Historical do you like your Historicals?

History or Fantasy?

The current adaptation by the BBC of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace seems to be flavour of the month, both on screen and in the newspapers, as Tolstoy’s written incestuous relationship “subtly alluded to” turns into on-screen nudity, presumably to sex up the story for a modern audience. After all, 40% of people polled by the BBC admitted they’d lied about reading the book. However, it isn’t the sexing up of body parts that brings the most shock-horror reactions, it’s the anachronisms: an out-of-politic military decoration, velvet worn on a battlefield, modern make-up, and a certain one-shouldered mauve satin dress. Ignoring the highly dubious cut, its colour didn’t exist in clothes until the 1890s.

Do we care? Should we care?

Also currently on British television screens is ITV’s Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands which was avidly awaited by this viewer and dumped after the second episode in favour of housework. Any housework. The only connection this has to the Anglo-Saxon poem is the hero's name. The howl of derision on Twitter had to be seen to be believed.

Yet what about the acclaimed series Wolf Hall, adapted by the BBC from Hilary Mantel’s novels set in the court of King Henry VIII, shot both in natural light and in candlelight? It had its detractors: an Elizabethan house used instead of a Tudor, its drab tapestries, its slow pace blamed for a slump in audience figures. Ah... audience figures. Not ‘sexed up’ enough, or not ‘dumbed down’ enough for a mass audience? I found it gripping, the double-dealing undercurrents both horrific and creepy. I’ve not read the books (I make no apology and I’m certainly not lying about it) but I know that a first-person narration, through the historical Thomas Cromwell, was used to bring an immediacy across an extended time frame.

I mention this because I’ve just finished reading The Bones of Avalon by Phil Rickman, in which is also used a first-person narration, through the historical Dr John Dee, mathematician and court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I. As well as humanising a name from the somewhat distant past, it certainly helped to deftly convey both historical context and minutiae without getting in the way of the story.

And this, I think, is the entire point: to put across a detailed historical background without info-dumping it on the reader. If readers wanted to read the history they would have picked up a history book not a novel; if viewers wanted to watch history they would not be watching a drama but a documentary, however factionalised such have become. Yet dramas, in novel or screen form, are often the first door to exploration of a historical period. Perhaps those who live by audience ratings don’t care enough whether there is a second, but I believe writers should. I think most writers do, hence the sometimes detailed ‘Historical Notes’ to be found after the fiction has concluded.

Am I alone? How historical do you like your Historicals?