Historical Fiction

When does fiction become historical fiction? How far back to you have to go?

Talking over drinks after Emma Darwin’s reading from Secret Alchemy  at Goldsmiths I was asked: ‘Do you write historical fiction?’ and swiftly answered ‘Oh no…’ And yet, pondering this question on the train back to London bridge I thought, well, no Kings and Queens, but my characters get caught up in ‘real’ events. Andy Warhol and Gandhi both make an appearance in my fiction.

For Taking In Water [set in 2002], I’ve imagined my character back into the 1953 flood that deluged the East coast in January of that year and, then into Warhol’s Factory in New York in 1963/4. Broken Threads [set in 2004/5], travels back to the cotton mills of Lancashire in the 1920s and 1930s, and for Deep Blue Silence [set in the late 1990s] understanding the social conditions around glassmaking in 1930s was crucial to imagining Faith’s past.  All three books required research into social history – what did they wear, eat? How did they speak – dialect etc? Work patterns, living conditions etc…  With all three books it was the history - my curiosity about particular events and how they impinged on a single life - that formed the core obsession, and it was the historical research that grew the work…

Comments

[Emma Darwin]

And, conversely, when people say, 'You write historical fiction' to me - or, worse, 'You're a historical novelist, aren't you - I find myself saying, 'Well, I keep finding myself writing about history', because, though I recognise the book trade's need to categorise things, I really don't see (or rather, can't feel) a clear distinction between historical fiction and any other kind. As Stevie Davies says, the deepest preoccupations of the novel are memory and history, and so to some degree fiction will always be about the relationship of the past to the present and the future, because that's what storytelling is: beginning, middle and end.

[Pamela Johnson]

Well, for me, storytelling is about weaving past and present - reviewing past[s] in the present - towards possible futures but remember The New Puritans [Thorne, Blinco et al, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Puritans] and their 10 point manifesto? See points 5 & 8

5. In the name of clarity, we recognise the importance of temporal linearity and eschew flashbacks, dual temporal narratives and foreshadowing.

8. As faithful representation of the present, our texts will avoid all improbable or unknowable speculations on the past or the future.