The internet is a glorious gift to writers bent on historical fiction. As in a miner’s fevered dream, nuggets of information lie glittering on the surface, needing only to be snatched up and plunked into the bag of a plot or a landscape or the makeup of a character. Adrian Carr’s massive inkstand; the fussy parlor of Lawrence Penniman, teacher of languages; the trees and paths of Highgate Cemetery, all came out of searches conducted from the ease of an ergonomic chair in my upstairs study. Sipping diet root beer and caressing small dogs in my lap, I made inquiries into the history of the Metro Police and read with glee about the first Assistant Commissioner, Howard Vincent, who revolutionized forensic science through the use of fingerprints. “It’s too easy,” I complain to my husband, over dinner.
It wasn’t always thus. I think with quaking feelings of inadequacy about drudges like James Michener and James Clavell, who amassed convincing bodies of knowledge from tangible sources while (presumably) perched on wooden seats in drafty libraries. I groan at the oceans of detail and, frankly, trivia, presented by Patrick O’Brian in his interminable tales of seaborne derring-do. For these writers, historical fiction was a bravado act, a show-off’s bid for recognition, not a matter of constructing deathless prose. The effort itself was the product – hundreds of pages filled with Facts! – which, while entertaining, made no bid to be immortal.
I write fan fiction, ephemeral by definition. Is my oeuvre lesser, because I have not worked as hard? Better historical fictions don’t show their sweat. Peter Carey, A.S. Byatt, Joseph O’Connor (My Father’s House), Faulkner of course, write about times not their own, and readers do not think, oh, I must respect them because they did Research. They think, will Ned Kelley get caught? Will Randolph Ash and Crista bel LaMotte ever love openly? Can Monsignor O’Flaherty evade the Gestapo and continue saving POWs and Jews? Why can’t Quentin Sartoris love himself? These authors, of course, know their material, but do not use it as a club. They are literary writers, in that they aim for fundamental human truths, for three-dimensional characterization, for stories that illuminate their settings but are not defined by them.
Yeah, well, me too. Go ahead and laugh – I can’t hear you, after all. Conrad was a genius and I am not, but in seeking to expand his world and place his people in plausible simulacra of situations he created, I need to use the tools I have at hand. I may not be standing on Conrad’s shoulders – more like hanging on with one hand to the tails of his coat – but if my fan fiction is drek, it’s not because I used the internet for research.