À la recherche du temps perdu

Ok, so call me a chutzpah merchant for stealing Proust to talk about research.  We virgin authors need all the cred we can purloin.

If I had one wish, it would be that I could write in a stream of consciousness that had little need for historical veracity.  No such luck.  For me there was only a deep dive into an ocean of data.  And when you’ve chosen as the central theme possibly the single greatest catastrophe to befall a people, you take upon yourself the moral imperative to get it right.

With a novel spanning a momentous century and whose hero is submerged in its two great conflagrations, it was not enough to ‘remember lost times’ but to reveal them. In other words, get under their skin for the purposes of exposure, rather than merely articulate events, albeit (hopefully) in a compelling and literary form.

But pretty quickly I realised that this was treacherous territory, with many opportunities to go badly wrong.  When you read broadly and deeply around a subject, there is a real temptation to show off your learning.  Of course, you’re going to have to buy the book to find out whether I succumbed!

So, the long, lonely distances travelled refer as much to the hours of sitting with book and screen as it does to the days spent tapping away at the keyboard.  But it has had some high spots, no more so than finding that a personal account of life and death in the extreme margins of human depravity was undeservedly out-of-print.  A request for a facsimile sent to the publisher led to an e-mail exchange, a gift of their last-ever copy and the reprinting of the book, something I could tell the author’s son about.

That, and the correspondence I had with a participant in the emotional centre of the novel, reminded me daily that what we know, and how we know it, is imperfect, incomplete and invariably subjective. And, therefore, any one fact should not really be relied upon with some further verification.  Of course, fiction is just that, fiction.  But there is a delicate tightrope to be walked when dealing with sensitive and controversial subjects.

Cue existential crisis.

Ian Phillips is a freelance writer for businesses whose first novel, Grosse Fugue, will be published by Alliance Publishing Press on April 3^rd.  He’s tweeting developments @Ian_at_theWord.