A guest post by R.N. Morris, author of Fortune’s Hand, a new novel about Walter Raleigh.
At a time when people are petitioning to pull down his statue, why write a novel with Walter Raleigh as the hero?
I should say that in Fortune’s Hand, Raleigh is more anti-hero than hero.But he is the narrator of the story. In one sense, Raleigh is a typical unreliable narrator. Some of the events that he describes couldn’t possibly have happened. And he was not present at others that he claims to have witnessed.
He is not exactly an Elizabethan Baron von Munchausen, but he is certainly a man with a tendency to self-mythologise, which I see as being consistent with the historical Raleigh.
At the same time, paradoxically, the Raleigh of Fortune’s Hand faces his past unblinkingly. He does not, for example, gloss over the atrocities he committed while suppressing an Irish rebellion. He is unapologetic because he does not see that he has anything to apologise for.
The Raleigh of that episode, and other dark chapters in the book, is not an easy character for a modern reader to relate to. We might even call him a monster. Perhaps this (mythical) modern reader would have preferred me to write such scenes from the point of view of Raleigh’s victims. But I think that would have been a cop-out. I also think it would have been less interesting, both to write and to read.
There’s a reason Milton appears more sympathetic to Satan than his religious faith might lead us to expect.
The point of historical fiction, I would argue, is to see the present through the lens of the past. That may sound counter-intuitive. Surely writing historical fiction is the exact opposite of that? A certain amount of seeing the past from the perspective of the present is inevitable. But as writers, we ought to try to do better than that. It’s not enough to take the attitudes and preoccupations of the present and put them into the mouths of some essentially modern characters in period costume.
Instead, we have to try to understand what was going through the minds of our ancestors when they committed acts that frankly appal us.
It isn’t easy, though, because to the modern reader, the attitudes and preoccupations of the past can seem baffling. In the same way that genuine 16th century speech would be incomprehensible. And let’s face it, a lot of Shakespeare’s jokes just aren’t funny anymore.
That’s the line that the historical novelist has to walk: to appear true to the past, without alienating readers who live in the present. I’ll confess, we do have to fudge it now and then.
Writing historical fiction, as distinct from history, is primarily an act of imagination. The research I do is always fuel to stoke the engine of my imagination. I want my story to take off, as Raleigh literally, and impossibly, does at one point in the book. The last thing I want to write is a novelised biography – a narrative that effectively follows the agreed historical record but throws in some evocative descriptions and a few passages of spicy dialogue.
Somehow I have to free myself from the constraints of both history and myth.
Our culture contains many Walter Raleighs. There’s the Walter Raleigh on the front of the Ladybird Book, the Walter Raleigh of Wikipedia, the Walter Raleigh of the National Portrait Gallery, the Walter Raleigh of the History Channel and Hollywood, the Walter Raleigh of Blackadder, the Walter Raleigh of statues and statue-topplers, even, these days, the Walter Raleigh of video games. And, of course, the Walter Raleigh of historical novels like mine.
These are all informed to varying degrees, by the multiple Walter Raleighs of the historians and biographers, each of whom emphasises different aspects of his life and personality, and exercises different degrees of sympathy or criticism. Every age, it seems, will re-examine and reinvent this fascinating and divisive personality.
The man who began this process was Walter Raleigh himself. The narrative he created through his self-mythologising was not just his own personal story. It intertwined with the national story. Indeed, he was consciously trying to insert himself into that bigger story. The fact that we all carry about the image of him throwing his cloak over a puddle shows to what extent he succeeded.
Latest Comments