Talking About Our Generation by Kate Lord Brown

How do you define historical fiction? Is it fiction set in the past? Over thirty years ago? Or set before the living experience of the writer? I've just finished the new draft of a novel set in the 1970s - so it is 'historical' if you use the 30 year rule. It is certainly ancient history to a group of schoolchildren I spoke to recently about 'bringing the past to life' - I showed them pictures of a penny farthing and a Chopper. Guess which one they thought we rode in the 1970s.

Yesterday involved a long, hot visit to the phone souq, thanks to a catastrophe involving an end of term pool party and an iphone, and there was plenty of time to ponder how accelerated our lives are now, and the rapid advances in technology. The display case in the photo above caught my eye. Nothing dates a work of fiction whether it's a novel or a film quicker than the technology used. The 'History' display reminded me of my first mobile, bought for my first job driving hundreds of miles around East Anglia for an arts festival. 'Brick' is an apt description. Researching old phones last night I came across these curious clips from 1928 and 1938 which claim to show early (or time travelling?!) users of mobile technology. A relation of the young woman shown has come forward recently to say that the factory was developing early wireless technology:

Anachronisms are the bane of historical fiction writers' lives - it is so easy to slip up, and there is always a kind reader ready to point out mistakes. Thinking of History Girls of the future, I feel for them, trying to keep track of  which phone, or computer, or tablet was around at the time their novels are set. Everything is changing so fast. I began my writing 'career' penning love letters on the Exe Valley school bus for friends to send to their boyfriends at the local boarding school, and still prefer pen and ink. My children are still taught cursive script at school, but are far more adept at keyboard skills. Dad's first computer, a huge Commodore that took up half his office in the 70s probably had less power than the dear, departed waterlogged iphone. Learning to type on huge clunky manual typewriters in the late 80s under Mrs Leach's formidable eye, ('I typed Le Carre's novels, girls'), early green screen computers were used for the 'word processing' Pitman's certificate, rather like those in 'Jumpin' Jack Flash':

That script, with Jonathan Pryce's delicious voice bringing the typed words to life, was one of the more successful uses of technology in fiction - but boy does it look dated now. 

One of the best things about writing historical fiction is that the need for suspense is supported by the lack of technology. Waiting for a letter is endlessly more romantic than the instant gratification of an email or the ping of a text. Ink and paper or an 'I luv u', which would you choose? If we are, as some believe, heading towards an Omega Point of singularity in 2040, a convergence of technology and humanity, I wonder what lies ahead for future History Girls. It is enough to keep you awake at 4am, but as long as even Apple's finest is fragile enough to be thwarted by a pre-teen diving into a pool with it in her pocket, perhaps we have a few years yet to ensure the future is bright. 

Breaking the Rules by Kate Lord Brown

Doha Jan 2014

Browsing in the souq this morning, it struck me again how strange (particularly for someone who adores history), it is to live in a city that is so new. The oldest building dates from the 1980s, the souq has been rebuilt to look more picturesque, and the antiques are rather more recent than you would at first glance believe. It's a city creating itself, buildings rising up out of the desert, and it's an interesting time to be here.

Writing historical fiction (with all the inherent contradictions just in the name alone), is rather the same. We take the past and create something new - our interpretation shapes what is known into entirely new characters, objects, cities, worlds. 

Perhaps you are the same when you're working on a new book - the brief rest between edits over the holiday was filled with an orgy of reading and films, (for me, at least, books and movies are the ultimate rewards). One of the films was Marie Antoinette (2006, Sophia Coppola). Based loosely on Lady Antonia Fraser's biography, it played pretty fast and loose with historical fact. Fraser was interviewed on the DVD, and she said how remarkable it was to see the film, and as a medium how deftly it imparted information (the description of a single bodice could take pages, but on film a picture's worth a thousand words ...). Then this image flashed onto the screen:

Screenshot - Marie Antoinette (2006)

My immediate thought was that continuity had missed the Converse trainers - but then it seemed so deliberate, so styled, I did a little research. Coppola used the image as shorthand to show the youth of Marie Antoinette and her ladies in waiting. I'm hoping perhaps you can come up with some examples in fiction where writers have managed to pull off something similar?

