Researching a
substantial novel set in a certain time means reading, checking out, exploring
the unavoidable facts of those times - a world war for instance, or the eruption of
a volcano. Unless you're writing parody. These substantial and real events have to be
right, fixed and immovable. To ignore them, exaggerate them or fantasise
with them or create fantasies from them requires a different process. Perhaps
an a-historical process
But what about the more fluid cultural social and
sensual world which existed around these immovable moments of historical fact? These are elements which will make your historical account or your historical
novel unique and at the same time universal to your reader.
If I were making a story about say Pompeii I'd be
referring to myth and song as well as to to the destruction of a stone built
environment. I did this with The Pathfinder my novel about post-Roman Celtic
Britain. To build a real world where people lived and breathed I had to take
note of poetry, song and myth and the many artefacts and articles that
characterised those times
I hope I succeeded.
But in more recent times the monuments of fact and
history are embedded in our meta-world of fiction story speculation
personification poetry and the personal fiction of diary memoir and now film
and expansive, often exaggerated, press content.
I like to access the perceptions
and the sensibilities of a certain time is through its art and – a favourite of
mine – it's popular fiction.
As my present novel Lifespan takes place from 1941 to the
year 2000 I have a multiplicity of twentieth century sources in terms of pure fiction and
biography and autobiography. It has been said many times that biography and
autobiography - being selections from lives - are in their own way categories of
fiction. It can be said that they are also categories of history and in that carry a certain kind of truth. So the selectivity and possible bias in such
sources as biography and autobiography and even diaries make a kind of
meta-fiction which is still important to my kind of research
Of course this means for
people like me the piles of books to be read and noted grows day by day. Add to that key Internet
sites and this adds up to a lot of research to absorb in order to imagine and freely write historical
novels that have the ring of truth about them.
Such books and sources a allow the researcher to access the distinctive subtleties of social context and the sensibilities, the assumptions and attitudes of the varied characters she is
imagining and growing within the narrative.
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Julian McLaren Ross |
In some places the line between
fact and fiction blurs rather satisfactorily, leaving an historical trail from
fact to fiction. I have just discovered that Julian McLaren Ross, whose book - Memoirs of the 40s - I am reading
alongside his biography Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia by Paul Willetts
– this is the man who was - in terms of distinctive, louche manners and mannerisms - mimicked by Olivia Manning for her dissolute character Prince Yakimov in her Fortunes of War Trilogy. This means, of course that I have to re-read these books...The jury is out as to whether this is a true portrait rather than a caricature.
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Olivia Manning |
Even so it does demonstrate how that the true nature of
unique characters has impact on the
imagined characters in the literature of their contemporary world. This can happen with fiction writers writing in
and of their own time like Rosamond Lehman, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Jane
Howard, Elizabeth David, Elizabeth Bowen and many more can give us clues to
contemporaneous habits, standards, speech modes and values of a time even
if our own invented characters emerge from a
different inspirational source.
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| Rosamund Lehmann |
In this lies the imaginative freedom of
historical fiction which allows present-day readers with their own modern habits,
standards and values, access to the minds of and lives of people in earlier
times. So they enjoy reading fiction in a different way from the way they enjoy reading history.
