Writers

Review: Restless

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William Boyd’s Restless won the Costa Novel Award in 2006, and when I found a copy in our small library in Sicily (it had probably been left by a guest), I decided I had to read it.  The reviews on the cover were effusive in their praise.  For example, The Times was quoted on the front cover as saying: “Boyd is a first-rate storyteller and this is a first-rate story . . . An utterly absorbing page-turner.”

The setting of the novel is the early years of World War II, when Britain and Russia were fighting against Nazi Germany alone, and the US had not entered the war.  The central female characters are Eva Delectorskaya and her daughter, Ruth.  The chapters alternate between Ruth telling her side of the story, in the first person, from 1947 onwards, and Eva’s story being told in the third person from 1935 until 1941.  Ruth does not know her mother as Eva; she knows her as Sally Gilmartin, née Fairchild.  She also didn’t know that her mother was half Russian, half English, and was living in Paris, age 28, when the war broke out in 1939.  The principal male character is Lucas Romer, who recruits Eva into a special branch of the British Secret Service.  Eva is beautiful and fluent in Russian, English and French.  After being recruited and trained in Scotland, one expects that Eva will be parachuted into France to work alongside the French resistance.  But we learn – partly through the files that Eva/Sally passes to her daughter and partly from Eva herself – that she has been recruited into an organisation which attacks Germany through the media.  The stories that the organisation places are sometimes fabrications and sometimes exaggerations or little-noticed Nazi misdeeds. In 1940, the organisation, including Lucas and Eva, move to New York City, where their focus shifts to persuading a reluctant American people to join the war against Germany.  Eva and Lucas become lovers, and for Eva, Lucas is the perfect secret agent: brilliant, and devious, but devastatingly attractive.  Of course, they succeed in persuading the White House to go to war, but just before Pearl Harbor, Eva is sent on a mission during which she is nearly killed.  Suspecting everyone, including Lucas, she goes onto hiding: first in Canada and then in England.  Years later, as an old woman, she persuades Ruth to help her unmask the traitor.

What could be a better story?

What I particularly liked about it was the subversive activity involving the use of the media.  One wouldn’t expect media people to be literally assassins, but when one is a traitor and one has to prevent something from happening, one uses strong measures.  The daughter who doesn’t know the truth about her mother, who discovers it during the course of the novel, and who collaborates with her in realising the conclusion, is another appealing feature.  The story is very well-written – not in a literary style – but in straight-forward, clear language.

The only faults I could find were what seemed to be a little bit of ‘filler material’ about Ruth’s occupation: teaching English as a second language to business people.  I also wasn’t clear about what actually happened during Ruth’s nearly-fatal mission.  Somehow, it didn’t all fit together.

But having said that Restless is a first rate thriller, and if you decide to pick it up, be sure you haven’t any pressing engagements: it’s difficult to put it down.

Book review: Aleph

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I’ve been on holiday in Sicily for almost three weeks, so I had some time to do a little reading.  (The weather, the sea, the beaches and, most importantly, the company were all very nice.)  At the news stand/book store in the main square of Capo d’Orlando, I had a look through their collection of English language books, which are to be found in the darkest inner recesses of the store, mixed in with German language books. Aleph, by Paulo Coelho, a popular and well-regarded Brazilian author, caught my eye.  I had read his Eleven Minutes some time ago, and I was impressed.  It is the allegorical story of a young girl who, through her failures to achieve true love, goes to Switzerland where she becomes a successful prostitute.  But then she meets and falls in love with Ralf, an artist with whom she falls in love, and she discovers sacred sex: a mixture of sex and love in which one gives up one’s soul for the loved one.  Thought provoking and a very nice story.

Aleph is written in the first person, and it is, at one level, an interesting story about a trip across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway.  At the allegorical level it is Paulo Coelho’s complex exploration of self discovery.

The train trip seems to involve the author himself: he reports on his interactions with his publishers, editors, journalists and readers in a very modest yet engaging way.  One sympathises with his hardships: lack of sleep, the cold and bad-tempered colleagues.  I found it easy to wish that I, too, were on that hellish train just for a chance to meet Paulo Coelho.

