Between fact and fiction

Is it a true story, I am asked? Did it really happen? Time and time again this is the thing that interests people.

Once when I was the Artist in Residence at the Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford, I wrote a piece about the museum building and what had happened in it. It was just a story. I made it up. But for many of the people who read it and subsequently wrote to me, I sensed a desperate need to believe it was ‘true’.

On another occasion I found a child’s dress from the Coptic period displayed in a case, labelled with all the details of location, date, fabric and age. There was a dark brown stain across the exquisite hand-embroidery of the garment. This, the label told me, was blood.

Taken aback, I tried to imagine the grief the unknown mother of a thousand years ago would have felt. Yet, since grief is not a tangible fact it was omitted from the label. And so that distant emotion, carried across time, was lost forever.

How much do we lose because of our rigid adherence to the distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction?’ And why do we care so passionately about realism in fiction? How true does a story have to be before it can be absorbed and enjoyed? We know from recent events the lengths that people have gone to ban novels and hound authors, believing mistakenly that their characters are ‘real’ people. Such is the power of the imagination; such is its potential. But fiction harnesses that power and takes you into a dimension which will continue to live in your mind, long after the pages of the book are closed. It should be irrelevant how much of it is constructed upon fact.

My novel Mosquito grew out of a longing. A longing to return to my past which had been lost in the mists of time and the events of war. I wanted to walk again on that beach I had known as a child, so, I imagined the place as it once was, and made it exist in my mind. That is not to say that actual events did not trigger the book too. The poet and novelist John Burnside recently said that, “to go beyond mere facts, to record a true history that takes account of the unseen as well as the visible …the writer must create something that, on the face of it, is a fabrication. That is what art does; that is what any narrative must take into account if it is to succeed.”

Should we not be celebrating these sentiments rather than frantically searching for the absolute division between fact and fiction?