Historical Fiction (background)

I’ve never been much of a one for history. Maybe when I was really little, but any love I might have had for it was beaten out of my by junior high. I remember reading a fair amount of it on my own, just for fun, but actually studying it was unbearable. I’m no good at rote memorization, and that’s all it was: Names and dates and places and events; cram ‘em in and spit ‘em back out. After that, I pretty much avoided it as best I could.

About two years back, fall of ‘05, I had some time off between jobs, and tackled Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. If you’re not familiar with him or it, he is a science fiction writer and it is a 2700-page wedge of historical fiction, in three books. It may seem unpromising, but I’ve always liked his stories, and the peculiarly geeky sensibility he brings to them. His Cryptonomicon was partly set in World War II, but even those bits still felt science-fiction-y in a way that’s hard to describe. So I rolled up my sleeves and gave it a try.

I loved it. It’s a sprawling epic of an adventure story, running from about 1660 to 1725 and spanning the globe. So it’s a fun read, just on the surface. The third volume is called The System of the World, which sums up what’s really profoundly cool about the series. Under the adventure story veneer, what he’s really exploring is how the world worked at that time, and how that was changing. You see the currents of science and finance and religion and political theory, all blended together. History stops being a straight, linear sequence of unrelated events and becomes this rich and complex web of interactions. Advances in ship-building and navigation technology allow the European powers to plunder the new world. Wealth from the new world upsets the balance of power in Europe. Financial misfortunes leave kings and princes unable to raise and maintain their armies. The pressure on European silver mines to compete with South America’s leads to advances in mechanical engineering, physics, and chemistry. The growth of international trade shifts the balance of power from landowners to merchants, allowing the rise of a middle class, many of whom become enthusiastic amateur scientists. And so on and so on. The important part isn’t the dates or the people, it’s the causality, how it all fits together, the framework that all of the facts hang from.

So since then, I’ve been reading a fair bit of historical fiction, non-fiction history, and biography. Whenever I travel, what I like to do is explore cities; just wander around, getting the feel of the place. I shy away from the touristy things, the bits that everyone tells you you need to see. Mostly, I try to get a sense of what it’s like to live there. The galleries and theaters and big faux-antique shopping districts don’t have much to do with day-to-day life. You don’t spend all that much time there. I mean, I live in Washington, DC, for pete’s sake - I’m surrounded by museums, galleries, and such, and I probably spend less than a dozen hours a year in all of them, total. I spend way more time in Murky Coffee alone. So the interesting bits of cities for me are the neighborhoods, the places you could live within walking distance of at least one good bar, a coffee shop, a couple decent restaurants, a book store, maybe a movie theater. That’s kinda the approach I take to history. It’s not so much the big names and events that really catch my attention.

Of course, there’s a lot of speculation that goes into that - this is fiction, after all - but you read enough different people’s speculations, and you’re probably triangulating in on something approaching reality. For example, I was reading a bit in Quicksilver where they’re talking about Monmouths’s rebellion and Lord Jeffreys (Daniel Waterhouse’s old nemesis) and the Bloody Assizes. And something about it rang a bell. So I went and fetched Captain Blood off the shelf and started skimming through that. Sure enough, the setup for that is that our hero is a doctor tending to wounded rebels. He gets rounded up, brought before Lord Jeffreys, and with great injustice is shipped off to a life of intended slavery and quite unintended piracy in the Caribbean. It’s interesting to see two narratives overlapping the same set of events. It’s kinda like watching “Pulp Fiction”, that feeling you get when you start piecing together the scenes and the characters: “Oh, this happened before that other scene - that’s why they’re dressed like that,” “Hey, he must be the brother of that guy from ‘Reservoir Dogs’.” It’s like that, only much more so, and it’s the real world.

But in a sense, it doesn’t really matter. Writing about the past isn’t really about the past, it’s about us in the here and now. Like science fiction, stories are put in a different setting to light up the differences between here and there, to shift situations and ideas out of their normal contexts. Often, they also underscore the commonalities, what hasn’t changed or what we’ve seen before. Either way, it’s about putting our lives in perspective and challenging what we take for granted. The really engaging part of the Baroque Cycle is the sense of change and discovery, of having a world to explore, scientific revelations to uncover; the sense that a technological revolution is driving a social one, and the old, stultifying order is being trampled underfoot; in short, the same sense we have today, and moreover, the understanding that this is all just the human condition, as it was and ever shall be, amen.