But the ‘meat’ of the story involves a perceived sin that Paulo committed in an earlier life: as an official in the Spanish Inquisition, he failed to testify to the innocence of several young women who were then burned alive.  One of the young women has been reincarnated as Hilal, a young Turkish woman who believes that her life depends on making contact with him.  Diligently, she tries to establish a relationship with him without really understanding her own motivation.  Paulo learns in a sequence of dreams what he did.  She forgives him unconditionally and unknowingly, and he finally declares his sin to her, and is able to persuade her to get on with her own life as a concert violinist.

The ‘Aleph’ is a condition where all things in the universe and all time are able to converge at one point.  It represents perfect enlightenment.  Paulo and Hilal are almost in an Aleph at a certain point between the carriages of the train.

Interestingly, there is no sex between Paulo and Hilal: not that he isn’t tempted and that she isn’t willing.  At one point, she appears naked to him and he remembers her naked before the Inquisition.  The only difference being that then she had pubic hair, but now she is shaved.  He comments negatively (and quite rightly, I think) on the popularity of women shaving.

This is quite an interesting novel.  The trip, the characters, their relationships, and the actual events are all captivating.  And Coelho’s writing style is both engaging and clear.  The problem for me with this book is that I don’t believe there is such a thing as an aleph, nor do I believe that, if there is such a thing as reincarnation, we carry a debt from one life to another.  It’s another example of my literal mind getting in the way!

Writers without a Genre

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Iain Banks, a Scottish “novelist of hallucinatory brilliance who attracted notoriety with his grotesque and bizarre tales” died last week at the age of 59.  His obituary in The Daily Telegraph says that until his first book, The Wasp Factory, appeared, he “plastered the walls of his room with rejection slips”.  I know the feeling!  The Wasp Factory was a controversial first novel which brought Banks notoriety (1984).  “Even before its appearance, one publisher claimed that the book had made him vomit into his waste paper basket.  It had a similarly emetic effect on many reviewers: ‘a repulsive piece of work’; ‘silly, gloatingly sadistic’; ‘a work of unparalleled depravity’ were among the judgements of the newspapers.  Many, though, also conceded the hallucinatory brilliance of the author’s imagination, and there was widespread acknowledgement that Banks’ control of tone and language were more assured than that of many established novelists.”

“The defining qualities of Banks’ novels, whether mainstream or genre, remained a macabre black humour and a taste for the bizarre and the Gothic. . . . In 1987 he published Consider Phlebas, the first of the Culture novels; thereafter there was, for a time at least, a clearer distinction between his science fiction output and his more conventional novels, which tended to appear in alternative years.  His space operas, which combined political musings, scientific speculation, mordantly funny asides (the names of the artificially intelligent spaceships were a long-running joke), and violent, frequently gruesome action sequences, brought him a new, large and enthusiastic fan base.”

My reaction is that Banks was one of those rare novelists who had two distinct audiences: a mainstream audience and a science fiction audience, although it has to be said that some of his works had their feet planted in both camps.  One recent commentator expressed the view that “not since Robert Louis Stevenson, has a writer so successfully bridged multiple genres”.  As a child, I was a fan of Robert Louis Stevenson; I liked Treasure Island and Kidnapped, and I thought of him as a clever novelist.  I decided to look him up, and I found that he, too, was a Scot.  His Wikipedia listing has him as a “novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer.”  In fact, Stevenson wrote twelve published novels, five collections of short stories, six uncollected short stories, five volumes of poetry, seven volumes of travel writing, and a long list of essays and other works.  In addition to all that, Stevenson ” wrote over 123 original musical compositions or arrangements, including solos, duets, trios and quartets for various combinations of flageolet, flute, clarinet, violin, guitar, mandolin, and piano.”