Perhaps film manages to break the rules in a way prose can't. Another favourite, filled with deliberate anachronisms is 'A Knight's Tale'. From the suspiciously familiar logo hammered onto William's armour by the female blacksmith to the soundtrack, the director played with twelfth century history in a way I just don't know if you can with fiction? For those of you who write in this era, it would be interesting to know how historically accurate the rest of the film was - the armour, architecture etc?

There's an assumption that although we are creating worlds from our imagination, they are rooted in historical fact. That we do our best to tell the truth. That we weed out anachronisms of dress, speech, even emotion. Certain genres lay their cards on the table and are clearly breaking the rules - for example alternate realities like Harris' 'Fatherland', or Steampunk novels (I'm rather taken with these keyboards just discovered browsing for images):

Perhaps every work of historical fiction is partial, telling as much about the writer as the reader's review does of them. No doubt you've had feedback - good and bad - from readers because your fiction does or doesn't fit their notion of the past, even if your facts are watertight. Some truths are concrete, some are simply more open to interpretation. Celia Rees' recent excellent post on HGs 'Shelve Under Venus or Mars' highlighted the gender snobbery in histfic - that some books are (grinds teeth), seen as 'girl fiction'. This was a charge levelled against one of my own books in a stinker of a review on Goodreads (yes, I now know you shouldn't read them, but it was my first, and yes I can quote it from memory ...). Because the girls wept when their friends were killed, because they had love affairs, because they danced with as much enthusiasm as they flew - to that reader it was 'girl fiction' whereas she prefers 'boy fiction'. The fact it was based on unpublished WW2 diaries belonging to brave male and female pilots which recorded heartbreak and love alongside their flying hours is neither here nor there - it didn't work for that particular reader, and the emotion was a jarring anachronism for her.

Studying English, much was made about 'the willing suspension of disbelief' and the risks of breaking the fourth wall. It's a risk to shatter your viewer/reader's investment in the idea that somehow this history, this fiction is 'true'. A single stitch dropped in the tapestry of your story can ruin the entire fiction you have woven - your reader no longer trusts you. I'd be fascinated to know if anyone can think of examples in fiction where deliberate anachronism has worked - or indeed your favourite examples of accidental anachronism. While you're thinking, enjoy a wonderful scene awash with anachronisms from 'A Knight's Tale':

'The History in the Words' by A L Berridge

All historical novelists know to avoid the ‘wrong words’ – the little anachronisms that boot us into the wrong century will the speed of a train crash. What I find much, much harder is learning when to avoid the right ones.

You know the ones I mean. The ones that are perfectly, demonstrably, authentically in period – but somehow sound as if they’re not. An astute copy-editor wisely advised me not to use the word ‘scan’ in ‘In the Name of the King’, because its rock-solid pedigree in the 16th century didn’t prevent it from sounding as if it sprang to life with a chunk of technology in the 20th.

Not what I meant

He was right. Not just because of the terrifying reader who’s so certain I’ve Got It Wrong that he can’t wait to tell the world on Goodreads, but because it creates a ‘blip’ – a moment of surprise that jolts the reader out of the story.  Anything’s better than that, so we swallow our pride and our research and consign our historical darlings to the dump.

Sometimes we can find ways round it, but they feel equally counter-intuitive. I have a character in my Crimean series who uses a lot of 19th century London slang, and since much of it sounds screamingly modern I often find myself choosing the oldest versions I can find. ‘Mug’ is a perfectly good 1850s word for the face, but I opted for the equally accurate but archaic ‘phizog’ instead. I only do this in the early chapters when readers are still adjusting to the voice, but it still feels strange to make my world seem more alien and distant than it really was.

And how far should we go anyway? The totally authentic ‘Shut your trap’ sounds suspiciously modern for 1854, but if I replace it with the original ‘shut your potato trap’ then I’m risking an altogether different kind of ‘blip’. I want my readers to be following a story, not stopping to think ‘oh, so that’s the origin of that expression!’ Words should be invisible, the mere medium of the story, and never the focus of the reader’s attention.

