Why I Write Historical Fiction

Answering the question ‘Why do you write?’, Margaret Atwood suggested various reasons. Among them were: ‘to record the world as it is’; and ‘to set down the past before it is all forgotten’; and ‘to excavate the past because it has been forgotten.’

This last one is the most interesting for me.

There’s a famous quote from the philosopher, George Santayana, who said: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ And he called the result of that a state of ‘perpetual infancy.’

Edmund Burke said much the same thing, much earlier: ‘People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.’

Those quotes come from 1906 and 1790, so they are themselves now historical artefacts. When we quote them today we are negotiating with the ghosts of the past. So we could justifiably ask, what can Edmund Burke, who lived through the French Revolution and the American Revolution, offer us by way of insight into our twenty-first century world? Although having said that, since Burke is generally regarded as being the founder of the political philosophy of Conservatism, and since he lived through the consequences of pandering to the mob, it would be genuinely fascinating to hear what he thought of Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick or the lunatics who have captured the modern-day Conservative Party. But that’s by the by.

Margaret Atwood continued, giving us more reasons to write: ‘To hold a mirror up to Nature. To hold a mirror up to the readers. To paint a portrait of society and its ills.’

And actually there were a number of other reasons Margaret Atwood suggested for why she writes. But I’ve ignored them. They didn’t fit my purposes here, so I left them out. Is that right? In the interests of accuracy, should I have included them all? For example, she also wrote ‘To help with my depression.’ Maybe that was more important to Margaret Atwood than any other reason, and by omitting that I am misinterpreting her.

Maybe. And if I was writing an academic treatise on Margaret Atwood I would have to be scrupulously fair in how I interpreted her words. But I’m not. I’m a writer of historical fiction, and I use historical events for my purposes. I’m not going to deliberately lie about what happened in the past. I’m not a revisionist historian with malign intent like David Irving, but I have ideas I wish to explore and historical fiction is my means of doing that.

So, for me, historical fiction offers a window on the past and a door to the present.

Walter Benjamin wrote in 1936: ‘Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn.’ Benjamin feared that the art of storytelling was being lost and ‘the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.’

In fact, he went on to suggest that the novel was part of the reason for this slow extinction. What distinguishes the novel from the story, he said, is its ‘essential dependence on the book.’ He explained: ‘What can be handed on orally … is of a different kind from what constitutes the stock in trade of the novel.’ The novel ‘neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it.’

As it happens, I don’t agree with Benjamin on that point, but he does actually lead us towards a truth which is at the heart of why I write historical fiction.

And that is the oral tradition of storytelling. Oral traditions long pre-date written stories because we learned to speak before we could write. As a result, we see traditions throughout the world that are essentially oral in nature, whether that’s African griots or Scottish traveller people.

One of my biggest influences is the Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean. Sorley Maclean was from Raasay and that place infused his work. Its physical beauty, its history and its people’s personal recollections all combined to create a distinctive highland culture, rooted in the Gaelic. For Maclean, the land and its people are deeply intertwined. And so are the past and the present. His greatest work is the poem Hallaig, a lament for the clearances of the highlands and islands in the nineteenth century. In the poem, he sees and hears those people still. They have become birch trees, a ‘straight, slender young rowan.’

They are still in Hallaig,

MacLeans and MacLeods,

all who were there in the time of Mac Gille Chaluim:

the dead have been seen alive.

We navigate our own histories all the time, without realising it. We deal with the ghosts of the past. That phrase, The Ghost of the Past, comes from a poem by Thomas Hardy. And for me, the poem presents a double past. The poem is about the ghosts of the past, in Hardy’s case his dead wife, and the pain that comes from gradually, over time, losing connection with them. The past, or at least your relationship with it, becomes ‘A fitful far-off skeleton/ Dimming as days draw by.’

I loved this poem, and once wrote a – terrible – short story based on it. But that was probably twenty-five years ago. It is a poem about reconciling yourself with the past, but now my memory of that poem is, in itself, in the past. I am not the man I was then. I am my own ghost sifting through my own history.

But back to Sorley MacLean. He talked about reported or received history against oral or lived history, and how these are often – possibly even mostly – not the same. He was very sceptical about received history. The recollections of the cleared Highlanders, for example, or Irish people fleeing famine, were very different from what you read in the history books. Where are their voices? The truth is that a lot of history is silent.

Denise Mina talked about the “Less Dead” – people like sex workers whose murders were deemed less important than those of “decent” women. Read anything on the Yorkshire Ripper murders and you’ll understand the baleful truth of that. But I would say there are also the “Missing Dead”: people whose voices are simply not there in the historical record.

And that is something that is very much at the heart of what I write. I come from a rural, working class background. I’ve now lived in England far longer than I lived in Scotland, so I’ve largely lost my accent, but as a child I was a Scots speaker, more broad, in fact, than most of my peers. And I don’t hear those cadences and rhythms and idioms in the vast majority of literature. When things are written in Scots it tends to be middle class. If it’s working class it tends to be urban – Irvine Welsh, Graham Armstrong, Douglas Stuart. If it’s rural, it tends to be kailyard – Wee McGreegor and the like – glorifying a simpler way of life that never existed.

So my writing is my window on the past. I write about rural working class people. My mither and faither bide in thae books. Their voices, long stilled, may be heard again. The generations connect, the traditions continue.

By focusing on that, that sense of community, the historical novel offers us a way into history that history books cannot. Because historical fiction is centred on people, not events. It gives us not just truth, but emotional truth. Your story may be set in Roman Britain or revolutionary France or the wars of independence or whenever, whatever, but they are, in essence, books about humanity. They try to make history real.

Note, I say ‘try to’. This ‘history’ we talk of is a slippery thing. A significant problem is that history, as Winston Churchill said, ‘is written by the victors’. Except, he didn’t actually say that. He did say something similar. But so did lots of people, Herman Göring – definitely not a victor – included. It’s one of those sayings that you can find examples of everywhere: it’s essentially a truism. But ‘history’ records that it was Churchill who said it.

So we are presented with this quandary: what is history? Hilary Mantel said:

History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.

History, then, is little more than a scaffold. It is a means of avoiding ‘perpetual infancy’. And historical novelists use it to navigate a way into the past and understand it from our present perspective. Shape the way we think. Influence the way we act. History, the present, the future.

Heraclitus said you can’t step in the same stream twice. That’s true. And it’s false. The stream bears on, the same molecules exist, in different combinations, new from old, handing down from posterity into eternity, my memories, my hopes, elisions, decisions, all of them merging with yours, and yours, and yours, and yours and forming, shaping something new, something wonderful. Hamish Henderson gave us this sense of our communities thriving across generations:

Maker, you maun sing them…

Tomorrow, songs

Will flow free again and new voices

Be borne on the carrying stream.

And the carrying stream will bear us all. Our culture will survive. Our hopes will see the morning.