I’ve never previously taken part in an “open book” blog hop, although I always enjoy reading Stevie Turner’s weekly contribution. This week’s topic inspired me, however. It is:
‘Talk about the setting of your book. Is it entirely imaginary, or is it based on a real-life place?’
My most recent work, Called to Account, is a novelisation of real events in a real town in Ireland. Because the events took place 170 years ago and are well documented, I can be reasonably certain that no-one living in the town today will be offended. Funnily enough, one of the central facts is that when the events were publicised at the time, some citizens were offended. So much so that the resulting dispute ended up with a charge of slander, the trial of which I have used as the frame for the telling of the story. It also gives the novel its title.
Another book that is a novelisation of historical events is Strongbow’s Wife. This features a number of real places, but the events took place in the twelfth century so only keen students of medieval history would have the knowledge to challenge any of my descriptions. The story begins in County Wexford, Ireland, travels first from there to Bristol, then on across Southern England to Kent, across the channel to France, back to Bristol, Chepstow and Pembroke before returning to Wexford. Journeys to Waterford, Dublin, back to Pembroke and Chepstow and via Monmouth to Hereford follow over the course of the book. There are also excursions to London, specifically the Tower where Strongbow’s son and daughter were domiciled following his death.
Summer Day features the small district in rural Herefordshire where I grew up in the 1940s, although it is not named. Anyone living there would certainly recognise descriptions. The people are all fictional, although based to varying degrees on real people I knew then. Transgression is set in an entirely fictional English provincial town. I am currently working up a few more stories set in the same town.
I think fiction must feature settings that are taken from the author’s imagination, whereas historical fiction must, by its nature, be set in real places in order to lend authenticity.
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Frank Parker's author site 
Thanks for the mention, Frank. Which one of your books features the Irish potato famine of the 1850s?
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Called to Account – should be available soon.
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So what did they pop round the pub to eat. Fish and dirt? Sorry. Irreverent, but couldn’t resist. Or was it rush on Potato chips (crisps) like the toilet paper famine of 2020? Sorry. Again.
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Lovely to see you joining in Frank. I must write my post today. I like the sound of your books.
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Thanks, Robbie
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Great to see you on the BlogHop Frank. It must be a tricky job, blending fictional characters with real, historical events.
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I’m guessing it’s not as tricky as creating whole worlds as I assume you do, Richard. I confess I’ve not read any SciFi in years. As a young man I read all the classics: Heinlein, Azmov, Sheckley, Herbert, Clarke, Bradbury – to name a few!
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I’m not so sure. I can base a fictional universe on one fact, you need to fit your fiction around what people know (and is recorded), which is a lot more complex. You’ve provided a roll call of my favourites there.
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There’s a lengthy discussion here about fictional universes that maintain the human condition experience, Bonanza in Space, or a completely “alien” realm wherein nothing is relative to what we currently understand. In which case a version of nonsensical post modernism must arise that is understood only by the author. I think of the psychedelic experience authors writing not in the experience transcribed in real words but in the language of the experience. Seriously. A fictional universe is either a described dystopia or beyond language. A pure fiction. But then that’s a little extreme…Yeah, I use that riff in a book. Someone’s writings are described as Carlos Castaneda meets Miss Marple.
I say this and admit freely I don’t write scifi because I don’t understand! I played with a bass player for years who inhaled the stuff and he’s still sane.
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Welcome, Frank. It must be time-consuming to do the research to make a historical novel’s setting accurate.
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My latest novel’s main character travels round England in 2014 and only visits places I have been to! In my trilogy the characters live in a London suburb that doesn’t exist, but has all the features that one would find in a typical suburb. In my first novel the family who set off for Australia in 1964 live in a suburb identical to where my aunt and uncle lived. I enjoy being inspired by places I know or visit.
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Suburbs are ideal settings – they could be anywhere!
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Amen
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The challenge of historical settings in fiction. I run from them like I am on fire, ironic, considering that I am a historian. Great post.
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Why? There’s no one to argue with you if it’s old enough! Except other historians who are working with the same information. And pre 1850? Nobody has postcards. f they did we’d know what Rome looked like and how Stonehenge came to be. Pre postcards historians are as much fiction as fiction writers. Stonehenge? Aliens!
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Seriously. Who can prove it wasn’t?
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We might not have photographs, Phil, but we do have drawings and paintings. And there are contemporaneous written records that go back a long way. Not as far back as Stonehenge I grant you. So the aliens built all the many henges that are all over Europe, as well as the Easter Island sculptures and the ancient structures in Asia and South America? Who can tell? And why did they not bother with North America? (This is your chance to tell me about similar structures in your neck of the woods!)
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Drawings and painting are always suspect. I mean look at the Byzantines! Cave drawings and writing only came about with the Sumerians around 2400 BC. And we all know history is writ by accountants and the winners! We have Mayan pyramids over here in Mexico, dated to be roughly 1,000 years younger than Giza. There was another burst 2,00 years ago. What we have plenty of is mounds and caves from the same era as the 13,000 year old Englishmen. There is talk of some 20,000 year old sites that they are blaming on the French. Which makes sense because the alien coneheads always said “We are from France.”
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Perhaps I should heed that, Lyndell. If a historian is wary of recreating a historical setting, maybe an amateur like me should beware.
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Aha! Frank is here. Okay, historical-fiction types. My father read and wrote it, so I have no beef with it unless it gets too long in the descriptive tooth. I mean knights are knights and days of yore are days of yore and indoor plumbing didn’t exist. But – I have a riff from my American in Cambridge bit along the lines of “What do you mean no one knows where Stonehenge came from? Like it just showed up in some farmers backyard one day? You people have been on this island for what, thirteen thousand years? And nobody knows where freaking Stonehenge came from? I say it’s a tourist trap.”
Welcome, Frank!! You old historical fiction guy.
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Interesting to hear about your work, Frank.
My fiction is almost exclusively in the genres of urban horror and dark fantasy, but I pride myself on recognizable, real-world settings (usually contemporary but sometimes historical) with only an element of the paranormal injected into them. (Most of my stories are set in New York City and the Hudson Valley, where I grew up.) I find that readers are more likely to buy into a supernatural premise if the world of the fiction itself conveys a certain verisimilitude. I much prefer magical realism to high fantasy, as both a reader and a writer.
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Thanks for joining the conversation, Sean. I think you are absolutely right about the impoprtance of authentic, relateable settings, especially when the events you describe are beyond everyday experience.
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