But they’re all we’ve got, and it’s sometimes a real struggle to make them convey what we intend. Numbers are clean things, fresh with every use, but words are second-hand and come to us laden with history and association. I wanted to use the historically-correct word ‘kid’ in ‘Into the Valley of Death’, for instance, but had to avoid it because of its modern associations with America, gangsters and cowboys.

Not what I meant. Though I think I could be persuaded...

Sometimes our innocent immersion in a period leads us to miss even more dangerous interpretations, and I still blush to remember a copy-editor’s polite suggestion that a character’s fast movement from a wall might be better not described as ‘jerked off’.

Sometimes it’s really frustrating. When writing the Battle of the Alma for ‘Into the Valley of Death’, I had to really struggle to avoid the one single phrase that would have described exactly what was happening as the Russians harnessed their cannon to field carriages to draw them from the field. Those two-wheeled carriages were called ‘limbers’ and the correct expression is ‘limbering up’, but I wanted the reader to see a scene like this:

Russian artillery at reenactment of the Alma (Sergey Kamshylin / Shutterstock.co)

and not something like this:

That may seem appallingly patronising to my readers, but the power of word-association can be stronger than logic. I know exactly what a limber is, and so will many of my readers, but the modern association still kicked in and gave me a ‘blip’ as big as a solar eclipse. Out went ‘limbering up’ and in went ‘backing to limber’, which in context was just as accurate.

And ultimately – I don’t mind. This kind of thing doesn’t happen with dead languages, but ours is a living record of our own past. I like the fact that the word ‘limbering’ remains like a ghost of its extinct military origin. I like the fact we still say ‘scot-free’ without the slightest idea that we’re using an Anglo Saxon word that means ‘exempt from royal tax’. The words stay when the meaning has gone, pebbles thrown up on the beach when the tide has gone out.

Mostly we hardly even notice them. A word just ‘is’, and we rarely stop to question how it got that way. Some people still refer to a ‘drawing room’, without any idea it’s an abbreviation of the ‘withdrawing room’ to which ladies would retire during the port and cigars. Many more will actually own a ‘penknife’ – but how many have ever used it to sharpen a quill? 

Or how about this:

The BMW i8 plug-in hybrid sports car, unveiled in Frankfurt 2013 – with an engine that produces 231 horsepower.

After all these years. Few of us have ridden in a horse-drawn vehicle, but that’s still the standard by which we judge those driven by the combustion engine. We can see both together in this fabulous colour footage from 1920’s London, but when we do we know we’re looking at history. Only the words have kept the history alive – just under the bonnet of our cars.

I suppose it’s natural to retain ‘horsepower’, since units of measurement are often the last to change. The horse itself is still measured in ‘hands’, just as many of us still measure distance in ‘feet’. How far does that go back? When did we last even think about it – except perhaps to marvel at men with twelve inch feet and to wonder if the size were proportional?

‘Hands’ and ‘feet’ will probably go in the end, as imposed metrication grinds its way through our remaining scraps of measuring heritage, but it’ll take more than that to expunge the many centuries of the horse from our language. Our idioms are steeped in it – ‘give him his head’, ‘rein him in’, ‘spur him to action’ – and they won’t disappear in a hurry.

Or will they?

Enter the Historical Language Saboteur, the chap who uses words without the slightest interest in what they actually mean. He’s the man who gives us the utterly meaningless ‘tow the line’, because he doesn’t understand the Naval historical concept of ‘toe the line’. He’s the man who writes about ‘giving free reign’ or ‘reigning in’ because the idea of controlling a horse by means of reins is beyond him. He's the man who infects millions of innocents, who dutifully repeat his mistakes because they've seen them written down on the internet. Distortion of language used to take centuries to accomplish, but these days it can happen in a matter of weeks.

But perhaps that’s as it should be. Perhaps he too is part of history. Mistakes and ‘back-derivations’ have played their own part in shaping our language, and they often enrich our understanding in how people thought and spoke in earlier times. Those who complain about today’s ‘sloppy diction’ might want to ask how the words ‘norange’ and ‘napron’ became respectively ‘orange’ and ‘apron’ – and if they say ‘a norange’ aloud, then they’ll know.

