On historical fiction…

Yesterday’s review of Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account got me thinking further about historical fiction, and the limitations that authors work with as they write in this genre. I mentioned three novels, the one above, Amin Maalouf‘s Leo The African, and Gilbert Sinoué‘s Avicenne, which is about the life of the famous physician Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna. Here, we have works of fiction about the lives of historically real characters. However, they all lived sufficiently far back in the past for many details of their lives to be vague or unknown, thus giving an author wide scope for invention. The history of the times when they lived is known and recorded to an extent, and the names of principal figures and places, and dates of historical events are also fixed. So this combination of known and invented seems to allow for a decent measure of convincing verisimilitude, although it’s perfectly possible that the real person was nothing like the character fictionally portrayed.

I then moved on to thinking about other historical fiction with which I was familiar, specifically novels set during the First World War: here, the situation is rather different. Firstly, the times are much closer to the present – only a century ago compared with five to ten centuries in the case of the novels I mentioned earlier. Events are recorded in much more detail, places and times known with a great deal of accuracy; accounts are available in memoirs and diaries from actual participants in the events. So, what is a writer to do? Sebastian Faulks invents characters in Birdsong, but sets them in detailed descriptions of real places and events. Pat Barker, in her Regeneration Trilogy, uses a mixture of invented and real characters – Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon figure quite considerably – and Erich Maria Remarque populates All Quiet on the Western Front with a cast of invented characters, and avoids detailed references to places and times.

These writers ‘get away with it’ or else, manage to convince us with invented characters, for several reasons. The canvas of events – the Western Front in the First World War – is sufficiently vast for a writer to be able skilfully to introduce her or his characters into certain events and places and weave them into the broader fabric, as it were: their heroes can blend in, particularly if they are not too high-ranking as to be in a position where they might have potentially been able to have a major effect on events (sometimes known as the butterfly effect). So, Faulks can introduce Stephen Wraysford as a mid-ranking officer because there were so many of them at the time, and he becomes just one of many, whose personal story we follow, and his interactions are all with other similarly convincing imaginary but plausible characters. The battle of the Somme was huge, so at some level Faulks’ participants all become stock representative characters, if I may put it like that.

Working with ‘real’ characters like Owen and Sassoon, Pat Barker sticks to creating a plausible account of their interaction at Craiglockhart, using available material to add credibility; the battlefield scenes involving Owen are again generic. And Remarque keeps everything in terms of detail vague: names of characters, location of the fighting, dates. The fighting itself is very convincing and realistic in terms of description, and he never needs to tell us much about whether particular actions were successes or not: we have a small group of men swallowed up by the enormity of events, and this is what he seeks to convey.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle‘s Sherlock Holmes stories were another work I considered. The setting is real – Victorian London, the times, the kinds of crime – though suitably sanitised and romanticised for a bourgeois magazine audience; it’s another broad canvas, so broad that the author can allow himself to invent a place or a building or a street as necessary. perhaps this might have jarred a little with purists at the time, but today we know no different. Against this background he can invent detective, police, crimes and criminals willy-nilly: as long as the background holds, it’s the plots that draw the reader along.

In the end, it is all surely about the realist myth which lurks behind all novels, not just those with the emphasis on the historical, a myth that every writer of non-fantasy has had to wrestle with since Defoe first marooned Robinson on his island… I feel another post coming on.

Laila Lalami: The Moor’s Account

Another book from my Christmas wish list read and enjoyed! And this is a marvellous and very moving story. Although I tend mentally to sniff a little at ‘historical fiction’ I suppose I actually do read and enjoy quite a lot of it: genre labels are often unhelpful..

Last summer, on my travels, one of the books I listened to in the car was The Journey of Cabeza de Vaca, an account written by a Spanish nobleman of eight years he spent lost, with three companions, wandering around the area that is now Florida, Texas and Mexico, in the company of various native tribes. One of the three companions was the Moorish slave of one of the other three Spaniards; he merits a single line in the narrative, and it’s from this that Laila Lalami has crafted her novel: what would Estebanico the slave have made of the journey, the Spaniards, the natives, his experiences?

Historical novels are limited – obviously – by the facts and details that are known and cannot be changed, which means that the creative efforts of a writer are differently directed: perhaps plot is not so important, because circumscribed by actual events and people; tension and suspense are rather more difficult to make use of when the eventual outcome may be known. Instead, a writer may focus more on empathy, on fleshing out events, characters and their responses to them, bringing them to life, and out of the history books, as it were.

The Moor’s Account is narrated from the viewpoint of an outsider from both worlds: neither conquistador nor native American, he becomes curious and perhaps impartial observer of both, yet with his own personal story and agenda: the plot is initially structured from two interwoven strands as his backstory is imagined alongside his sea journey to the Americas; what he wants above all is to be able to return home, a free man.

Lalami is of Moroccan-American origin, and has read and used some of my favourite travellers (Ibn Battuta and Leo Africanus) as background source material; her novel joins others which explore interaction between West and East, Christian and Moslem at this interesting time in world history, such as Amin Maalouf‘s Leo The African, for example, or which seek to give Westerners insight into the rich life of the Muslim world, such as Gilbert Sinoué’s Avicenne (only available in French, as far as I know). I enjoy these insights into the world from different perspectives; I know I’m reading novels, which are perhaps primarily entertainment, but I find it heartening to find common links of humanity between peoples, races and religions when so many nowadays want to convince us we are alien to each other… and yet, the small, sceptical part of me also wonders if there is not some romanticising of the past lives and interactions between Christian and Muslim worlds? In the end, however, what we share must surely outweigh the ways in which we differ.

Estebanico inevitably observes and interprets the world he sees in a different way from his Spanish masters; sometimes this is helpful to them all, but at others, it seems to him, brings disaster. All four are inevitably shaped and changed by their experiences in various ways – some learn from them and others do not. And our hero, in the end, is torn between his yearning for his home, family and community back in Africa, and the new life and possibilities which gradually reveal themselves to him in the Americas. My final response was also modulated by the realisation (which a historical novel can give) that he throws in his lot with a native people who are ultimately doomed by historical inevitability. It’s a slow, subtle and very powerful read.