Unfortunately, he died at the age of 44, probably of a stroke, having suffered from poor health for much of his life.  With the rise of ‘modern literature’ after World War I, Stevenson was seen as a second class writer, specialising in children’s literature and the horror genre.  The 1973 edition of the Oxford Anthology of English Literature (2000 pages) does not even mention Stevenson.  But later in the 20th century, his reputation began to re-ascend with recognition of his literary skill and imaginative powers.  Setting the critics aside, he is the 26th most translated author in the world.

So, sometimes specialisation is not necessary.

The Hare with Amber Eyes

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I’ve just finished reading The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund De Waal.  It was highly recommended by my cousin, Peggy, and it won the 2010 Costa Biography Prize and was a Sunday Times best seller.  I dutifully bought a copy and read in during a recent trip to Sicily.  In many ways it is a fascinating book.
The hare in the title is a small ivory netsuke from a collection acquired by the author’s great grandfather’s cousin in Paris in the second half of the 19th century.  Netsuke are small, precious, hand-carved and polished figures of animals and people, made in Japan by skilled craftsmen of ivory or unique hard wood, like boxwood.  The collector, Charles Ephrussi (born 1849), was from an extremely wealthy Jewish family originating in the Ukraine.  The family made their money buying and selling grain from the Ukraine and later in a banking empire.  The story traces the lives and life styles of the family from Odessa in the Ukraine to Paris to Vienna to Tokyo to London (where the author now lives) alongside the collection of 264 netsuke that were passed through the family.  The collection is quite extraordinary in that all 264 pieces of the original collection have survived several transfers between family members, including temporary custody under the mattress of a ladies maid during the Nazi occupation.  The pieces, while extremely valuable as a collection were also very precious to their various custodians.
But it is not the netsuke which take centre stage in this story, which is really about the lives (good times and bad) of the family members.  Particularly fascinating are the descriptions of the life styles in the second half of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century.  They are life styles which we would not recognise today.  For the family, things started to go very wrong with the rise to power of the Nazis.  But post-war, with family members scattered through Europe, America and Japan, lives became stable and even improved.
The book strikes one as a very learned biography.  It is erudite, and colourfully descriptive, with an extensive vocabulary and frequent phrases in French or German.  But it is the descriptions of people’s daily habits, their attitudes, priorities, activities, dress, etc., in the various cities over a period of 15 decades which are most fascinating. 
The family characters are real, but they seem suitably distant and untouchable.  We know them from a distance.  The descriptions of settings and the author’s reflections on what he has learned are sometimes too copious, but I suppose the author wants to immerse us in the results of his very extensive research, from which he, himself, took great pains and satisfaction.  In fact, I find it rather startling that De Waal was able to take two years away from his family (married with three children) and his occupation (world-famous ceramic artist) to do all the necessary research.  But he deserves our thanks for creating a fascinating biography and a literary treat.

Are Women Writers Disadvantaged?

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There’s an article in today’s The Daily Telegraph headed “It’s the same old story of women writers, claims novelist“.  The article, written by Rosa Silverman, is as follows:

Women writers remain disadvantaged by a male dominated literary world in which men do not want them to succeed, a female novelist has claimed.  Elizabeth Jane Howard, who wrote the Cazalet tetralogy, said that female authors suffered “a hard time politically and sexually”, suggesting little had changed since the 19th century.  Jane Austin was “respectfully received” but others such as George Eliot had to disguise their names for “a better chance of being taken seriously,” she noted.  Almost two centuries on, writers such as JK Rowling and AS Byatt did the same, possibly for similar reasons, she said.  Howard, 90, who was married to the author Kingsley Amis, said that instead of allowing women to succeed on their merits, the world of male critics and editors “scratch each other’s backs.  I think men are more sympathetic to the work of men,” she said.  “They find domestic, emotional matters more difficult.”  The writer VS Naipaul was among those who have expressed the views to which she  was referring, Howard said.  In a 2011 interview, he dismissed women writers as “unequal” to him and criticised their sentimentality.  Howard, whose fans include Hilary Mantel, who has won the Man Booker Prize twice, added: “I think at higher levels, a talented male writer would have an easier journey than a talented female writer, who might very well get bad reviews.”  Although there are signs that men’s perceptions are changing for the better, the general position of women around the world “is showing no signs of improving”, she added.  Howard, who won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for her first novel, The Beautiful Visit in 1951, said: “Women are not starting from an equal position.  People say that because they have got the vote, the problem is over.”

