I have been thinking about fiction today; you know, that thing that people do when they have too much time on their hands and do not have the peculiar bent for philosophy.or carpentry. As a species we are fascinated by story, imagined or real, whether it be the tale of bored, suburban housewives leading bored, boring lives or the derring-do on the high seas by Cap'n Jack and his merry band of cut-throats; whether it be tales of impossible gods, and demons, or the impossibly insignificant 'homme quotidien' and his ultimately wasted life; we love tales of courage, bravery and it matters not a jot whether the courageous one is a man or a woman or a rabbit; we adore tales of cowardice, moral turpitude, that slow disintegration of a man, or a woman, or come to that matter a rabbit, into that long, slow shredding of what she, or he, was.
The love of story is, on the face of it, a perfectly natural adjunct to the profound sense of self-awareness human beings have and the acute and sometimes painful knowledge that we have that our lives seldom attain the heights or plumb the depths of what human beings are capable of; we live in a mainly quotidian existence of work, love, babies and the occasional pint down the pub. You may think that you lead an exciting and fulfilling life but in comparison with Sherlock Holmes, Aragorn, Mr Darcy, Scout Finch, Lisbeth Salander, Isabelle, the Marquise de Merteuil, Fiver, Purdy and Pongo, Buck; you do not.*
Fiction, and to a lesser extent non-fiction, although no less powerful for all of the tedious facts cluttering up the place, allow us to vicariously live someone else's life who does attain the heights and plumb the depths of what it means to be human, our emotions and experiences.
However, I have a problem. In a nut-shell; how real should fiction be? Quite obviously, first base must be that the tale should have a fundamental grounding in the world we all know and experience; we would have little interest in a novel entitled 'A day in the life of a bacterium - the world of stimulus and response', although we have little difficulty relating to the higher animals such as mammals, birds, even dinosaurs, suitably anthropomorphised.**
In the realms of science-fiction or fantasy, although all fiction is fantasy to a greater or lesser extent, this 'grounding' is all that is required; it is quite acceptable to have blue grass and red skies in sci-fi, six legged 'horses' and magical swords in fantasy. However, if your tale is outside these strict genres, how much reality should you include or, more importantly, omit; in fact, is it acceptable to omit anything, must you do your research down to the finest levels of details?
I had an idea to continue a story; a story that I wrote earlier in the year as a way of confronting certain demons from my past (or one in particular). In some bizarre fashion, it turned into a perennial question; how do you hurt someone who has lost everything? Give him back something broken. Over the past few months, I decided that I could not leave it at the point at which I originally concluded it and decided to continue it as a love story that is not a love story.
I included various elements into the story because I have a fair degree of pre-existing knowledge about the things discussed; I did not need to do much 'research'. However, quite early on, I decided to include a holiday, a 'Grand Tour', into the plot. I have been around Europe a fair bit and I thought that descriptions of architecture or art from earlier centuries would perhaps be mildly interesting. It was then that I faced my dilemma.
I should be as accurate as I could be in describing the actual buildings or paintings, to be sure, describing the 'Mona Lisa' as a portrait of an eighteenth century, regency dandy painted by Cézanne would serve to do nothing except brand me as surrealist of the worst kind; but what of the itinerary? Where would I stay? How would I get where I am going? Should the route from (a) to (b) be a genuine way of travelling to and from a destination? Should I make any description of such routes conform to the architecture or landscape of the actual route?
Given my minuscule readership should I be even bothering to think about this? And even if my readership were large, would it make any difference to my characters, their reactions, their emotions if I were to have them walk down 'Totallyinvented Allee' on their way to 'Schloß*** Nymphenburg' in Munich or have them eat at 'Das Schwalbennest' in Salzburg?**** I cannot see that it would make a blind bit of difference and yet I am irrevocably drawn to research flight times, hotels, where they are, how you get from (a) to (b), whether there is a good Google street view of the routes I might want to take, consulting maps, finding the nice restaurants etc just in case my memory has faded too far. Why? Who could possibly give a flying fuck?
No-one!
Except me.
And that is surely the reason we do anything; it is always for us, irrespective of any charitable or altruistic intent we might have. (Or perhaps I just have too strong an affinity with novelists who do spend month after month researching their novels!)
Useful factoid #438: I murdered a slug today; it had made its way to my kitchen sink without leaving a trace of its route! (Up the drain?) I killed it with salt (I could have used silica gel or anhydrous copper sulphate but I had none to hand) The slug's body has a higher percentage of water than most animals and an excessively permeable membrane-like skin. The salt literally soaks up all the moisture from the slug; death by dehydration. I was not proud of my feat but slugs (and slime moulds) are two animals I hate the most, contrary to my normal nature-loving persona.
* In case you need help with the literary allusions: Sherlock Holmes, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's detective stories; Aragorn from JRR Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings'; Mr (Fitzwilliam) Darcy from Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice'; Scout Finch, lawyer Artemis Finch's daughter in 'To kill a mockingbird' by Harper Lee; Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larsson's 'Millenium' trilogy; Isabelle, the Marquise de Merteuil from Pierre Laclos' 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses'; Fiver, the rabbit in Richard Adams' 'Watership Down'; Purdy and Pongo, the parents of the 101 dalmatians in Dodie Smith's eponymous novel; Buck the sled dog in Jack London's 'Call of the Wild'.
** Vide, 'Raptor Red' by Robert Bakker. A tale of a Utahraptor in the early Cretaceous period. At least it is broadly factual, if a mite speculatory and with 'confused' timelines; Bakker was one of those responsible for the so-called 'dinosaur renaissance'
*** Should I even worry about whether it is 'Schloß' or 'Schloss' (castle); the Germans have changed their minds so many times that I am terminally confused. The 'ß' is often technically an 'sz' and the symbol is pronounced 'Eszett' in German.
**** Should I worry about the correct gender? Der (m), die (f) or das (n)? (It is neuter, I checked!) This is the name of an actual restaurant where I got drunk more often than I care to (or can) remember, although it was renamed 'Die Karotte' back in the mid-seventies when it became a music venue and is now 'Plateau'. (Neuer Wall 15, am Affentorplatz, in Sachsenhausen, Frankfurt-am-Main, if you are ever in the vicinity.)
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