The Tenth Walter Scott Prize shortlist panel: historical fiction that casts a spell

15th June, 2019

The shortlist panel for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction celebrates its tenth anniversary this year at the Borders Book Festival, and we were delighted to again host a packed audience for our discussion with three superb novelists: Samantha Harvey (THE WESTERN WIND), Andrew Miller (NOW WE SHALL BE ENTIRELY FREE) and Robin Robertson (THE LONG TAKE).  The panel discussion took place on Friday 14th June, the night before the Prize is announced.

The panel moderator, prolific book vlogger Simon Savidge, kicked off the discussion by exploring the dark core at the heart of each story. Miller and Robertson both centre their books on combat-veteran protagonists plagued by the atrocities of war. Harvey’s main character is a priest facing a different torment: he must hear confession from a cast of suspects in a medieval village where a murder – or possibly a suicide – has occurred. His church superiors order him to name the culprit, regardless of the sanctity of confession.

Asked why they focussed on characters who are under such pressure, the authors gave similar answers: what drew them to their protagonists was the characters’ profound isolation, both from wider society, and from themselves.

In THE LONG TAKE, Robertson’s protagonist Walker is a World War Two veteran, the only survivor of a Canadian regiment whose men fell to Nazi artillery in Normandy and, later, to sadistic officers who murdered them as prisoners of war. Born in Nova Scotia, Walker roams postwar New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, separate from and unknowable to the Americans with whom he shares a language, but not a culture. To get inside Walker’s mind, Robertson said he drew deliberately on his own “otherness” as a Scot, when he relocated to London and immediately had to retire most of his vocabulary, which made no sense in his new city.

Miller’s main character LaCroix, in NOW WE SHALL BE ENTIRELY FREE, is a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who may or may not have committed an atrocity for which he’s hunted, through the story, by a single-minded mercenary. Like Walker, LaCroix is adrift inside his own life. He begins the story near death, and it’s not at all clear whether he’ll survive; what ensues feels like borrowed time, in which LaCroix, tortured by his past, “keeps waking up inside his own life,” Miller says.

Harvey, too, is fascinated by the chasm between priest John Reve and his fellow villagers in THE WESTERN WIND. They’re separated not just by the screen of the roughly built confession box – the first of its kind of medieval England – but also by Reve’s failure to see his own faults. “He has blind spots,” Harvey says; “there are things he won’t acknowledge about himself.”

Structure, imposters and echoes of history

Both Harvey and Robertson drew laughs by stating, each more forcefully than the other, that they felt themselves imposters on the panel: Harvey, because she doesn’t see herself as a historical novelist (“this is my first historical novel and I may never write another”), and Robertson because he’s “not a novelist at all,” but a poet. THE LONG TAKE, which is written with the cadence and force of an epic poem but reads as a complete novel, was the result when Robertson decided he wanted to “write something longer; I thought ‘longer’ might be 20 pages,” he said; THE LONG TAKE extends to 200.

Miller, whose novel is the most classically structured of the three, said he intentionally kept the form strong and simple, with two storylines drawing closer until they meet: the war veteran and the mercenary who’s pursuing him. This simplicity let him focus on the characters, he said.

Interestingly, THE WESTERN WIND’s unconventional structure also has the effect of unveiling layers of the main protagonist’s character, as more of the truth is uncovered. The book is a murder mystery told backwards over four days; Harvey said it was the first time in her writing life that a complete story arrived in her mind, including the reverse-time structure. At first, she rejected the idea – “I’d decided I wasn’t going to write a backwards book — it’s gimmicky, and I didn’t want to do it.” Writing it forwards, however, didn’t work: the story insisted on unfolding as her first instinct had instructed.

Unlike the others, Harvey’s inspiration for the story wasn’t history itself, but her desire to write something about a confessional, which led her to the middle ages during a time when the confession box was an innovation. She was frank about her research – she says it kicked off with an Usborne children’s book about the middle ages and culminated in her reading “PhD theses about parish life in the south west of England, in the Middle Ages.”

All the writers were open both about the deep research they conducted, and about the need to set it all aside during the writing. Miller’s own book was inspired by a piece of mandolin music written by a military captain in 1815 in the Hebrides, prompting him to wonder why the man was so far removed from the theatre of war. Robertson’s research included not only reading but film work, re-watching some 400 movies that included 20^thcentury noir classics, with their themes of paranoia and isolation; but he wrote Walker’s story in a free way, dropping him beside the Hudson and “letting him go,” not knowing where Walker would end up.

Like many of the past Walter Scott Prize shortlist panels, the evening’s conversation ultimately turned to the historical truth of the historical novel, and the balance writers strike between responsibility to the story, to the reader and to history. The writers agreed that members of the public can (and do) write in to point out when a historical detail is wrong, but Harvey said the real joy of these stories for readers is their ability to capture and hold the imagination, and the joy for authors is blending deep research with creativity.

“I did a huge amount of research, but I won’t say that my aim was to ‘get it right,’ because I don’t think what we’re aiming for is accuracy, but rather a kind of ‘truthiness,’” she said. “I want to write a story that hangs together, rather than worrying that readers will be looking out for the next error. What we’re doing is seducing the reader: but that process of casting a spell is what fiction is.”

To find out more about the inspiration and insights of all six of our shortlisted authors, see our series of exclusive author Q&As for the tenth annual Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction here.