“I was able to play with the truth”: Creating History

A friend of mine is at this moment in Iceland, digging through library rooms, sneezing from archival dust, and loving every moment of it. She is doing research for a historical novel, based on the life of an Icelandic woman who lived in the 1800s. This intrepid dipping into the history and, indeed, mind, of a person long gone is an experience shared by Peter Rose, Lisa Lang and Michael Meehan

Peter Rose is well known for his memoir The Rose Boys. His latest offering is a novel, Roddy Parr, which tells the literary insider tale of Roddy Parr, amanuensis to lauded author David Anthem. In name, biographical and autobiographical writing are different to fiction. But writing fiction requires the same attention to detail, the same consciousness of a multifaceted and continous being. Rose says of his characters that he has to know ‘how they dress, what they read, who they sleep with … they must become vivid, plausible, almost historical’. They’re not passive creatures: ‘I hear them babbling away in my head’.

A few years ago, Lisa Lang published Chasing the Rainbow, a book on Edward.W. Cole, a significant and prolific figure in publishing in the 1850s. She has now fictionalised Cole’s life in her novel Utopian Man. His history may be described as checkered – he sold lemonade in the gold rush fields, later sold pies, and once travelled to Adelaide in a wooden boat. He then put an advertisement in the newspaper for a wife: ‘She must be a spinster of 35 or 36 years of age,’ he declared. This was before he installed himself as a bookseller in Cole’s Book Arcade, which included a Chinese tea salon at the height of the anti-Chinese sentiment in Australia.

What is it, Lang wondered, that fiction could offer this abundant, larger than life story? ‘It gets us inside the heads of the characters.’ The ‘intensity of the inner life’ is served better by fiction than non-fiction writing, she concluded. The public details of Cole’s life were there for the taking, but what of the more personal details, the childhood memories, the blush of feeling?

Michael Meehan has published four novels, the latest of which is Below the Styx. Martin Frobisher’s name is familiar to connoisseurs of Tudor history. But the newer Frobisher is more like a sleuth than a courtier (though he is interested in the art of lying); he’s searching earnestly for the truth about well-known Australian, Marcus Clarke. Earlier this year, the Meehan family celebrated their 100th year in the country up in the Mallee. Michael’s grandfather had insisted on a total break from the Irish Meehans, many of whom opposed his union with his chosen wife. With all that excitement in one’s background, it’s not surprising that Meehan has written about history, but not to rechart it – instead, ‘Hope, desire, dream and dread’ is the realm of the novelist. Documentary history ‘will take you a certain distance’, as will oral history (though it’s ‘notoriously unreliable’), but you must ‘fuse’ this research with sensation and feeling, because that’s why readers read – not facts.