| For many novelists, it’s not difficult to strike a balance between fiction and fact. For Winnipeg author Linda Holeman, however, there is always a delicate balance between the two, with fact being equally as important as fiction in her novels.
"I like doing research," she says, and adds that although the story of her new novel, The Moonlit Cage, is fictional, "every detail is true. I never want to make a mistake or be disrespectful (to history)."
Holeman has written in numerous forms and across genres, ranging from adult fiction to novels written for youth and from short stories set in the present day to novels set in 19th-century England and India. Historical fiction has become her forte. Her previous novel, The Linnet Bird, was distributed in 10 countries, translated into several languages and rose to become a bestseller. She has also been successful in Canada, recently touring through Western Canada and reading for an enthusiastic crowd in her hometown of Winnipeg.
Her new novel, The Moonlit Cage, picks up where The Linnet Bird left off, and tells the story of Darya, a young woman in 1840s Afghanistan, who leaves her native village to marry into a nomadic tribe and ultimately travels through India to England. While the storyline is predictable and unoriginal, the descriptions are vivid and detailed, recounting everything from the topography of the places Darya visits to the customs, rituals and food of the societies she lives in.
Holeman hasn’t visited most of the locales in her book, but plans to travel to India before writing her next novel, which will be set there.
"The best time to go somewhere you plan to write about is before writing," she says, saying that she considered visiting India while she was writing The Moonlit Cage, but decided not to, for fear it would cause her to doubt what she had already written. Even without having visited India or Afghanistan, she describes both countries with ease, and even draws some subtle parallels between the different settings of her story. A description of the impoverished women on the docks of Bombay is mirrored later in the novel by a description of the poor children in East London wading in the Thames, scavenging for anything that has washed ashore.
One of the most difficult aspects of her craft, says Holeman, is knowing how much of her research to use in a novel.
"You need to be cautious about how you put it into the novel," she says, stressing that the story is still the most important element, even if the historical setting has to be accurate. "If you put in too much information, it becomes boring," adds Holeman, revealing that she usually uses only a third of her research in a novel. In contrast to authors whose historical fiction is oriented around major historical events, Holeman admits to deliberately avoiding them.
"I pick a time period that would lend itself to my character. I look at the back story and what is going on in the world at the same time," she says, indicating that she starts with a character, with other details falling into place later.
It took several months to create the character of Darya she says, because "in some ways, she dictated the shape of the story." With characters as much as with setting, says Holeman, she must pay constant attention to the period to avoid any anachronisms.
"At every turn, I have to remind myself that I’m writing from the point of view of a young Afghan girl. I have to remind myself of what she knows and, more importantly, of what she doesn’t know. I stay in that era." She is also critical of writers who plant modern characters in historical settings. "You read some things and you wonder how a writer or editor didn’t notice (the inaccuracies)."
She admits, however, that there are many things about people that remain unchanged from one period to another, saying that this is part of the appeal of historical fiction. "It doesn’t matter the era, universal human feelings are always the same."
While there are obvious social and political implications to her writing, Holeman neither embraces nor avoids them. Darya, for instance, spends much of the novel struggling against the fact that she lives in male-dominated societies – both in Afghanistan and in Victorian England – where she cannot find the freedom she desires. While this struggle is ever-present in the novel, Holeman claims that she isn’t making a political statement. And while the conservative Islam of Darya’s family is frequently used as a reason to punish her, Holeman never passes judgment, and admits that both topics were struggles for her to write about. "In order to stay alive, Darya has to be with a man. I had to come to terms with it."
Likewise, she initially thought of having Darya reject her belief in God because of her suffering, but "Darya’s faith is too deeply-rooted for that. She stops believing in blind faith, but she never rejects her faith entirely."
Despite being well-written, driven by a strong plot and Holeman’s vivid descriptions of time and place, The Moonlit Cage frequently feels as if it is written more for entertainment than believability, and lacks anything particularly original that would allow it to rise above these constraints.
While holding a balance between fact and fiction may seem difficult, Holeman does not hesitate when asked why she has chosen historical fiction as a genre.
"This felt like the only story I could be writing," she says. "Besides, how many stories could I write about a Protestant prairie woman – how boring would that be?" |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.