I would be very interested in what my readers think of Ms. Howard’s views.

I think that she almost certainly has a point, but that she overstated her case.  I think it is wrong to imply that women writers are as ill-received now as they were two hundred years ago.  It’s also not clear to me that Rowling and Byatt used their initials rather than their first names to prevent discrimination.  After all, it is very difficult to hide one’s gender in today’s world (behind initials, or almost anything else).  As I may have said elsewhere, I think that women are definitely better at expressing emotion than men (part of the DNA?).  If one accepts that this is true, would it be fair to say that women tend to choose themes which allow them the liberty to display their superiority?  And would it also be fair to say that men find this superiority uncomfortable?  If so, this may account for Ms. Howard’s perception that male critics and editors discriminate against women.

I don’t think it’s accurate to say that women writers suffer “a hard time politically and sexually”.  They don’t seem to be suffering sexually.  What male author can match the success of E L James Fifty Shades of Grey?  And what do politics have to do with writing?  I would have said that “women writers may suffer discrimination professionally and socially.”

It seems to me it is an exaggeration to say that the general position of women around the world “is showing no signs of improving”.  I would argue that women writers are winning more recognition in the West, where there is a greater appreciation of the expressive skills of women.  In the Middle East and in Asia, progress may be slower, but I have the impression that women are finding greater professional recognition in many fields.

What do you think?

Lost City Radio

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My wife and I recently returned from a trip to Peru.  More on this later.

Knowing that we were going to Peru, one of my sons-in-law gave me a novel, Lost City Radio, to read.  It is the first novel by Daniel Alarcon, who was born in Peru and raised in Birmingham, Alabama.  The novel is set in a country which is not identified, but from some geographic and political clues is probably Peru.

It takes place during a time of violent political revolution that sounds like the Shining Path revolution which gripped Peru.  Many people are missing.  Its central character, Norma, hosts a talk show, ‘Lost City Radio’, which takes calls from listeners who describe their lost loved ones in hopes that another listener will provide information on the lost one’s whereabouts. Norma is married to Rey, who is a biologist with a keen interest in the medicinal properties of jungle plants.  He has been drawn into the revolutionary camp and is an enemy of the government.  For ten years, Rey disappears from Norma’s life, but she doesn’t dare to describe him on the air for fear that this will compromise him.  Instead, she continues a lonely life in the city and at the radio station, until an eleven-year-old boy and a strange man arrive at the radio station from the jungle.  Norma makes the connection between the boy and Rey, and this gives her the courage to talk about Rey on air.

Most of the reviews of this novel are very complementary.  They say that it depicts war and human reactions to it movingly and well.  War is senseless, yet people struggle to make sense of their lives in the wake of it.  This is all correct.  The novel has a mysterious vagueness about its setting, the passage of time, the characters, their relationships and motivations which tend to make the novel a universal rather than a specific statement.

On the one hand, I can appreciate the reason for this vagueness, but, for me, it had its drawbacks.  I found it difficult to connect with any of the shadowy characters at an emotional level – or even intellectually.  When I finished it, I thought: “Interesting book, but kind of frustrating.”

About Peru: it’s a beautiful, fascinating country.  We spent a week above 10,000 feet, which was difficult.  I wasn’t really sick, but I had very little energy or positive spirits.  Much of the landscape is beautiful: the Cola and Urubamba Valleys, Lake Titicaca.  Manchu Picchu is awesome in its beauty and its sense of mysterious community.  The Incas were incredible stone masons.  Working without iron tools, they cut huge blocks of granite with extraordinary precision.  One thing thing that was off-putting was the decorations in the (Catholic) churches.   Nearly every church had elaborately dressed figures of various saints.  I thought, “Is this a monotheistic religion?”  And in the cities, particularly Cuzco, the use of real gold (an 8 pound solid gold crown of thorns) and silver (life sized statue of the Virgin Mary made of silver) was obscene.  Wouldn’t it have been better to give that money to the poor, of which there are plenty?