That’s the best part of language history for me: what it tells us about our ancestors and how they lived. I’m fascinated, for instance, by the fact we use English words for an animal in the field but French ones for the same animal on the table – and what this tells us about life under the Norman Conquest. The peasants were English who knew cows, sheep and pigs, but the court aristocracy were only familiar with boeuf, mouton, and porc – beef, mutton, and pork.

The history of language can obviously teach us far more profound truths than that, and I only wish I knew more about it.  My mother was lucky enough to attend the lectures of Professor J.R.R. Tolkien himself, and one of the remarks she recorded in her notebooks takes my breath away even now. Tolkien told his students that the first languages to develop a future tense were those of peoples who lived by the sea.

I have no idea how accurate that is, but it makes me tingle because of its essential truth. To comprehend the idea of a future, one has to have a sense of the ‘beyond’ – and who would learn that quicker than those who can look further than the edge of the world?

But the past is ‘beyond’ too, and words can take us there if we let them. Words aren’t just a record of the whole of human history – they are that history, and the living chain that joins it all together. If we choose to, we can follow them right back to the beginning, when the first people came out of the forest to stare in wonder at the power of the sea.

***

If you think words can never be dull, you should visit A L Berridge's website.
If you care about the history behind the words, you should visit the Crimea Appeal. 

WAM: N M Browne

Back in the day, long ago when the world was younger and I was a girl, I studied Philosophy and Theology because for me the most interesting thing about the world is that it is perceived so differently by different people. What fascinates me most in writing history, or indeed fantasy, is trying to make those other views clear. I am unlikely to notice the wrong kind of buttons on a waistcoat, the wrong colour wallpaper on a wall, or even the wrong technology in an artefact but I do tend to notice the wrong kind of attitude or belief system in a novel or a drama.
(Well that is my particular delusion anyway.)
Which brings me to Downton Abbey. It’s great in many ways - interesting storyline, good pace, some nice little historical references to make the viewer feel clever, but somehow it feels to me like a costume drama in which contemporary people are dressed up to look old fashioned rather than a truly historical drama. I am not an expert - not my period, darling - but would a respectable, unaccompanied woman really have walked into a pub back then? My grandmother wouldn’t have dreamed of it even in the early eighties any more than she would have offered a guest a shop bought cake. Would the lady of a house really be prepared to have her senior servants ordered around by a former junior servant? Such things get my WAM: World-view Anachronism Meter buzzing. To me these kind of details matter more than hairstyles or hems. They are the hardest thing to get right and to convey to the reader; the attitudes and beliefs that constrain and restrict, that might have a woman give away a child from shame in 1950 while her single daughter gets pregnant by artificial donor insemination just forty years later.
It is not just about technology. I’m sure history is full of such shifts: Catholic to Protestant in the space of a King’s reign, worshipper of Thor to worshipper of Christ in another, believer in creationism to advocated of evolution. These things matter - you have only to see an old episode of ‘On the Buses’, or ‘Rising Damp’ to see how much. These shifts change the way the world is for those who live in it. The world is different if it is seen as flat, if it is a precursor to another, or an illusion caused by desire.
I would like costume drama more if it made the past a stranger, less comfortable place,if it shocked me sometimes by saying what could not now be said, believing what is no longer universally believed. Mind you it would probably never get commissioned...

Choice of Language by Marie-Louise Jensen

So you're writing historical fiction. How do you recreate the past?

There are many ways you can do it. Atmosphere, descriptions, clothes, situation. all these things contribute to a sense of experiencing the past and all are important to the authenticity of the text.

One way I don't attempt to recreate the past is by language. Or at least not very much.

I've had reviews that complain that much of the vocabulary I use wasn't in use at the time the book is set. Of course it wasn't. If I were to try to use truly authentic language, it would require a vast amount of research - of the reading ancient texts in gothic script variety - and I don't think anyone would read my books. They would be too difficult to access. And I see my role as one of making the past accessible, enjoyable and easy to read about.

In the case of my Viking books, they are 'in translation' anyway, as the characters weren't speaking English, but Norse. And in the case of my Tudor novel, The Lady in the Tower, the language people spoke would have been so dramatically different to our own that we would struggle to understand it. It would be somewhere between Chaucer and Shakespeare.

