Who wants to see history in a great historical
novel?
What is it that separates a
magnificent historical novel from the rest?
The answer lies not in superb
writing, compelling plot, characters we can believe in, and a book that reveals
some truth about the human condition – although all of that is of course a
pre-requisite for magnificence.
It’s the history. The history that we don’t notice but which we
absorb with every word we read.
We recognise that the world we have
entered is entirely authentic, while remaining unconscious of the research that
made it that way. This is not about
accuracy of historical detail – right food, right clothes, right transport - that
just has to be a given. It is about
understanding that the past is not always a foreign country, as L.P Hartley
believed in ‘The Go-Between’. Sometimes they may do things differently there,
but there are also times when they behave and think very much as we do.
It is the history that gives us the
social and political context, the public landscape in which lives are lived. Historical
fiction brings us vicarious experience; we can read about the impact of
anti-German rhetoric and prejudice in early 20thC America on the lives of
individuals we have come to know and care about, for example. It tells us
something about the human capacity for bigotry, while the ways our characters
respond to that tells us something about the strength of friendship.
Anne Fine, UK Children’s Laureate in
2002, described ‘The Seeing Stone’, Kevin Crossley-Holland’s wonderful
historical novel, published for children but read by all ages, like this: “a world so real that you can run your
fingertips over its walls, feel its morning frost bite at your throat, and
remember the people who lived there for a lifetime.”
What a testimonial.
As a relatively new writer, I know
the temptation to expose rather than conceal the research. So many hours are spent reading and thinking,
making notes and making connections between the imaginary world and the real
one.
Sometimes I have come across a
contemporaneous description of an incident or place, and instantly seen my
characters there. I know just what they would have said and done, and have even
written whole chapters of many hundred words to add texture and credibility by
putting them there. It is a hard
learned discipline to go back over the draft; recognising the slowing of pace,
or the inconsequential diversion, and cut, and cut again, until the story is
released to flow again as it should.
However, it is also undoubtedly
true, that sometimes the research helps to shape the narrative. In my own novel, set in New York, the books
and newspaper accounts about the lives of emigrants at the turn of the century,
(particularly women), became translated into the lives of my characters. Sometimes they even helpfully provided the
inspiration for a pivotal moment in the plot.
Philippa Gregory has described the
period when Jean Plaidy, Anya Seton and Georgette Heyer were at their peak as a
‘golden age’ of historical fiction. She
is now herself part of a group of contemporary writers which could rightfully
claim to be leading a new golden age.
Others include Elizabeth Chadwick and Hilary Mantel, and now Eleanor
Catton. All have very different styles
and approaches. All have that necessary
lightness of touch, that deft ability to interweave narrative and context that
creates the best in both popular and literary historical fiction. All are wonderful storytellers, but never at
the expense of the history, so we come away even more enriched by our reading.
As a reader I want to feel
enthralled and fulfilled. I want to
unconsciously absorb a perspective about the times and the humanity - and to do
that through the imaginative leap of seeing through the eyes of another person.
As a writer of popular rather than
literary fiction, I want to get it right, to be a good historian – and then to
conceal that scholarship with creativity and an absorbing read. Popular
fiction may not bring readers a profound truth.
But it can bring insight, perspective, and a measure of understanding,
in a cracking good story.
I guess that’s something we all keep
striving to achieve.
~~~~~
About the author...
Annie Thomas is a British writer, and the author of ‘A Woman’s Choice’. Brought up in London, after a degree in English and History she now works in an English university, and lives in a rural converted Victorian converted pub where rumour has it that Tolkein and C.S.Lewis once stopped for a beer on one of their many walks together.
About the novel...
Set in the vibrancy of early twentieth
century New York, the story follows the young emigrant Clara and the people she
meets on the way, through tenement living and sweatshop labour to success. But
as the horror of World War One in Europe threatens to engulf America, Clara
learns that personal lives cannot be lived apart from public events, and finds
that the people she has loved, and who love her, are not always what they seem. All the incidents in ‘A Woman’s
Choice’ are based on what really happened to many thousands of emigrant
families. It is a compelling saga of friendship, love and ambition.