But I recommend a trip to Peru, and a read of Lost City Radio.

Wine and Literature

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Last week my wife and I went to the Piedmont region of Italy.  There were several reasons for this trip.  First of all, my wife wanted to see two cousins whom she hadn’t seen in twenty-five years.  The cousins live in Turin, and they are the daughters of my wife’s mother’s sister.  As girls, the three of them used to be very close, but my wife is from Milan and we live in London, so there wasn’t much chance to get together.  I’m glad they did, because it was a very happy reunion.

We also went to visit two wineries, from which my wife’s business buys wine, and, since it is the time of the white truffle festival, we visited a major buyer and seller of Piedmont’s unique and most expensive export: the white truffle.  Last Friday night I had a plate of plain tagliatelle sprinkled with Parmesan cheese and seven grams of truffles.  It was so good that I didn’t mind the price of €45!

But for me, the highlights of the trip were the visits to the wineries, and our exploration of the Barolo family of wines over dinner.  The wineries we visited were Ascheri, a small, family-owned producer of a quarter of a million bottles per year, and Fontana Fredda, a large-scale, multi-brand producer of seven million bottles per year.  At each winery, we were conducted through the winery, and treated to a wine tasting followed by a very pleasant lunch.

As the wine connoisseurs amongst you will know, Piedmont is famous for the wines produced from its nebbiolo grape, and in the countryside, every available hillside is covered with rows of vines.  The vines may all be the nebbiolo grape, but, at this time of year, some of the leaves have turned red or yellow and some are still quite green.  It all depends on the subspecies of the grape and the all-important terroir – that French term which refers to the soil, the landscape and climate, temperature and precipitation profiles, and the exposure to the sun.  The most expensive wine (about €50 retail for a good bottle) is Barolo, but Barolo has several cousins: Berbera, Babaresco, Dolcetto and Nebbiolo – all from 100% nebbiolo grape.  The difference is down to terroir and the wine-making process.  It is not possible, either legally or practically, to produce a Barolo from an estate which produces Barbaresco.  The wines may look and taste slightly similar, but an expert (not I) can immediately tell a Barolo from a Barbaresco.

All of this got me thinking about the similarities between making wine and producing literature.  Of course most literature is simple trash, and most wine is cheap table wine.  In both cases, not much effort is required to produce it.  But the subtleties become apparent as we move up scale.  To produce a good Barolo requires a special terroir.  The production of a good novel requires a well-educated, experienced and imaginative writer.  There is considerable knowledge and expertise required to maintain the vines in a Barolo estate, and to manage the production of the wine.  How should the vines be pruned?  How long shoul the crushed grapes be soaked.  How long the fermaentation?  At what temperature?  How long to age in steel vats, in oak, in the bottle.  There is much that a good writer has to know about language, grammar, plotting, characterisation, setting,  etc.  Another point is  common is how the end product will be received.  One person may find a particular book or a bottle of wine to be excellent.  Someone else may find the book and the bottle not to their liking.  And some of the success (or the lack of it) is down to luck.  Too much rain just before the harvest can spoil a vintage; an initial bad review can spoil the prospects of a good novel.

Finally, in both producing a fine wine and in writing an excellent novel, both art and science  are required.  It has to be said, however, that making a fine wine is becoming steadily more scientific in the sense that causes and their effects are better understood.  It seems to me that the trend may be in the other direction for literature: less traditional and more artistic/innovative.

Your opinions on this subject are welcome!

The Novelist as Psychologist?

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The short, imprecise answer is that a novelist is also a psychologist, assuming that s/he is writing about human characters (or characters with human characteristics).

