Once upon a time, in a world before Zoom…
Are we all historical novelists now?
Two fellow writers from the St Mary’s MA in Creative Writing have recently published brilliant debut novels. Louise Fein’s People Like Us is set in 1930’s Leipzig, where Nazi persecution of the Jews is taking hold. Molly Gartland’s A Girl from the Hermitage spans 75 years of Russian history from the siege of Leningrad to the modern more materialistic Russia of 2016. Both are beautifully written character portrayals and also meticulously researched. But while Louise and Molly set out to write historical fiction, little did those of us writing ‘contemporary’ novels realise how much events of 2020 would make our novels feel a bit like historical fiction too!
I’m sure I’m not the only one who has had the occasional experience of watching a crowd scene in a film on TV this year and thinking, ‘Huh, not much social distancing going on there.’ Just at the moment, our lockdown life has made anything before March 2020 feel like it comes from a different age. For me personally, even before Covid, I’d had reason to question whether my novel was quite as contemporary as I initially intended it to be.
When I began my novel back in 2014, I knew that I wanted the story to span a year, starting in Advent, but it certainly didn’t seem important to specify which year. By time it was written, or so I thought, a reader would just assume it was contemporary. I hadn’t realised just how long it would take me to write it, and how by time I completed it, the world would have moved on.
During the course of my story, the lead character Stephen, (whose marketing career thus far has never taken him beyond a conference on a boat that sails round the Isle of Wight) is thrust into a brave new world of European business. Grimley’s, the chocolate company he works for, becomes part of the new Schmaltz Europe empire, and suddenly Stephen is attending horrendous European team meetings in Paris. Now back in 2014, David Cameron had not yet committed to a EU referendum if he won the next election, and hence the ‘B word’ hadn’t even been invented (I know, hard to believe.) But by time I finished my novel, Britain was (slowly) on its way out of Europe. While I didn’t require my story to reflect every aspect of current affairs, it did occasionally feel odd to be writing a book about European business culture without mentioning Brexit. And yet to introduce it into the story felt like a distraction which would require a re-write, without really adding anything. Plus, let’s face it, Brexit remains a moving target anyway - we still don’t understand the ramifications for British companies who are part of a bigger European organisation.
Ultimately, my conclusion was that my novel needed to be fixed quite firmly in the year I started it, to take Brexit out of the equation. But by time I made the decision to publish early in 2020, something much bigger loomed on the horizon - Covid. And there was no way of deftly avoiding the blow this struck to the contemporaneity of my novel. The staging posts (good and bad) which make up Stephen’s working life have been ripped away from many people this year. The commute into work, the difficult face to face meetings, the banter by the coffee machine (or in Stephen’s case, the Eat Schmaltz juice bar), and the early morning red-eye flights, to name but a few.
As I write this, there is a widespread belief that office life will never become the norm again. Many observers believe that in the ‘new normal,’ we’ll end up with some form of hybrid with working days split between home and the office. Personally, I wouldn’t yet underestimate the power of the office to strike back. While older people who have worked in an office environment for years might welcome a switch to home working, many younger people may still want the buzz of working together. And for business leaders trying to create a company culture, getting people into the same physical space will remain a big driver. I’m trying to imagine Schmaltz President Brad Hardman’s feeling about all his staff working at home – maybe I feel a sequel coming on. And while my novel highlights the oppressive downside of corporate culture, even for Stephen (or maybe particularly for him) a friendship forged in the office and the respect of his work colleagues are big factors in his redemption.
Ultimately, I console myself that if the events of 2020 might in one way have made my novel a little less contemporary than I hoped it to be, it’s also made me reflect again on how what is ‘true’ in a novel should of course be able to live beyond the exact period or year in which that novel is set. To return to truly historical novels, they work best work I think when they give us insight into a period of history other than our own, but combine that with insights into the human condition which feel timeless. Louise Fein’s heroine Hetty Heinrich, a young German girl falling in love with a Jewish boy in Nazi Germany, experiences conflicting emotions that still resonate today, and in Molly Gartland’s novel, I could feel the anguish of Mikhail Tarasovich in early 1940’s Russia just as much as I could empathise with the reflections of his daughter Galina as an old woman in 2016.
My character Stephen’s problem is that he has become so obsessed with his working life that he’s lost touch with his inner life, and now an oppressive corporate culture is threatening to destroy his moral compass. Even if we as a society don’t return to the office, I suspect the challenges of working life and corporate culture will remain. In fact, if the division between place of leisure and place of work becomes non-existent, they may become even bigger challenges, or perhaps mutate into a different form of the same core problem.
The post-Covid era will no doubt create new backdrops for our literature, but the pre-Covid past will not become another country. Writing it, experiencing it and learning from it will be as relevant as ever.