Happy New Year everyone! Here’s to staying alive in ‘twenty five. Other than surviving until 31st December, my aim for this year is to finish the first draft of my new novel, a Cold War spy thriller with added magic. So I’ve spent my January re-reading the first fifty thousand words of my manuscript and making a few notes on what I want to change and how I’m going to take the characters forward.
And I’ve encountered a small problem. Historical fiction is hard. In all honesty, the reason I’ve stuck to fantasy fiction for so many years was because I didn’t want to do any historical research. Despite (or possibly because…) I have both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s Degree in history, I find researching things kind of a drag. It’s easier just to make stuff up! Yet, unfortunately, when the Muse comes knocking, I must answer, and my personal Muse has obviously been hanging out with Clio the Muse of history because the story she’s telling me I have to write is set in the 1950s, with flashbacks to World War II and earlier.
Great. Guess it’s time to get out the map of the Allied advance across the Rhineland and hope no WWII nerds read my book and pull me up on placing a detachment of the 13th/18th Hussars on the wrong side of the river. At least, since my book has a fantastical element, I can do a certain amount of hand-waving. (‘It’s a secret magical detachment! That’s why it isn’t in the history books!’)
A deeper issue than trying to get the historical minutiae right is that of, ah, let’s say ‘period-accurate attitudes’. Because on the one hand, I want to write a book with a diverse cast of characters, each with a full personality and a role to play in the story. And on the other hand, there’s the reality that a lot of people in the 1950s were… not very enlightened about certain things. Now obviously there are a lot of people today who are still not very enlightened (some of whom are unfortunately in charge of entire nation states) but I think it’s fair to say that your average white guy in the ‘50s had attitudes towards, say, immigrants from the Caribbean, or women in the workplace who weren’t secretaries, that these days would get him hauled in front of HR.
My protagonist is a white man in the ‘50s whose boss is a woman, and who works alongside a couple of people from Jamaica. Hmm. It’s going to be a challenge to try and write this guy in a way that is both acceptable to modern standards, and not totally anachronistic.
I’m not the first person to face this kind of problem, of course. There’s a whole Regency-Romance-Industrial complex out there, and the early nineteenth century has even steeper challenges than the 1950s — never mind immigrants from Jamaica, there were still slaves in the plantations of the Caribbean back then. Most of these writers, producing their own brand of fantasy, simply gloss over the more unpleasant aspects of their setting and don’t worry too much if their characters seem a bit too modern. All historical fiction is actually about the present day, after all.
That’s one approach, but it’s not one I personally want to take, because I’m writing something more towards the gritty end of the candyfloss-to-gravel scale. I don’t like drawing too much of a veil over the darker parts of the past — it’s just not what appeals to me, as either a writer or as a reader. And I’ll be honest, my main character does some pretty dark stuff over the course of the story — he fought in World War II after all, and then became a magical version of James Bond. He’s going to get his hands dirty. And I’m not going to shy away from depicting that. I enjoy (in fiction) examining some of the darker parts of human nature, what could drive people to acts of violence and betrayal.
But while clearly murder is acceptable, casual misogyny is not. I want to write a character who has a dark side, sure, but I also I want the readers to root for him. Fiction — however gritty — is nearly always a form of escapism. Seeing characters you care about go through extreme experiences and make dramatic, even terrifying, choices is all part of the fun. Morally grey protagonists and even straight-up amoral anti-heroes can make great characters. But petty, prejudiced, annoying people… they’re just too much like real life. Most of us will never meet a murderer, but we all meet plenty of dickheads. So the challenge is to portray someone who isn’t a dickhead, and who also doesn’t sound like he’s been picked up from the 2020s and dumped in the past.
