Breaking the Rules by Kate Lord Brown

Doha Jan 2014

Browsing in the souq this morning, it struck me again how strange (particularly for someone who adores history), it is to live in a city that is so new. The oldest building dates from the 1980s, the souq has been rebuilt to look more picturesque, and the antiques are rather more recent than you would at first glance believe. It's a city creating itself, buildings rising up out of the desert, and it's an interesting time to be here.

Writing historical fiction (with all the inherent contradictions just in the name alone), is rather the same. We take the past and create something new - our interpretation shapes what is known into entirely new characters, objects, cities, worlds. 

Perhaps you are the same when you're working on a new book - the brief rest between edits over the holiday was filled with an orgy of reading and films, (for me, at least, books and movies are the ultimate rewards). One of the films was Marie Antoinette (2006, Sophia Coppola). Based loosely on Lady Antonia Fraser's biography, it played pretty fast and loose with historical fact. Fraser was interviewed on the DVD, and she said how remarkable it was to see the film, and as a medium how deftly it imparted information (the description of a single bodice could take pages, but on film a picture's worth a thousand words ...). Then this image flashed onto the screen:

Screenshot - Marie Antoinette (2006)

My immediate thought was that continuity had missed the Converse trainers - but then it seemed so deliberate, so styled, I did a little research. Coppola used the image as shorthand to show the youth of Marie Antoinette and her ladies in waiting. I'm hoping perhaps you can come up with some examples in fiction where writers have managed to pull off something similar?

Perhaps film manages to break the rules in a way prose can't. Another favourite, filled with deliberate anachronisms is 'A Knight's Tale'. From the suspiciously familiar logo hammered onto William's armour by the female blacksmith to the soundtrack, the director played with twelfth century history in a way I just don't know if you can with fiction? For those of you who write in this era, it would be interesting to know how historically accurate the rest of the film was - the armour, architecture etc?

There's an assumption that although we are creating worlds from our imagination, they are rooted in historical fact. That we do our best to tell the truth. That we weed out anachronisms of dress, speech, even emotion. Certain genres lay their cards on the table and are clearly breaking the rules - for example alternate realities like Harris' 'Fatherland', or Steampunk novels (I'm rather taken with these keyboards just discovered browsing for images):

Perhaps every work of historical fiction is partial, telling as much about the writer as the reader's review does of them. No doubt you've had feedback - good and bad - from readers because your fiction does or doesn't fit their notion of the past, even if your facts are watertight. Some truths are concrete, some are simply more open to interpretation. Celia Rees' recent excellent post on HGs 'Shelve Under Venus or Mars' highlighted the gender snobbery in histfic - that some books are (grinds teeth), seen as 'girl fiction'. This was a charge levelled against one of my own books in a stinker of a review on Goodreads (yes, I now know you shouldn't read them, but it was my first, and yes I can quote it from memory ...). Because the girls wept when their friends were killed, because they had love affairs, because they danced with as much enthusiasm as they flew - to that reader it was 'girl fiction' whereas she prefers 'boy fiction'. The fact it was based on unpublished WW2 diaries belonging to brave male and female pilots which recorded heartbreak and love alongside their flying hours is neither here nor there - it didn't work for that particular reader, and the emotion was a jarring anachronism for her.

Studying English, much was made about 'the willing suspension of disbelief' and the risks of breaking the fourth wall. It's a risk to shatter your viewer/reader's investment in the idea that somehow this history, this fiction is 'true'. A single stitch dropped in the tapestry of your story can ruin the entire fiction you have woven - your reader no longer trusts you. I'd be fascinated to know if anyone can think of examples in fiction where deliberate anachronism has worked - or indeed your favourite examples of accidental anachronism. While you're thinking, enjoy a wonderful scene awash with anachronisms from 'A Knight's Tale':

'The History in the Words' by A L Berridge

All historical novelists know to avoid the ‘wrong words’ – the little anachronisms that boot us into the wrong century will the speed of a train crash. What I find much, much harder is learning when to avoid the rightones.

You know the ones I mean. The ones that are perfectly, demonstrably, authentically in period – but somehow sound as if they’re not. An astute copy-editor wisely advised me not to use the word ‘scan’ in ‘In the Name of the King’, because its rock-solid pedigree in the 16th century didn’t prevent it from sounding as if it sprang to life with a chunk of technology in the 20th.

Not what I meant

He was right. Not just because of the terrifying reader who’s so certain I’ve Got It Wrong that he can’t wait to tell the world on Goodreads, but because it creates a ‘blip’ – a moment of surprise that jolts the reader out of the story.  Anything’s better than that, so we swallow our pride and our research and consign our historical darlings to the dump.

Sometimes we can find ways round it, but they feel equally counter-intuitive. I have a character in my Crimean series who uses a lot of 19th century London slang, and since much of it sounds screamingly modern I often find myself choosing the oldest versions I can find. ‘Mug’ is a perfectly good 1850s word for the face, but I opted for the equally accurate but archaic ‘phizog’ instead. I only do this in the early chapters when readers are still adjusting to the voice, but it still feels strange to make my world seem more alien and distant than it really was.

And how far should we go anyway? The totally authentic ‘Shut your trap’ sounds suspiciously modern for 1854, but if I replace it with the original ‘shut your potato trap’ then I’m risking an altogether different kind of ‘blip’. I want my readers to be following a story, not stopping to think ‘oh, so that’s the origin of that expression!’ Words should be invisible, the mere medium of the story, and never the focus of the reader’s attention.