As far as I'm concerned, language is the medium we use to access the story and not really a part of the authenticity of the setting. Of course, that said, it's still a minefield.

I have to be very careful not to include anachronisms, for example. It's more easily done that one might imagine, because we take our everyday items and the names we have for them so for granted that we scarcely see them. Thus my copy editor found and alerted me to a mention of trousers in my second Viking novel. Norse men wore leggings and tunics. Of course, I know perfectly well that trousers as a clothing form didn't exist until the Victorian age, but that kind of slip is so easy to make if you're cracking a joke or using a catchphrase.

And then there are the words that have changed their meanings. I've had to be really careful with these in my latest novel, which is set in the early Georgian era. In those days, a dress was a gown, a wardrobe was the clothes you owned and the piece furniture you kept them in was a closet. Skirts refered to the section of a man's coat below the waist; women had petticoats or 'coats', not skirts. I knew all these and others and had a list beside me as I wrote. Nonethless, when I did a search of the document once it was finished, I found six instances of the word 'dress' that had evaded my attention.

Getting these words right - the era-specific references - is very important to me. I think it does help to recreate the past. I did a great deal of research on costumes, furniture, food, literature and buildings, as well as lifestyle. Accuracy is valuable. Especially when readers are basing their knowledge of the era on your work. And of course modern slang is completely out of place in a book set in the past.

But if you want to tackle the old authentic language, don't come to modern historical fiction; seek out the plays, poems, stories and novels that were written back in the period you're interested in. Personally I enjoy reading many of them. But it's an altogether different experience.

Getting it Wrong (On Purpose?): Anachronisms in Historical Fiction

by Katherine Langrish

So here is Jael, from the Book of Judges, about to hammer a very large nail (or stake, or tent peg, depending on which translation of the Bible you use) into the temples of the sleeping Sisera.  The painting was made by James Northcote, RA, in 1787,  and I think you will agree its impact is not diminished by the fact that no attempt has been made at historical accuracy and Sisera is (most uncomfortably, one supposes) lying fast asleep in a suit of 15th century armour.

So how important are anachronisms?

I write historical fantasy, not straight historical fiction: which you might think offers me a loophole out of strict adherence to absolute accuracy.  After all, if my books set in the Viking Age also include trolls, ghosts and water spirits – for which clearly there is no historical evidence – then surely it won’t matter too much if some of the details of everyday life on a 10th century Norse farmstead aren’t exactly right either?

Actually I don’t see it that way.  For one thing, there’s the small point that Viking age people believed in ghosts, trolls and water spirits, as well as in a mixture of gods – Christian and pagan – for whom there can be no evidence of physical presence either.  And so I don’t feel that fantasy is necessarily less ‘historical’ than non-fantasy.  Indeed, partly to correct this notion, I have sometimes referred to my fiction as ‘history with the beliefs put back in.’ 

But let’s come clean.  Even with the best of intentions, I’m never going to get everything absolutely right. There is not nor ever can be such a thing as absolute historical faithfulness.  The past is a jigsaw with many missing pieces. Did Richard III really murder the Princes in the Tower?  We’ll never know.

Historians relay social, political and domestic information about the past: facts derived from primary and secondary sources which most of us do not have the skill or patience to read.  There is room for many interpretations of history.  And when history is remodelled as fiction, there is not only room but a licence to go further.  It’s not the duty of an historian to determine Richard III’s guilt (though quite a few of them try); but for a novelist (as for Josephine Tey in 'The Daughter of Time') it may be an imperative, and the reader will understand it as fiction: a possible, not definitive, version of events.

Further, anachronisms can be used to bring an old story to life.  In the painting of Jael and Sisera, above, it's probable that the artist used anachronistic clothing (old fashioned, yes, but nothing like old-fashioned enough!) as a way of giving Jael's murder of Sisera a more universal meaning: in the Bible, Sisera is a leader of the Canaanites, an enemy of Israel: his downfall at the hands of a woman could be seen as the downfall of a tyrant.

