Monthly Archives: October 2014

When Nobody’s Home

30 Thursday Oct 2014

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Reading historical fiction–or writing it, for that matter–is like settling into a house for the first time. You discover its quirks, the odd angles where surfaces meet, the cranky washing machine, the scuff marks, as well as the pleasing architectural lines, the perfect spot for your favorite chair, or the view from the upstairs window. The house feels lived in, not a backdrop for your life.

In historical fiction, this quality is hard to define precisely, even harder to achieve. Yet I know it when I see it, and I think most readers do too, though we may disagree about which stories have it, and which don’t. Maybe too, we disagree about why. From having read writers’ and readers’ blogs on this subject, I sense that the discussion usually focuses on historical accuracy, and I’m not sure that’s what I’m looking for.

Yes, I want the author to have done her homework, and I resent it if a writer dares enter my historical specialty, my territory, without a passport and gets the facts wrong. What nerve! But when I stop jumping up and down, I see that what really bothers me is how the house she’s built feels like scenery rather than a home. The characters don’t really live there, no matter how many period details surround them like antiques.

An example crossed my path this week, a novel about World War I whose first 150 or so pages narrated the events of July 1914, from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo to the declarations of war. The author wrote as if Europe expected a great war from the get-go (when in fact, nobody did), and she collapsed or reordered key events, either because she hadn’t consulted a reliable source or thought she could up the tension this way.

Whatever the reason, little compelled me to keep turning the pages. But I did anyway, because I wanted to understand what I was missing. Now, I think I know.

To make four main characters prescient about the coming conflict is historically doubtful, but this is fiction, after all. Had they wrestled with competing feelings about duty, what killing would be like, serving their country, pleasing or disappointing their families, whether they were cowards–the possibilities are endless–the book might have succeeded. But these issues, if they appeared at all, were told or explained, not lived through, so the house of this novel felt like a flat backdrop. The characters may have possessed the right kind of bedstead and the proper tea kettle, but they seemed dislocated, as if they were merely passing through and would go somewhere else in a minute.

So I’ll offer this: The historical record matters, but you can get around that if the characters connect to the time. Conversely, the history may be top-notch, but unless the people move through it as if they belong, there’s no tension, no fullness, and no story.

What do you think?

Looking for a Home, and Himself

27 Monday Oct 2014

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Review: The Lie, by Helen Dunmore
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2014. 294 pp. $25

“A memory like mine is more a curse than a blessing. It cuts into the past, as sharp as a knife, and serves it up glistening.” So observes Daniel Branwell, a British soldier returned to his native Cornish village in 1920, where he hopes to make a life after the Great War.

But Daniel has no home he may call his own, living in a cottage informally bequeathed him by an elderly woman whom he tended in her final illness. He worries that he’ll be turned off her property and prosecuted for having buried her on her land, as she wished, instead of the village cemetery.

From this seemingly modest premise, Helen Dunmore has created a page-turner of extraordinary depth and beauty, which has touched me ever since I finished it and probably will for a long time. Daniel’s homelessness is a metaphor for his struggles to find a place in the world, which have plagued him all his life; I love novels whose premise is itself a powerful, elegant image. But Dunmore takes this further, for her protagonist has an even more serious problem, an inability to find a resting place within himself.

Daniel’s sharp memory overwhelms him. The rocks, the sea, the pathways around the village, everything reminds him of Frederick, his closest boyhood friend who was killed in France, while he, Daniel, survived. Frederick’s sister, Felicia, Daniel’s first love, still lives in the village, which brings up more memories. But usually, he relives the war, which Dunmore renders mostly in words of one or two syllables, as with this passage, which narrates his thoughts during a visit to Felicia, now a war widow with a young child:

This is what we dreamed of, in France. Fire, and four walls, dry feet, a belly warm with food. Children’s toys on the floor. We talked about such things as if they were gone from the earth. You couldn’t believe in them. I still can’t, even though I’m here. I say Frederick’s name, but the room doesn’t answer.

The many lyrical passages like this convey Daniel’s longing, his pain, and, elsewhere, his rage–at the world, for passing him by, or the villagers, who treat him like an intruder, a shameful reminder of what they themselves escaped. But his trauma seems a quiet desperation, even when he’s reliving blood and thunder, the sort of understatement I find more compelling than the sound and fury that so often describes a mind torn by combat.

Perhaps most impressive about The Lie is the author’s range. I had read two historical thrillers of hers, The Siege and The Betrayal (can we say Dunmore likes simple titles?), which, though excellent, differ from this novel.

Do read The Lie. I haven’t been as moved by a novel about the First World War, one of my favorite subjects, since I finished A Long, Long Way, by Sebastian Barry.