In five blessed weeks, I will be done with college. In those five weeks, I have an important project to work on. My advisor and I are working together to polish Book 3 in the Clouds Aflame series as my capstone project–the bachelor’s degree version of a thesis. In preparation, my advisor gave me a novel to read. The 900-page novel The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett, a prequel to his famous Pillars of the Earth.
Yes, you read that correctly. Nine hundred pages. I read 74 of them today. This is going to take a while.
Even though I’m only 74 pages into the book, I’m noticing a few things about it. First of all, the historical setting is very rich. Follett obviously knows how England worked in the 990s, as he gives detailed descriptions of who owns what and how much the peasants have to pay to use it and how many women survived their childbearing years and whatnot. There’s some detailed descriptions of a few other things, too. I could go without knowing what color the main character’s pubic hair is, but…well. Such is modern literature.
Problem is, it’s difficult to get across all these details. Normal people don’t have conversations about how many pennies are in a pound or what percentage of the population is enslaved. All of that is delegated to the narrative. However, there arises a problem. Like Where the Clouds Catch Fire and Where I Stand, The Evening and the Morning is told through what’s known as the third person limited perspective. In other words, there’s one character (or several who take turns, as in Follett’s novel) who tell the story through their own perspective. The words that make up the book are taken to be the thoughts of the characters doing the telling. This means that all these characters are thinking about things like how many slaves live in a town and how many pennies are in a pound.
Is it just me, or…do people tend not to think like that, either?
This isn’t the first time I’ve run into this sort of exposition. I read a book a long time ago about an Irish princess who was kidnapped by Vikings. I don’t know why I only got about halfway through the book before I quit. Maybe it was too sad. Watching your little sister jump off the side of a Viking longship to avoid a life of slavery isn’t exactly the sort of heartwarming thing I enjoy in a novel. Anyway, the main character (I believe her name was Melkorka) described a weird number of things. Like the fact that she personally peed on an article of clothing so that the dye would hold better.
Now, there’s little doubt that details like that genuinely describe how the world used to work. But to me, they feel awkward. Especially if they aren’t important to the story later on, it feels like the author is trying to show off all the useless facts they learned while researching. It’s also entirely possible that I’m just jealous because I wish I’d done a better job of researching and worldbuilding. On one hand, I wish that I’d known that there are no trees in Orkney. On the other hand, since the trees hide St. Anne’s Monastery and therefore kept the Norse from raiding the place long before Alynn came to the island…I don’t know how I would have worked around that, and part of me is glad that I didn’t know that.
What are your opinions on weird history facts in historical fiction? Let me know in the comments below! God bless you, dear readers, and don’t forget to review us on Goodreads!