Literary platforms don’t come lovelier than
the column slot
on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book with Mariella Frostrup, and the other week I took a
turn on the subject of putting real people into novels:
Marx, Freud, Tom Cruise, Tony Blair,
Emperor Hadrian, Her Majesty... Many thanks to producer Ellie Bury for inviting me in. You can
listen to the programme on iPlayer here and my
slot is from 08:31-12:40. My text is pretty much as below:
If you call yourself a fiction writer, why put real people
in your novels – rather than characters you’ve made up, whom you can claim as
your own inventions? What gives you the right to appropriate the lives of
others?
Well, for starters you might say that storytelling – from
Homer’s time, to Shakespeare’s, and ours – has relied hugely on the compelling
lives or legends of people who actually existed. And fans of historical fiction
expect – even demand – the special pleasure of meeting historical figures on
the page.
We all enjoy novels that mix famous individuals with
fictional ones: Sigmund Freud treating Sherlock Holmes for cocaine addiction in
Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution; Karl Marx encountering a serial
killer in Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem; Mohandas Gandhi
popping up as a Boer War stretcher-bearer in Giles Foden’s Ladysmith. Cameos of
this kind, short and sweet, play cleverly on one or two things we know for sure
about eminent figures of the past.
But what about fictionalising figures of the present day?
Tom Cruise might have been un-amused to see a version of himself in Bret Easton
Ellis’s American Psycho, making small talk in an elevator with Ellis’s
murderous protagonist. But, as far as we know, he made no fuss. I gave the
young Tony Blair a walk-on part in my novel Crusaders, and I’ve never heard
from the former PM’s lawyers, so presumably my imaginative work didn’t amount
to any slur on Blair’s reputation.
Many writers evade a debt to the actualité by creating
composite characters, amalgamated from various traits of assorted real people –
who, like Frankenstein’s monster, leave no identifiable fingerprint. That
method runs into trouble, though, if any reader can spot the unmistakable shape
of one real person – as when the poet Stephen Spender read David Leavitt’s
historical novel While England Sleeps and saw a character based all too clearly
on passages from his own memoir, World Within World.
So, this is risky ground for writers; and some might say
that any intermingling of fact and fiction is an insult to historical truth. I
began by asking, what gives a novelist the right? Marguerite Yourcenar, author
of the masterpiece Memoirs of Hadrian, argued that a novelist possesses a
mysterious faculty – she calls it ‘sympathetic magic’ – to enter the minds of
others. But that won’t stand up in court against a charge of libel; which is
why the wisest course for a writer still is to wait until the person they want
to write about is no longer with us.
Strangely, the public figure of our time who seems above all
to defy that wisdom is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. We’ve seen the well-known
dramas of her reign depicted in Peter Morgan’s movie The Queen, and his TV
serial The Crown. But Alan Bennett, in his story The Uncommon Reader, was so
bold as to transport himself into the Queen’s head for a fanciful tale of how
she discovers the joys of promiscuous reading by way of a mobile library parked
in the grounds of Windsor Castle. In Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I, the
monarch suffers the indignity of eviction from the Palace by a republican
government and has to eke out an existence on a sink estate in the Midlands.
Of all people to find themselves so persistently
fictionalised – why Her Majesty? Is it because the Royal Family, famously,
‘can’t answer back?’ Or because the Queen recognises her likeness in these
fictions? Or, that she simply doesn’t care? Whatever the truth – as a fiction
writer I must confess, I rather wish there were a few more like her.
