Today we have the pleasure of another wonderful
guest post, once again by a fellow Crooked Cat Publishing author, Mark
Patton. Mark introduces us to the concept of...
The Stranger as Protagonist
One of the
challenges of writing historical fiction (but which can apply equally to
science fiction and fantasy, or to any stories with unfamiliar settings) is how
to explain to the reader those things that the characters would take for
granted. The writer of a contemporary novel, for example, can take his or her
readers into a Christian church along with one of the characters, without
having to explain what Christianity is, who Jesus was, or why a baby might be
baptised. The reader may or may not be a Christian, but will be familiar with
the religion as an element of modern western culture. If, on the other hand, I
write a novel set in ancient Rome, and have a character walking into a Temple
of Mithras, I will need to explain far more in order not to lose the reader
along the way.
My novel, Undreamed Shores, is set in the familiar
landscape of Southern England, but it is set in 2400 BC, in the context of a
culture that, for most readers, will be profoundly unfamiliar. The prospect of
visiting Stonehenge whilst it is in use, and meeting its architect, is
hopefully one of the things that will attract readers to the book, but I
inevitably have a good deal of explaining to do, and not just when it comes to
the religion, but many aspects of daily life as well. It was partly for this
reason that I chose a protagonist (a young man, Amzai) who is himself, a
stranger to this land and culture. The entire novel is narrated from his point
of view, and the reader discovers it along with him.
In one
sense, this is a tried and tested formula. Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Divine
Comedy, as well as Robinson Crusoe,
Gulliver’s Travels and, more
recently, David Mitchell’s The Thousand
Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, all have protagonists who discover and explore
worlds that are unfamiliar to them, taking the reader on that journey with them
as they progress. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula,
Jonathan Harker travels to, and reports back from, the heart of Dracula’s world
before the vampire arrives in England to begin his reign of terror here.
In most
cases, however, these discoverers of unfamiliar worlds come from backgrounds
that gave them much in common with the readers for whom the works were written.
Robinson Crusoe and Lemuel Gulliver are fairly typical eighteenth century
Englishmen; Jonathan Harker is a London solicitor; Dante even places himself
centre-stage, since it is he who travels, with the poet Virgil as his guide,
through the infernal regions, describing them for the reader in terms so
memorable as to have informed almost all subsequent imaginings of “Hell” in art
and literature (far more so than anything in the Bible). Jacob de Zoet is a
different sort of protagonist: an eighteenth century Dutchman in a 21st
Century English novel, his own world is only marginally more familiar to the
reader than the Japanese milieu that he explores. Here we come face to face
with one of the specific challenges of writing historical fiction: our
protagonists are always, to a greater or lesser extent, unlike our readers (or
ourselves) simply by virtue of living in a remote time period.
My
protagonist, Amzai, is quite an extreme example of this. He comes (as I do)
from the Channel Islands, and the culture and society of Early Bronze Age
Dorset and Wiltshire are strange to him. He has to learn the languages; figure
out the customs and manners; understand the religion; much in the same way as
Gulliver has to find his way around Brogdingnag. He has a guide (a young woman,
Nanti, with whom he falls in love) to help him in this, much as Dante has
Virgil.
Both Amzai
and Nanti, however, belong to their own time period, which is very remote from
ours. Theirs is a world without the written word, without maps, without the
wheel. In trying to interpret such a world for the reader, it suited my
narrative purpose to imagine Amzai and Nanti as coming from very different
backgrounds (not only in terms of where they come from), and to give them
different sorts of knowledge, which they share with one another in a way that
hopefully seems natural to the reader in the context of the story. As an
islander, Amzai has an intimacy with, and an understanding of, the sea that
Nanti cannot begin to approach. She, however, has a particular gift for
languages, and is also a respected healer, with a vast knowledge of medicinal
herbs.
Part of
the joy of writing the book lay in the opportunities it created to mix up the
very familiar (the landscape, birds, trees, flowers, animals) with the
profoundly unfamiliar (the society, customs, mythology and religion - partly
reconstructed from the archaeological evidence, but largely imagined); to
generate sparks of connection between our own world and that of our remote
ancestors.
This,
however, is just how I have done it. Who are your favourite protagonists in
stories with unfamiliar settings, and why? How do you go about the process of
creating a protagonist in your own writing? What characteristics should a great
protagonist have?
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