THOUGHTS, DREAMS & ACTION

If we’re going to get through the next few years, we need a change of narrative so profound that our entire culture changes direction.  We need not just new stories, but a whole new shape to what a story is. And it will start with our writing.

THOUGHTS   |   DREAMS   |   ACTION

If we’re going to get through the next few years, we need a change of narrative so profound that our entire culture changes direction.  We need not just new stories, but a whole new shape to what a story is. And it will start with our writing.

The lying art of historical fiction

Well yes… whenever we authors write a new book, our publicists ask us to write pieces for newspapers that are tangentially linked to the topic/genre of the book so that we get what is, in effect, a half page of free advertising and they get copy from someone who, they hope, will be a Big Name one day soon (if not already)

So cue this piece in the Grauniad (for my American readers, that’s a left-ish leaning (but Blair-supporting) UK newspaper, the Guardian, which is famed for its hopeless proof reading, and which was once known to miss-spell its own name in a title somewhere. Or so I’m told. Certainly the proof reading used to be atrocious. It’s rather better now, in the era of auto-spellcheckers)

Anyway, author write historical novel, Author then writes piece for the Guardian about… historical fiction.

Interesting snippet here:

A clear distinction needs to be made here between telling lies and making mistakes. A lie is intentional and purposeful; a mistake is accidental and sometimes unforgivable. One highly acclaimed and commercially successful recent novel had on page three the statement that there were “no priests within a three-day ride”. Taking into consideration the time of year and the location of this statement, I calculated there were between five and eight thousand priests within “a three-day ride” in that year. I could not carry on reading when I realised that author’s vision of 14th-century England was so far from my own. One can make mistakes and not lose the reader: Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth has many people of low status eating breakfast regularly, even though in the 12th century very few people would have had anything to eat before their main meal of the day (and those who did were high-status individuals). Yet Follett’s book is so well thought through in other respects that the breakfast issue becomes a minor quibble.

For me, the question of veracity is always relevant, but difficult to pin down.  When it was known that I was writing the Boudica series, I had conversations with historians in both camps of the ‘where did the Romans land?’ controversy and each side desperately wanted me to write their version of the ‘facts’. In the end, I sat down with a map and some tide tables and some scale models of boats and worked out that they had to have landed at both locations (at the mouth of the Medway in Kent, and on the south coast sheltered by the Isle of White – realising that the coast line has changed out of all recognition in the past 2000 years) and very likely a third location as ennumerated in a paper with the glorious title ‘Sentius Saturninus and the Invasion of Britain’ which postulated a 3rd landing at York. The fact that I can remember this a decade later is testament not to my geekishness (OK, that, too) but mainly to the heated nature of the arguments between different historians.

SO…. history is not a single truth, it’s more or less what we make it in our interpretation of what small pieces of incontrovertible fact we have.  In the more recent books, I think I’ve found a plausible story for the historical basis for Christ. I think the narrative we have, is based on a concatenation of one death and two lives.

The death is of one man, Judas the Galilean, aka Judas of the Sicarioi – the 1st century equivalent of the Taliban- whose crucifixion Saul aka St Paul, transformed into a noble sacrifice.

The Sermon on the Mount was given by someone, and I don’t think it was a first century insurgent, but it may well have been his brother, Yacov, aka James the Just, the Peacemaker who led his ‘Assembly’ for around 30 years until his own death in AD62 at the hands of the Sanhedrin. James was a Nazirite, given to the Hebrew god at birth; he was pacifist, vegetarian, celibate and known for his godliness. If we’re looking for someone to be the ‘Master’ referred to in the Gospel of Thomas, he could well be that man.

But I don’t think either of these rode into Jerusalem on the back of an ass, proclaiming himself King – that was Menachem, Judas’ grandson, who raided the armoury at Masada, armed his men and took Jerusalem by force  – and then rode in proclaiming his kingship. He held it, too, for a while.  (at least, according to Jospehus, and I can’t think why he’d lie in this particular instance)

So we take three lives, squish them into one and you have the mutually inconsistent gospels which people have been trying to make sense of ever since.

And the rest of us, can write what we choose, because our reality is real for us.  Discuss….

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