Sir Philip Sidney once said in his ‘Defence of Poesy’ that poetry – by which he meant invention: fiction – was less likely to deceive the reader than history, because it does not pretend to be the truth: 

“What child is there that, coming to a play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an old door, doth believe that it is Thebes?  If then a man can arrive at that child’s-age, to know that the poet’s persons and doings are but pictures what should be, and not stories what have been, they will never give the lie to things not affirmatively, but allegorically and figuratively written.  And therefore, as in history looking for truth, they may go away full-fraught with falsehood, so in poesy looking but for fiction, they shall use the narration but as an imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention.”

However, some anachronisms do matter.  Even one can grate, breaking the illusion.  Too many, and I don’t see the point of using an historical background for your novel at all.  Many fantasies are set in a sort of generic ‘medieval England’ with no relation to a genuine historical period.  It sets my teeth on edge if I read a book placed, say, in 12th century England, only to find the characters all have 14th or 15th century names like Alison and Matthew (or even Rose and Jack), while the villages are full of 16th century inns complete with 19th century-type regulars and landlords, and everyone speaks English (of course they do: it’s a modern novel) but there’s not the slightest hint that the 12th century was a linguistic and racial melting pot of Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Welsh and Latin.  Stick a white witch at one end of the village street and an evil Norman overlord at the other, and you’re done.  Medieval Disneyland.

Beliefs even in fairies changed over the centuries.  When I wrote my own 12th century fantasy, ‘Dark Angels’ (‘The Shadow Hunt’ in the US), I tried not only to indicate some of the racial and linguistic issues mentioned above, but to investigate 12th century fairy lore, courtesy of Gerald of Wales, Gervase of Tilbury, Walter Map and other 12th century men of letters.  It turns out that the characteristic story of the time was of abductions or journeys into or out of underground fairy kingdoms: The Green Children of Woolpits, Elidyr, Wild Edric; and of ‘dead’ wives being seen with the fairies: Sir Orfeo, The Sons of the Dead Woman.  This supernatural underworld was assumed to be ruled by a king: belief in a sovereign fairy queen – as in the 16th century ballads of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer – seems not to have come till later (perhaps not until Elizabeth Tudor and the literary cult of the Faerie Queene).

Does any of it matter?  Well yes, to me it does: to me it’s worth trying to be faithful to the 12th century experience of the world, which is different from that of later centuries – and interesting in its difference.

But there are occasions when deliberate anachronisms are permissible when writing fiction.  Or at least, I think so, and here’s an example. In my first and second books, Troll Fell and Troll Mill, a lot of the action takes place in a dilapidated old water mill, an important element which I needed to visualise very clearly.  Off I went to visit the local (18th century) watermill up the road, to talk to the miller, who was a knowledgeable enthusiast.  And I learned that in the10th century, watermills were very different. 

You can picture a watermill, can’t you?  An old wooden or stone building with a big, vertical waterwheel turning around and around on its horizontal axle as the water rushes through the mill race?  And if you’ve ever been inside a mill, you’ll have seen the heavy-duty machinery of cogs and gears which turns the horizontal rotation of the axle into a vertical rotation to drive the millstones.  Well, in the 10th century, watermills weren’t like that.  Instead, water would be led from the mill dam down into the mill itself via a long wooden chute, to strike against the paddles of a horizontally-laid wheel whose vertical axle would have disappeared up through the floor of the grinding platform to drive the millstones directly above.  Much simpler.  No cogs, no gears.

It’s not easy to imagine without a diagram, but the point is that a 10th century mill would have looked very different inside and out from the sort that we’re used to picturing.  Trying to describe it would have taken up a lot of space, added nothing to the narrative, and probably confused my readers.  I decided I wasn’t writing a treatise about early water mills.  So the mill in ‘Troll Mill’ is an anachronism – a water mill of the sort that wasn’t seen in Europe for another two hundred years.

Does this contradict what I said earlier?  Isn’t this just part of the Disneyfication process?  Maybe…  But if there are anachronisms in my work, at least I know they’re there.  I chose for them to be there. 

And that, I think, is important.


Katherine Langrish is the author of 'West of the Moon', HarperCollins 2011, a YA fantasy set in the Viking period, and of 'Dark Angels', HarperCollins 2009, set in the 12th century.  Visit her website and her blog Seven Miles of Steel Thistles