Historical Fiction or History in Fiction?

There's been much talk about historical fiction lately - around the The Orange Prize, at The Hay Festival, on the occasion of the new Walter Scott Award - this had me chewing on a few questions

Does everyone have to be dead?

I've always understood that we need a perspective of 50 years before events can be viewed as 'history.' The Cuban missile crisis, Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War are all now on the GCSE history syllabus.

It's unsettling to know that the vivid events, the current affairs, which formed the backdrop of one's early years, are being swotted up and scribbled out as answers in stuffy exam halls. But there will always come a point where 'history' and living memory overlap. 

In that overlap, the category of 'historical fiction' is, perhaps, at its most uncertain.  For an era or particular event to count as 'history' do we feel more comfortable if everyone who lived at the time is already dead? If so, the First World War would have only have passed into history in July 2009 when, "last fighting Tommy," Harry Patch died, aged 111.

If a 'true' historical novel requires the writer to move beyond available living memory, we'll have to wait ever longer as many more people are living to 100 plus and 90 is the new 80.

All the novels on this year's Orange Prize shortlist, apart from Lorrie Moore's, A Gate at The Stairs, were set prior to this century. At the readings on the night before the prize was announced, chair of the judges, Daisy Goodwin, suggested to Moore that even her book, set in 2002, was 'historical' since it focused on that troubled year between 9/11 and the start of Iraq war in 2003. Moore said wryly "it took me so long to write, it became historical."

Moore set the book in the Midwest in 2002, she said, in order to show that that part of the USA wasn't simply "a place you fly over" between New York and Los Angeles.  The world events of 2002 form the anxious background against which her characters make their choices. 

Looked at another way, in a 24/7 globalized world, momentous events come at us thick and fast. After ten years so much has happened that perhaps we need to view these through the lens of history.

What's the pull of the 20th Century for so many contemporary writers?

Four of the Orange short-listed authors chose to go back to a point where living memory is still available, though not always the writer's own.

Barbara Kingsolver, with her book The Lacuna, set out to look again at the anti-communist activities of 1950s America. However, she soon found that she needed a character with a personal history in revolutionary times; she sent him back to Mexico in the 1920s/30s to meet Trotsky. "A writer is a kind of anti-analyst," said Kingsolver, "you go back through their lives and give them damage."  

Kingsolver said the novel grew out of her curiosity about how America had gone from being revolutionary to neo-conservative, "How did we get from your George to our George?"

Rosie Alison's The Very Thought of You moves between 1939 and 2006 as she explores the consequences, in the present, of lives disrupted by the Second World War. Her curiosity in returning to the Second World War was, "to see what was happening on the Home Front." Ashton Park, the 'big house' to which evacuees are sent and features large in the book - almost a character - was based on the school in Yorkshire, which Alison attended. Writing the novel was, in part, "A love letter to my boarding school." 

Monique Roffey, for her novel The White Woman on The Green Bicycle, had an eye on her family history, going back to Trinidad in the 1950s when the politics were vibrant, breaking from a colonial past. She'd written the book because, "I wish I'd been there."

Attica Locke with Black Water Rising, similarly, went back to the 1980s, to what was, for her, living memory as a child. Her parents had been activists in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She was curious to explore what happened to that generation as they moved into the Reagan Era.

There is such a time lag between writing a novel and getting it into the hands of readers that, given the nature of our times, a novelist who tries to catch the contemporary moment risks being a hostage to fortune. Besides, film and TV, with their visual power, can do both the urgent present and the apocalyptic future so much faster and with more impact. It's bold writer that speculates on the future these days. Margaret Atwood managed it in Oryx and Crake, though, for me, less so in The Year of The Flood.

Inevitably then, writers will turn to the twentieth century, burrowing back into personal, family stories where these intersect with history  - Andrea Levy's Small Island, Rushdie's Midnight's Children - or as a way to understand the present crises by glancing back, as in The Lacuna.

Can You Put Words In Their Mouths?

Of all this year's Orange Prize authors Hilary Mantel, with Wolf Hall, had gone much further back to history we all think we know from school, TV costume drama and documentaries, feature films etc. Having written Beyond Black, about the spaces in contemporary life that seem devoid of history - shopping centres, housing estates - she wanted to revisit to a formative period of English history.

Last week Mantel picked up the Walter Scott Prize for Wolf Hall - a new award to stimulate debate around historical fiction. At The Hay Festival there was lively debate about how much license an author can take with real historical figures.  Helen Dunmore was reported as saying at Hay that, when writing The Betrayal, she was wary of giving lines to real historical figures. Yet Mantel in Wolf Hall has completely reanimated Thomas Cromwell. How has she pulled that off? Apparently there are scant primary sources that record his words and his life; there was plenty of room to speculate.

Similarly, Andrea Levy, in writing The Long Song, found a void to fill. There are no accounts, written by slaves, recording the slave experience in Jamaica. Like Mantel, she had to read between the lines of other sources.

Dunmore's novel The Betrayal, set in the 1950s, is too close to events that are well recorded for her to have such freedom.  For a novelist going back into the Twentieth Century there will be fewer voids. Sources are prolific: public records available on line, film, TV news and documentary, records, tapes, DVD. As Simon Mawer pointed out in his recent interview for Words Unlimited, you've got to get it exactly right.

Kingsolver said the way she got round the problem of tampering with the thoughts and words of Trotsky, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo was to think of them less as characters and more as, "the setting for my character." 

A Category Shift?

With the future rather too uncertain and the present too fast to pin down  - other than in visual media - the novel becomes a place to pause and reflect. The twentieth century is ripe for re-examination as we ask: where did it all go wrong? Or - How might it have gone better?

Perhaps, as we move into the next decade of this new century, we need a category shift? Clearly, in the novels mentioned here, there's more going on than bodices and battles. Whether they are 'historical' novels is less the point. What's happening is that history in fiction seems, currently, to be the subject of some of the best of mainstream literary work.

Hilary Mantel, at the Orange Prize readings, succinctly summed up the novelist urge to go back: "as a writer you reach a hand into the universe and say, right, let's stop there, and have another look."

Comments

[Supra Shoes]

The ideal is to strike a medium between ideology and inspiration.

[Pam Johnson]

Yes, I think the trick is to put the research away and just BE the character. The temptation is to include 'fascinating facts' - the kind of thing that made you want to write in the first place - good luck with it..

[KMLockwood]

Plenty to think about. I have been working on a children's historical fantasy set in the 1960's ( to them it's history!).Quite a challenge to get a sense of the period without it being a history lecture.
Thanks for this.