The definition of a psychologist, according to my dictionary is “a person who has (knowledge of) and is qualified in the study of the mind and behaviour.”  This seems like a pretty broad definition.  In fact, the American Psychological Association has 56 divisions in its membership.  The one respect in which most novelists would not be considered psychologists is in the word ‘qualified’.  Very few of us have a degree (particularly the required advanced degree) in psychology.  But that doesn’t prevent us (and most of our fellow human beings) from acting as psychologists.  Hands up! those of us who have never given advice to a friend or family member on how to handle a troublesome acquaintance/colleague/friend/lover/family member.

There are generally considered to be two categories of psychologists: applied and research.  Researchers use scientific methods to learn more about the functioning of the human mind.  Since a novel is, by definition, fictional, it is not suitable for the scientific method.  This would seem to disqualify novelists from being amateur research psychologists.  However, there may be some of my colleagues who believe that they have discovered, and have published, an interesting parameter of human behaviour.

If we consider the applied category, it seems that there are two sub-categories here: teachers (those who pass on to others their knowledge of psychology) and practitioners (those who ‘work with patients in a variety of therapeutic contexts’).  To me, it seems doubtful that many novelists write with the purpose of giving insight and relief to troubled individuals.  However, for example, a troubled reader may recognise himself as Josef K. in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and he may draw some useful conclusions from that recognition.

So, for me, novelists if they are amateur psychologists at all, fall into the ‘applied’ category, not exactly as teachers but as practitioners who provide us with insights of the human mind and character.  Wikipedia points out that psychologists explore such concepts as personality, the workings of the mind, emotion, motivation, interpersonal relationships, cognition, perception and the unconscious.  Novelists also work with these concepts to create characters and situations which may enlighten us, but mostly they entertain us.

Women & Sex

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The Daily Telegraph reported yesterday on remarks made by the author, Martin Amis, at the Hay Festival.  The Telegraph said, “With his penchant for pot-stirring statements about feminism, Martin Amis earned a reputation as a misogynist.  Now the author has declared that women make better writers – at least when it comes to sex.  Female writers are more ‘sincere’ about expressing emotion, Amis said.”

The Telegraph quoted Amis as saying: “Let me venture a distinction between men’s writing and women’s writing.  There is a difference between real sincerity and literary sincerity. . . I would say there’s a bit more song in women’s writing, there’s more real sincerity in women’s writing.  And before I tiptoe away from this, I’d say the reason why women write better about sex – which is almost impossible to write about and no one has done it very well, ever – is that as a novelist you are in a God-like relation to what you create.  You are omnipotent and the question of potency is embarrassing for men.  It is the great hidden weakness in men, that potency can fail, and it’s not something that troubles women.  They have a lot else to worry about, but not that.  So once a man is writing a sex scene he’s feeling omnipotent, and he’s forgotten about all those fiascos and no-shows.  But women don’t and they write better about it.”

I think that Amis has several fairly valid points here.  The first is the writer assumes an omnipotent relationship to the novel he is creating.  S/he alone creates it.  The second point is that the subject of potency is potentially embarrassing for men – but not for women.  It seems to me that this is true for biological and psychological reasons.  It follows that male writers in their omnipotent state do not like writing about failed sexual experiences.  As I reflect on the sexual scenes I have written, there are only two where the male performs unsatisfactorily.  In Sin & Contrition there is the honeymoon scene involving Bettina and her new husband.  And there is the wedding night scene involving a 15 year old Afghan boy and his 23 year old wife in my fourth novel which is not yet published.

I think I understand what Amis is trying to say about ‘real sincerity’ in women’s writing.  I think he means that, in general, women are more in touch with their feelings than men are.  But I don’t believe that this is universally true.  I think it is true that, in general, a woman’s emotional response to a given situation is likely to be more loving and forgiving than a man’s.  But again, it is not universally true.

I think that the sincerity of women’s writing about sex has more to do with the whole spectrum of emotions of the relationship.  Men’s sincerity is more about excitement, illicitness, eroticism and conquest.

Perhaps we should learn from each other if we are able to write about it ‘very well’.

The Novelist as Historian?