But they’re all we’ve got, and it’s sometimes a real struggle to make them convey what we intend. Numbers are clean things, fresh with every use, but words are second-hand and come to us laden with history and association. I wanted to use the historically-correct word ‘kid’ in ‘Into the Valley of Death’, for instance, but had to avoid it because of its modern associations with America, gangsters and cowboys.

Not what I meant. Though I think I could be persuaded...

Sometimes our innocent immersion in a period leads us to miss even more dangerous interpretations, and I still blush to remember a copy-editor’s polite suggestion that a character’s fast movement from a wall might be better not described as ‘jerked off’.

Sometimes it’s really frustrating. When writing the Battle of the Alma for ‘Into the Valley of Death’, I had to really struggle to avoid the one single phrase that would have described exactly what was happening as the Russians harnessed their cannon to field carriages to draw them from the field. Those two-wheeled carriages were called ‘limbers’ and the correct expression is ‘limbering up’, but I wanted the reader to see a scene like this:

Russian artillery at reenactment of the Alma (Sergey Kamshylin / Shutterstock.co)

and not something like this:

That may seem appallingly patronising to my readers, but the power of word-association can be stronger than logic. I know exactly what a limber is, and so will many of my readers, but the modern association still kicked in and gave me a ‘blip’ as big as a solar eclipse. Out went ‘limbering up’ and in went ‘backing to limber’, which in context was just as accurate.

And ultimately – I don’t mind. This kind of thing doesn’t happen with dead languages, but ours is a living record of our own past. I like the fact that the word ‘limbering’ remains like a ghost of its extinct military origin. I like the fact we still say ‘scot-free’ without the slightest idea that we’re using an Anglo Saxon word that means ‘exempt from royal tax’. The words stay when the meaning has gone, pebbles thrown up on the beach when the tide has gone out.

Mostly we hardly even notice them. A word just ‘is’, and we rarely stop to question how it got that way. Some people still refer to a ‘drawing room’, without any idea it’s an abbreviation of the ‘withdrawing room’ to which ladies would retire during the port and cigars. Many more will actually own a ‘penknife’ – but how many have ever used it to sharpen a quill? 

Or how about this:

The BMW i8 plug-in hybrid sports car, unveiled in Frankfurt 2013 – with an engine that produces 231 horsepower.

After all these years. Few of us have ridden in a horse-drawn vehicle, but that’s still the standard by which we judge those driven by the combustion engine. We can see both together in this fabulous colour footage from 1920’s London, but when we do we know we’re looking at history. Only the words have kept the history alive – just under the bonnet of our cars.

I suppose it’s natural to retain ‘horsepower’, since units of measurement are often the last to change. The horse itself is still measured in ‘hands’, just as many of us still measure distance in ‘feet’. How far does that go back? When did we last even think about it – except perhaps to marvel at men with twelve inch feet and to wonder if the size were proportional?

‘Hands’ and ‘feet’ will probably go in the end, as imposed metrication grinds its way through our remaining scraps of measuring heritage, but it’ll take more than that to expunge the many centuries of the horse from our language. Our idioms are steeped in it – ‘give him his head’, ‘rein him in’, ‘spur him to action’ – and they won’t disappear in a hurry.

Or will they?

Enter the Historical Language Saboteur, the chap who uses words without the slightest interest in what they actually mean. He’s the man who gives us the utterly meaningless ‘tow the line’, because he doesn’t understand the Naval historical concept of ‘toe the line’. He’s the man who writes about ‘giving free reign’ or ‘reigning in’ because the idea of controlling a horse by means of reins is beyond him. He's the man who infects millions of innocents, who dutifully repeat his mistakes because they've seen them written down on the internet. Distortion of language used to take centuries to accomplish, but these days it can happen in a matter of weeks.

But perhaps that’s as it should be. Perhaps he too is part of history. Mistakes and ‘back-derivations’ have played their own part in shaping our language, and they often enrich our understanding in how people thought and spoke in earlier times. Those who complain about today’s ‘sloppy diction’ might want to ask how the words ‘norange’ and ‘napron’ became respectively ‘orange’ and ‘apron’ – and if they say ‘a norange’ aloud, then they’ll know.

That’s the best part of language history for me: what it tells us about our ancestors and how they lived. I’m fascinated, for instance, by the fact we use English words for an animal in the field but French ones for the same animal on the table – and what this tells us about life under the Norman Conquest. The peasants were English who knew cows, sheep and pigs, but the court aristocracy were only familiar with boeuf, mouton, and porc – beef, mutton, and pork.

The history of language can obviously teach us far more profound truths than that, and I only wish I knew more about it.  My mother was lucky enough to attend the lectures of Professor J.R.R. Tolkien himself, and one of the remarks she recorded in her notebooks takes my breath away even now. Tolkien told his students that the first languages to develop a future tense were those of peoples who lived by the sea.

I have no idea how accurate that is, but it makes me tingle because of its essential truth. To comprehend the idea of a future, one has to have a sense of the ‘beyond’ – and who would learn that quicker than those who can look further than the edge of the world?

But the past is ‘beyond’ too, and words can take us there if we let them. Words aren’t just a record of the whole of human history – they arethat history, and the living chain that joins it all together. If we choose to, we can follow them right back to the beginning, when the first people came out of the forest to stare in wonder at the power of the sea.

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If you think words can never be dull, you should visit A L Berridge's website.
If you care about the history behind the words, you should visit the Crimea Appeal.