Mary Novik's debut novel Conceit, about the daughter of the poet John Donne, was hailed as "a magnificent novel of seventeenth-century
The Balancing Act between Fact and Fiction in Muse
By Mary Novik
The inspiration behind my novel Muse is the amazing
town of Avignon in France ,
where the popes resided in the 14th century. I visited it five times
to explore the popes’ palace, the city wall, the rivers and canals, and the
surviving medieval streets and buildings. I went there to soak up the
atmosphere and walk in Solange’s shoes. The late middle ages are so far back in
time that facts are scarce and history blurs into poetry and myth. This made
the city even more attractive to me, because I could gather many story-strands
into a single character, the fictional Solange Le Blanc.
Early on, I decided to tell the story from Solange’s point
of view. This was a blessing, because it would have been drudgery to wade
through the piles of information about the Avignon
popes. Acres of worm-eaten parchment sit in the Vaucluse archives, not to
mention the Vatican archives in Rome .
The municipal archives were less intimidating and it was
there I sought out medieval maps of Avignon .
No two maps put the streets in the same place or called them by the same names.
I knew that the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch had lived in the city and
fathered two children, so I asked the archivist for birth records. He informed
me, sadly, that the records only stretched back to 1500. Far from being
disappointed, I felt liberated, because I was free to make Solange the
children’s mother.
Because the biographies of Petrarch seldom agreed, I could
cherry-pick the ripest facts. He wrote love poems to Laura, whose identity is
still a mystery. Was she the married noblewoman Laura de Sade (née de Noves)?
Petrarch recorded their meeting, the famed innamoramento, but fudged the
date to make it more poetic. Myths have obscured the story from that point
forward. Although real, Laura became so removed from fact that she became a
legend, like Lady Diana.
Medieval thinking was far from logical. If you crack open a
copy of The Golden Legend, you’ll realize that most of the book is
preposterous. Even the Avignon
popes and cardinals were superstitious and believed in miracles. People accused
of sorcery were tortured in horrific ways. This was the sort of information,
like the city’s filth and stench, which could swamp the story. To allow readers
to suspend their disbelief and empathize with Solange, Muse could not be
wedded to the facts. I had to be selective.
This brings up the thorny issue of whether novelists are
required to stick to the truth or whether saying it’s fiction is a license to
play around with the facts. I try not to cross swords with history since it’s a
lot bigger than me. Luckily, most of Muse doesn’t deal with
historically-recorded events, but more intimate matters, such as what people
said and thought, and whose beds they crawled into in their private hours. This
gave me latitude to use the facts that worked, to avoid the ones that didn’t,
and to invent a great deal. As Michael Ondaatje said, "Facts breed and
what they produce is fiction."
Since Solange was fictional, I could invent freely without
flying in the face of known facts. I learned to trust my inner historian, since
I’ve read widely in medieval authors like Petrarch, Chaucer, Dante, and
Boccaccio. A few times, I got into a sweat dovetailing the dates of Petrarch
and Pope Clement VI, but having a fictional heroine gave me wiggle room. I was
following Petrarch’s lead, since he once told a friend, “If true facts are
lacking, add imaginary ones. Invention in the service of truth is not lying.”
I tried to find a balance between fact and fiction, to
create verisimilitude while harnessing the emotional power of fiction. The
Globe and Mail review of Muse sums up nicely, “The use of fictional
characters interacting with true historical figures is a liberating creative
device and as long as the story is executed within the framework of reality,
there is generally no expectation from the reader of exact historical veracity.”
When I had trouble writing, I looked at maps, drawings,
poems, and letters for inspiration. I fed my muse, searching for quirky facts
to inspire me, like the oddball discovery that one of the popes had ordered Petrarch
(and his brother Gherardo) to send their sister to his chamber. This was one of
the stray facts that opened a secret door in the popes’ palace. Don’t be
surprised, when reading Muse, if a fictional person walks through that
real door. After all, this is my 14th century, not history’s.
Also, Random House of Canada is giving away 10 copies of Muse, check out the giveaway below! And don't forget to check out the other stops on the blog tour as well!
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Also, Random House of Canada is giving away 10 copies of Muse, check out the giveaway below! And don't forget to check out the other stops on the blog tour as well!
- August 22: Retreat by Random House
- August 26: Cozy Up with a Good Read
- August 27: Good Books and a Cup of Tea
- August 28: GailAnderson-Dargatz.com
- August 29: Sukasa Reads
- August 30: Your Hidden Shelf
- August 31: Be Nice or Leave Thanks
This book sounds like it was incredibly difficult to research! Kudos to Mary Novik for pulling through. I love the history of Avignon France though so I can't wait to read this
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