Messing About With Books

Hilary Mantel, in her own words, likes to “use real people in real situations.” Her Man Booker Prize-winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies evoke Tudor England so vividly that most readers accept her portrait of Thomas Cromwell as historically accurate. According to one critic, because of her books “millions think of Thomas Cromwell as a much-maligned, misunderstood pragmatist from the school of hard knocks who got precious little thanks for doing Henry VIII’s dirty work.” In fact, argues this critic, he was “a detestably self-serving, bullying monster who perfected state terror in England, cooked the evidence, and extracted confessions by torture”. Where is the truth? What is the responsibility of an author of historical fiction to accurately depict the relevant history?

Some of historical fiction’s popularity stems from reader interest in past events, different from today’s world around them. Setting a novel in a different era lends it a certain exotic air, taking the reader to another time and place. And there’s no denying the past is filled with great stories to stoke the imagination of authors. This richness of settings and characters has led to several types of historical fiction.

One type has famous persons as main characters. The stories can range from epic to personal. Mantel’s books span Reformation England and feature Cromwell, King Henry VIII, and Cardinal Woolsey. At a different scale, Lincoln in the Bardo happens in a single night, describing Abraham Lincoln’s grief over the death of his son. In between, Hamilton is a musical portrait of the American Revolution. While not a novel, it is certainly historical fiction, with the same accuracy responsibilities.

A second type, alternative histories, is a fascinating sub-genre that mostly sidesteps the accuracy question by forking off on a different, imagined historical track. Well-written examples include The Plot Against America by Philip Roth, about what happens when Charles Lindbergh is elected President of the United States in 1940 and collaborates with Nazi Germany; The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, describing what the world was like after the Axis powers, Germany and Japan, won WWII; and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, in which the path to freedom included a literal, physical transport system as well as safe houses and secret routes. What does consciously rewriting history bring to the reader?

Which brings us to the most popular type of historical fiction, where authors set invented characters on the stage of real-life events. Classic examples include Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell; Ken Follet’s Pillars of Earth, a story about the intrigue surrounding the building of a cathedral in 12^th century England; War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy; and A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris during the French Revolution. I could go on and on here, for this type of historical fiction includes some of my favorite novels.

My own historical novel, Once We Were Strangers, falls in this category. Four siblings, displaced from their Ukrainian home by poverty and pogroms, immigrate to North America. Each has their life altered by their participation in one of the great events of the period: the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the internment of Ukrainians by Canada, the invasion of North Russia by the United States, and the Russian Revolution. While the characters are my invention, the world events are not and I’ve put great effort into describing those events as accurately as I can.

Why is that important to me and to my readers? Primarily because my characters are shaped by these events. I’m interested in the interaction between my characters and the world around them. If the world and surrounding events are inaccurately portrayed, I would expect my characters to turn out differently. Maybe that would make a better novel, maybe not. But there are lessons to be learned from and feelings exposed by my story. Distorted history would lead to different lessons and false feelings.

So I’ll avoid alternative histories and do my best to describe what really happened when Canada threw naturalized citizens from Ukraine into forced labor camps in the Rockies; when avaricious factory owners put children to work in dangerous conditions on New York’s Lower East Side; when Woodrow Wilson ordered the US Army to invade Russia at Archangel after the end of WWI to fight against the Communists in the Russian Civil War; or when the Comintern suppressed the rebellion of the sailors at Kronstadt Naval Base. My novel revolves around these events.

Still, I’m not an historian. I write historical fiction, not historical fact. My invented character Leonid’s escape from Castle Mountain Internment Camp and subsequent flight with his family to North Dakota becomes more thrilling when set against the accurately described horrors of his imprisonment. The reunion of Karl and Max next to Trotsky’s armored train deep in the taiga north of St. Petersburg becomes more emotional because the brothers are fighting for opposing armies. My readers shouldn’t need something like an imaginary Wolf Hall or a false view of the Reformation to create setting and motivation for the novel. They are better served by the truth.

A few nights ago, my wife and I were hosting a thank-you dinner for two beta readers of my new novel, Once We Were Strangers. Conversation drifted to my plans for my next project, and I was urged, as I often am, to write a memoir capturing some of the stories from my career-hopping past. Memoirs are hot in publishing these days.

“Nope,” I said definitively. “Not interested in that.”

When pressed, I couldn’t give a good reason for my answer, though I knew that choice was not for me. Now I can and here it is:

First, my life doesn’t seem as interesting or as important as the stories I’ve been writing—about saving bluefin tuna and immigrants in America. The more I became immersed in Strangers, and the more the immigration debate heated up in America, the more I’ve wanted to make this new novel into a compelling book. I think I’ve done that.

