Pub quizzes are evil.
I’m still haunted by an evening ten years ago, when havingfailed to contribute anything on the subjects of baseball teams, Big Brother contestants, or theprivate life of Bjork, I was finally asked which Shakespeare play opens withthe line ‘If music be the food of love, play on’? ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ saidour quiz veteran, ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ guessed the others, but I pulled rank asan ex-English teacher because I just KNEW it was ‘Twelfth Night’. The quiz ended,I folded my arms smugly, and heard the answer read out as – ‘Love’s Labour’sLost’.
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| I was right... |
It’s wrong. Just wrong. I argued with the quizmaster, butwas answered only by a shrug and the unchallengeable statement ‘That’s what itsays on the sheet.’
Obviously I’m far, far too mature to allow such a thing torankle after ten years, but I’ve never forgotten that phrase. We’re surroundedby the kind of sub-knowledge it represents - popular misconceptions, urbanmyths, what ‘Everyone Knows’ and no-one knows at all. To perform successfullyin tests of popular knowledge you need to suppress what you do know in favour of What It Says On TheSheet. You need to believe Benjamin Franklin invented electricity, that batsare blind, that lemmings deliberately jump off cliffs, and Columbus lived in asociety that believed the world was flat. When asked ‘Who invented the lightbulb?’ you must forget Joseph Swan (or any of the other possible 20 candidatesfor the honour) and dutifully write ‘Thomas Edison’. That is how you win.
But what if you’re a historical novelist, what then?
In many ways it’s easier. It’s part of our job descriptionto challenge the stereotypes, and readers expect it of us. Most will begenuinely interested to discover that Napoleon wasn’t short, Cleopatra wasactually Greek, and that Marie-Antoinette was only ten years old when Rousseau wrote the phrase ‘let them eat cake’. Aslong as they don’t attempt to use this new-found knowledge in pub quizzes theneveryone’s happy.
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| Not short... |
The devil, however, really is in the details. It’s thelittle things that can surprise a reader when they go against a popularmisconception – and not in a good way. Perhaps it’s because of the rise ofeasily accessible information on the internet, perhaps because we’ve allencountered mistakes in works previously considered sacrosanct, but either waywe seem to have lost a quality of trust in what we read. Fifty years agoreaders might say ‘that’s interesting, I never knew people wore spectacles inthe 14th century,’ but these days we’re more likely to assume the writer has simply got it wrong.
I wouldn’t want people to read my books uncritically. I like to be questioned, it keeps me on my toes and always opens the possibility of my learning something useful. The problem only arises when the error is imaginary but there’s no chance of defence. I once saw somebody boaston a writers’ forum that they threw a book across the room in disgust becausethe writer gave blue eyes to a character with two brown-eyed parents – but that’s genetically perfectly possible. This hasn’t happened tome yet (as far as I know!) but it's only a matter of time.
Which is what makes it so horribly tempting to try to defend ourselves in advance. That’s when we makeour characters implausibly present in Pisa to hear the monk declare in 1306 ‘Itis not yet twenty years since the invention of spectacles’. It’s when weinclude hideous dialogue along the lines of ‘Hullo, Bob, what are those glassthings on your nose?’ and ‘Yes, clever, aren’t they? Only invented a few yearsago.’ It’s when our books do indeed get thrown across the room, and franklywhen they deserve it.
Of course there’s that totally wonderful thing, the ‘HistoricalNote’. Ostensibly there to help the reader, I’m very conscious mine are alsothere to defend me. In ‘In The Nameof the King’ it’s a blatantly transparent way of saying ‘I know you thinkRichelieu was a Bad Guy, but he really wasn’t’, or even ‘I know you think it’simplausible that Louis XIII took a young male lover, but it’s honestly whatpeople believed at the time.’ I was talking to Karen Maitland at the ‘Historyin the Court’ bash last month and learned that even she felt the need toexplain the different kinds of Plague in the Historical Note to ‘Company ofLiars’ because she was afraid people might think she’d got it wrong in notblaming the rats.
But there’s a snag. Apart from the fact my Historical Notesare already threatening to become longer than the novels, the pesky things alwaysgo at the back – and a reader like the one who reacted so violently to blueeyes is simply never going to make it to the end.
So I do what I can in the writing. I knew, for instance, that someone would find it odd that my 17th century French hero in ‘Honour and the Sword’ should own a tennis ball, so I carefully had my peasant narrator refer to it as ‘a hard little rag ball used for a game called tennis’, and evenhad the thing ‘unravelling’ later on.
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| 17th century tennis balls |
I still had an e-mail from a readercomplaining about the anachronism.
Sometimes I’ve been so desperate I’ve wonderedif I shouldn’t just leave the detail out – or even give in and write ‘what itsays on the sheet’. It would certainly be safer, but then I think I reallywould be betraying the reader, and selling myself short too.
This has been a lot on my mind lately. I’m lucky to have anexpert on the Crimean War giving ‘Into the Valley of Death’ a historical proof-read,and he’s pointed out (quite rightly) that it’s dangerously improbable to havemy soldiers drinking tea because it was very expensive and hard to get. I can defend myself, I’ve found eyewitnessaccounts that have ordinary soldiers genuinely drinking tea at those times, butthere’s no doubt that if I include those scenes there will be readers who thinkI’ve just been sloppy.
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| 4th Light Dragoons socializing with the French in the Crimea |
The easy solution is to give them coffee instead, but I’mnot doing it, and this is why. The cavalry went out without breakfast on themorning of the Charge of the Light Brigade, they sat for six hours before goinginto action, they breathed in cannon smoke and dust, and their mouths would havebeen dry with fear. I don’t think my hero would have been craving coffee, he’dhave wanted the clean, thirst-quenching taste of tea. It’s significant to methat the trooper who wrote an account of drinking tea the morning after theCharge should remember it so clearly thirty years later, and I think under thecircumstances we would too. I want my readers to feel what those men felt, so I’mignoring the improbability and going for authenticity instead.
In my novels, that is. The next time I go to a pub quiz I’mgoing to grit my teeth and jolly well write what it says on the sheet.
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