Perhaps I should look at some other historical novelists. I’ve recently been blasting my way through the Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian (the basis for the fantastic film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World). This series is deservedly one of the most enduringly popular pieces of historical fiction of the twentieth century. Part of its appeal is O’Brian’s ability to tell a ripping good yarn of adventure on the high seas. Another part is his painstaking historical accuracy, even sometimes to the point of sacrificing clarity: there are scenes in The Mauritius Command, for example, which I found pretty confusing to read because of the plethora of different ships involved, including French ships with English names and English ships with French names. Could O’Brian have made it easier on his readers by reducing the number of ships and giving them all appropriate-language names? Yes. Was he going to when that would have meant historical inaccuracies? No. HMS Magicienne was not re-named by the British after they captured her in 1781 off Cape Ann in Massachusetts, and she wasn’t re-named by Patrick O’Brian when writing his fictional account of the Mauritius campaign.
How does O’Brian handle the period-typical attitudes of the characters in his Regency setting, while maintaining reader sympathy? Brilliantly, is the answer, by using his two main characters as foils to each other. Stephen Maturin, the scientist, is far more progressive in his views than Captain Jack Aubrey, and they have on-page discussions and disagreements about all kinds of things, including the Royal Navy’s traditions of drunkenness and corporal punishment. Early on in The Mauritius Command, they capture a slaving ship off the West coast of Africa, and, in a letter to his wife, Aubrey comments: ‘Ordinarily she would have been crammed with blacks for the West Indies, which would have added much to her value [as a prize]; but perhaps it was just as well that there were none. Stephen grows so outrageous the minute slavery is mentioned, that I dare say I should have been obliged to set them ashore to prevent his being hanged for mutiny.’
Aubrey goes on to describe slavery as ‘a very ugly thing to see, indeed’ but he acknowledges the awkward practicalities of the situation as well as the moral certitudes. He’s very much a conservative even by the standards of his own time, and he’s also a fundamentally good-hearted man who tries his best with the men under his command — it’s often mentioned that his ships are happy, and have very little flogging compared with the rest of the navy. Maturin would of course prefer that there be no flogging at all, but he as the ship’s doctor has the luxury of being outside the chain of command, and not responsible for enforcing discipline. These two characters together — one pragmatic, the other idealistic — provide a microcosm of the opposing views of the time, and they form an unlikely but beautiful friendship, cemented by their shared love of music.
I don’t have a direct parallel to Aubrey and Maturin in my own book, nor is my work remotely like Patrick O’Brian’s — I don’t think I mention sextants or ratlines even once. Nonetheless, I’m trying to keep his techniques in mind, to give my characters the chance to discuss issues on the page, express different views, and show different ways of navigating their world and dealing with the realities in front of them. My protagonist doesn’t have to be perfect by modern standards, but he can be better than some of the other people I portray, like the stuffy old Professor who cloisters himself in all-male environments and is aghast at the idea of a woman in charge of — well, anything.
The other thing, of course, is that actions speak louder than words, and a good novelist should know to show rather than tell. My protagonist isn’t off in the wilderness all by himself — he’s surrounded by other characters, and I can show their interactions. His boss is a woman, and he respects her authority, at least in part because she’s an aristocrat, and so social deference cancels out any reservations he might otherwise have had. Likewise, he respects the abilities of his co-workers who’ve moved to London from Jamaica. And he can show that respect for his boss and his co-workers without it being a big deal on the page. I want to avoid him being a dickhead, and I also want to avoid a scene of him saying ‘well of course I’m happy to have a woman as a boss because I respect the equality of women and their right to work outside the home because I am a Modern Man’.
I want to be sympathetic to the views of contemporary readers, without portraying those views too bluntly. Partly because I don’t want to break immersion by seeming anachronistic, and partly because I need to remember that, as views have shifted since the ‘fifties, so they will continue to shift over time. Contemporary novelists may well find that their own views will feel horribly out-of-date in the future, and scenes of people eating sausages may soon seem as horrifying as scenes of slave-trading. While all historical fiction might be about the present, all contemporary fiction eventually ends up being about the past.