Second, fiction is my favorite form of literature, so I write what I like to read, novels and short stories. I recently posted a short story, The Judge, on my website. Tell me what you think of it.

Third, I’m a plottser, not a pantser. A plottser, in the writing trade, is someone who carefully constructs his or her plot before beginning to write, whereas a pantser plunges forward immediately, deciding what happens next by instinct and intuition. With a memoir, I’d miss most of the challenge of assembling characters, settings, and events into a meaningful whole, a part of the writing process that gives me a lot of pleasure.

Finally, at my core I’m a storyteller, and my best stories are fictional. I’ve loved writing Strangers. I think it’s a helluva story, and I can’t wait for you to read it.

Today, I’m a novelist, not a memoirist.

Vladimir Lenin once said, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” My life of late falls into the second bin. I’m sitting now in my new office, trying to catch up.

Since my last post, my wife and I have sold our house of twenty years on New Castle Island and moved to a brand new home in a nearby community. The usual term for what we went through is “downsizing” but we call it hell. Most of the boxes are gone from the main floor, and life is becoming normalized. Where did all that stuff come from?

I’m back to writing. My third novel, Once We Were Strangers, has been through two drafts and I’m in the midst of a third. My indefatigable illustrator Virginia Dickinson is working on cover designs and maps to trace the travels of the main characters. Early reports from beta readers are very positive, but there is much work still to do. If you’re interested in reading an early version and have a Kindle or Kindle app on an iPad or computer, I can send you a copy. In return, I ask only for honest feedback.

In the meantime, I’m posting the opening chapter in the fiction section of this website. Tell me what you think.

Good science fiction needs good science as well as good fiction.

In my first novel, When Comes Such Another, the reality distortion comes from the presence of Whu, a creature from a parallel universe. Within close proximity of him, the normal gravitational rules of our world don’t apply. Stuff tilts, like the house in the illustration on the book’s cover. These gravitational perturbations are proportional to the level of discord, the lack of harmony, among those near him. The perturbations reveal the discord between the characters, often in amusing ways.

Is this really possible? Science fiction requires some suspension of belief by the reader, but the portrayal of an alternate reality must be, to some extent, plausible. Could this actually happen? In those tales set in the future, the implicit assumption is that science has advanced far enough to enable intergalactic time travel and encounters with alien life.

For stories set in the present day, the futuristic science might come from other universes (for example in the movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial) or from new discoveries here on earth (e.g. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein). In both cases of present day settings, the plausibility requirement is especially high. So, in writing my novel, I felt obligated to supply some scientific justification to support the suspension of belief.

That scientific justification is described in the Physics section of the book’s website. Using ordinary English, I explain what is happening. Then I postulate (for those with a mathematical background) some equations that extend today’s understanding of gravity. In my physics-based formulation, space-time becomes crenellated, and when the manifold warps, it becomes possible to jump from one point to another in time. That’s how Whu travels from one universe to another.

Hey, I spent a lot of my life as a theoretical physicist, and this theory leads to some fun scenes in the book. There’s a chapter on the book’s website where the heroine deals with the gravitational changes. Have a read and tell me what you think.

The writing of my first novel actually began twenty-five years before I even thought of doing it. I was carrying my lunch tray, walking out of the cafeteria in the Student Union at the University of Wisconsin, onto the plaza overlooking the lake. Somewhere among that throng of students and faculty was a table full of my friends, but I couldn’t see them. Neither could I hear them, though they saw me and were calling my name.

One of that coterie of physicists and artists who hung out together was Ugo Camerini, an experimental physicist who fled fascist Italy just before World War II. Ugo was a fine scientist with a sharp mind and a sharper wit.  Ugo grew frustrated with my inability to hear their cries of “Mark, Mark”, so he tried a different approach, a European approach.

“Herr Doctor Professor, over here,” he called out.

To my forever regret, that was the moment I heard their cries and turned around. From then on, I was always known in Madison as Herr Doctor Professor.

Skip forward those twenty-five years to a single-digits cold winter night at a farmhouse outside of Fargo, North Dakota. I was visiting my friend Doug Burgum, then a software entrepreneur and now the Governor of North Dakota. Doug asked me to help him put his three young children to bed by telling his daughter Jesse a bedtime story.

I sat on the edge of her bed and invented a tale of creature from a parallel universe that suddenly appeared in the laboratory of a physicist called Herr Doctor Professor by his students and friends. Thus was born the story that became my first novel, When Comes Such Another.

With the kids asleep, Doug and I talked well past midnight, sitting outdoors in the tree house he was building for his children, and I almost forgot the bedtime story. But flying home to New Hampshire the next day, the story came back to me and I started the book that launched my new career as a writer.