Linking fiction and reality

Really good blog entries are like buses - you wait for some time, then several come along at once. The latest batch are from Jim Putnam and Clarissa Vincent; I'll deal with Clarissa's in a separate post, this one being sparked by Jim's thoughts on linking fiction and reality.

I haven't read any of the Janeway novels, but I intend to try The Bookman's Promise. Like Jim, I enjoy the embedding of fiction into the crevices of real history. In that case the crevice is temporal, a three month gap in the known chronology of a real person. It can also be geographic, as in The Piano Tuner which I read recently. Then again, social crevices are left by history's lack of concern with most ordinary people and these are exploited by books such as Falling Angels.

The Piano Tuner travels through the last type of crevice, the social, following a lower middle class character to a geographical one, a fictional outpost in British occupied Burma during the Limbin Confederacy period. I shan't add to the many synopses already available (search the web and take your pick), but it's an amazing achievement which held me spellbound from opening to last word. Falling Angels stays with the social crevices, again following lower middle class fault lines but this time through the eyes of two girl children, to explore from within the end of the Victorian era and the beginnings of women's suffrage.

Daniel Mason (The Piano Tuner) is a Californian, Tracey Chevalier (Falling Angels) a Texan; facts which make these books remarkable for their pitch perfect placement inside the "voice" of English characters from different centuries. Mason was a student when he wrote The Piano Tuner, which perhaps makes his achievement even more extraordinary since his protagonist is middle aged.

Then there are the conspiracist fictions which build much larger edifices, colonising not just a crevice or two but whole swathes of the undocumented past and even present. One of the finest and most powerful (in my own personal opinion, though many disagree with me) is Eco's Foucault's Pendulum which plays knowingly with its own acknowledged fictionality to generate a warning against the confusion of fiction with history. Better known by far (I find it an incredibly tedious read, but I am very much in the minority) is Dan Brown's The da Vinci Code, which could have been written as a textbook illustration of Eco's warning. Brown plays with much of the same material, and takes place in a "parallel history" world recognisably different from our own, yet seems to have been taken by millions of readers as reality.

The parallel history is another type of historical fiction, which creates its own crevices by asking "what if...?" A single historical fact is changed, and the fiction is developed in the subsequent vacuum which opens up. A popular choice is the outcome of the second world war. Usually this sticks to the very believable alternative of Germany defeating Britain – Len Deighton's SS GB (Deighton also wrote an excellent, altogether more powerful and conventional historical fiction of the social crevice type in Bomber) or Richard Harris's Fatherland, for instance – but the iconic example is Philip K Kick's The Man in the High Tower which envisages a USA occupied by Germany in the east and Japan in the west.

Other parallel histories place the turning point much further back, and make greater changes to the world which results. A fine example of this is Keith Roberts' Pavane which takes place in a 1960s world shaped by the assassination of Elizabeth I of England and the subsequent suppression of science and technology by a Roman Catholic church freed from the reformation. The changes in Jasper Fforde's quartet of "Thursday Next" books are more radical, many of them not intended to be serious (these are comic and surreal novels which play with many explorations beside the historical), but the alternate historical aspect remains: what would the world look like if the Crimean War had ground on to the present day, airships had remained viable, Germany had won the second world war, and Wales had seceded as an independent socialist republic?

John Fowles' A Maggot (amongst many other fireworks) plays the opposite trick, projecting the recognisable present backward so we can see it though other eyes. Somebody (I think it was William Gibson, but I'm having trouble tracking down a reference) said that we rarely recognise the utter weirdness of the past, and that is certainly a weakness of most historical fiction. A Maggot is one of the few novels I know of which manages to partially breach that veil. We follow a motley group (a gentleman, his servant, a prostitute, a bogus army sergeant) on a trip through the badlands of south western England in the first half of the 18th century to locate a cave containing what seems to be a vehicle some kind containing a historical (from the reader's 1985 perspective) archive. The events are seen through affidavits collected from the participants by a lawyer, and the book culminates with the birth of (real historical figure) Ann Lee, leader of the Shakers, apparently as a result of the prostitute's impregnation within the cave.

I seem to have wandered a long way from Jim's recommendation of The Bookman's Promise; time to finish, I think. For anyone interested in a more detached, rigorous and academic approach to historical fiction than mine might like to start with Form, Parody and History by William Stephenson or Forked Tongues? by Ann Massa and Alistair Stead. And now, I am off to Ottakars to see if they have or can get me The Bookman's Promise. Goodbye.

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1. Dunning, J. The bookman's promise. 2004, New York: Scribner.
2. Mason, D. The piano tuner. 2002, New York: Alfred A Knopf.
3. Chevalier, T. Falling angels. 2001, New York: Dutton.
4. Eco, U. Foucault's pendulum. 1989, London: Secker & Warburg.
5. Brown, D. The Da Vinci code. 2003, New York: Doubleday.
6. Deighton, L. SS-GB : Nazi-occupied Britain, 1941. 1978, London: Cape.
7. Harris, R. Fatherland. 1992: Hutchinson.
8. Roberts, K. Pavane. S.F. 1968: Hart-Davis.
9. Fforde, J. The Eyre affair. 2001, London: New English Library. (et seq)
10. Fowles, J. A maggot. 1985, London: Cape.
11. Stephenson, W.J. Form, parody and history in 'The French lieutenant's woman' and 'A maggot' by John Fowles, and 'To the ends of the Earth: a sea trilogy' by William Golding. 1996, University of Leeds: Leeds. p. 320 leaves.
12. Massa, A. and Stead, A. Forked tongues? : comparing twentieth-century British and American literature. 1994, London: Longman.