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Can a novelist also be an historian?  There are plenty of historical novels published every year, and some of them are very popular.  Some of them may even be quite accurate in representing the events, the culture, lifestyle, technology, and even the key personalities of the subject time frame.

I very much enjoyed reading the Sharpe series of novels by Bernard Cornwell.  Richard Sharpe was a fictional soldier, then an officer, in the British Army from about 1790 to 1810.  The novels follow his progress from raw recruit (his mother was a woman of easy virtue in East London) until he is a lieutenant colonel at the  Battle of Waterloo.  He overcomes many obstacles (military, romantic and social) on and off the battlefields in India, Portugal, Spain, France and Belgium.  I didn’t read the novels as history, although the descriptions of the battles are said to be very accurate, and that Cornwell carefully researched his material.  What I enjoyed about the novels were Sharpe’s talent for surviving  in difficult situations and Cornwell’s array of good and bad characters.

I also enjoyed the Aubrey-Maturin series of novels by Patrick O’Brien.  Captain Jack Aubrey had command of a Royal Navy ship during the Napoleonic Wars, and Stephen Maturin was the ship’s surgeon and Aubrey’s good friend.  The 2003 film Master and Commander: the Far Side of the  World  with Russell Crowe as Captain Aubrey drew material from several of O’Brien’s novels.  Most of these novels reached the New York Times best seller list, and were acclaimed internationally.  Again, I didn’t read these novels for their historic content; I enjoyed reading how Aubrey and Maturin would triumph in the face of adversity.  My impression is that the descriptions of life aboard Royal Navy ships in 1800 is quite accurate as far as it goes.  Winston Churchill once described shipboard life at the time as “rum, sodomy and the lash”.  There was undoubtedly more to it than that brief, brutal summary.  O’Brien does mention the daily (and coveted) ration of grog (rum) issued to the crew, and there are several passages dealing with floggings (which neither Aubrey nor O’Brien, apparently, liked.)  But sodomy is never mentioned, and it must have been prevalent among all male crews from poor, illiterate backgrounds who were cooped up on board ship for years at a time.  In fact, the scene which O’Brien paints is of a very hard but somewhat romantic life.  That’s fair enough; would we be anxious to read about the true brutality of the life?  For example, falls from the rigging were quite common on sailing men of war.  The consequences of such falls were usually severe if the sailor landed on the deck below, and almost always fatal if he fell into the water: rescuing a man overboard was not the norm.

As an author, I have occasionally inserted historic material into my novels.  For example, there are LaMarr’s tours of Vietnam and Somalia as an enlisted man and an officer in Sin & Contrition.  But these passages are not intended to be read as history, but rather as the setting for events in the life of a character.

On the Institute of Historical Research website there is this commentary:

“The relationship between academic history and historical fiction is a subject of great interest to historians. Major academic conferences . . . have included papers and sessions on the subject, and they are proving among the most lively and well attended. There are numerous examples of historians who have successfully moved into the sphere of fiction, and conversely of authors whose fiction is underpinned by rigorous research. The large and growing public interest in history in Britain takes in both historical fact and historical fiction. And it is clear that many historians were at least in part inspired to pursue historical research by novels that they had read, or indeed are currently either planning to write or are writing their own works of fiction.”

It goes on to raise the following questions:

  • “Why have historical novels become ‘respectable’, and why anecdotally are historians being encouraged to write them?
  • What is the difference between historical fiction and academic history, and how rigid are the boundaries between the two?
  • How good are readers at differentiating between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ and how much does it matter if they don’t?
  • Does the success of historical fiction benefit or threaten academic history, and what can literary authors and academics learn from each other?”

Perhaps I am a purist, but I believe it is very important to distinguish fact from fiction.  Some of the most egregious examples of fiction parading as fact are the history text books for children in communist states.  These text books of ‘history’ inflate the government’s successes, and, if they deal with failings of the state at all, the picture is rosy and sugar-coated.  How are we (and, more particularly our children) to learn right from wrong if we are intentionally told lies with a smiling face?