Historic fiction is self-explanatory. Surely.

It refers to novels about the ‘Old Days,’ as we used to call the past when I was a child.

By which, of course, we meant the times when our grandparents were alive. When life was in black and white rather than colour. When people were ‘Old Fashioned.’ I think our childhood vision of their past was of lives lived in slow motion or, as L.P Hartley so famously says in the opening of The Go-Between:

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

Yet when you think about it, everything that is not set in the present, in the very moment of when it is being written has some sense of historicity about it.

Nothing is static. Everything changes all the time. And at no point in our evolution, surely, more than now.

Always I write novels set in what I consider to be the recent past. But lately, I’ve begun to think of how very different, how historic, in fact, are some of the attitudes, habits, norms and values of merely thirty or forty years ago. How, to a younger generation, it needs to be understood quite how people behaved or believed or reacted to situations then rather than now – even if the novel is not palpably and conventionally ‘historic.’

Recently, someone who had bought and read my first novel, Counting the Ways, which is set in the mid-1980s, emailed me to say how much she had enjoyed it but that she was disappointed with the female protagonist’s behaviour at the end – what this reader suggested, however, as her preferred fate for my character, Grace, would have seemed ill-judged and unlikely for the norms of a young woman nearly forty years ago.

And in a recent review of my latest novel, The Odyssey of Lily Page, a reader was incredulous about certain attitudes of my eponymous heroine Lily. But this novel is set in 1983. Lily was born in 1931 and almost unconsciously, we all inherit and imbibe the values and attitudes of our age. Many young people today are disbelieving when you explain to them that it was only after 1975 and the passing of the Sex Discrimination Act that women could apply for mortgages in their own name. Shocking but true. Equality, an awful lot seem to think, came conveniently along with the arrival of the post-war welfare state rather than having to wait another thirty years or so for the act.

But the 1980s was indeed an era of massive change – and 1983 was, I think, a pivotal year. (hence setting my fourth novel in that year and my interest in it.) Another reviewer was kind enough to comment that my picture of the year is scrupulously true-to-life so presumably he is of an age to remember it as lived experience!

Of course it’s not just values and attitudes that change – our physical environment shifts all the time too. But you have to be of a certain age to appreciate quite how much has changed in our domestic, every day lives and quite when.

For example, twenty years ago, when I was studying for my M.A. in Creative Writing, I wrote a short story set around 1964 which featured, (among other things!) a chemist shop. My tutor, a woman a couple of decades younger than me, liked the story but said that my description of the chemist shop sounded like something in the 1930s rather than the ‘swinging sixties.’ It was hard to convince her that outside of Carnaby Street and the Kings Road, suburban high streets really had not changed very much at that time. That chemist shops sold crepe bandages and corn cushions and red cough mixture in glass bottles and were yet to become sleek, stylish emporiums with aisles deep in beauty products as they became later in the 20th century.

The rapidity of change is so fast these days that perhaps novels that are not technically in a historic genre are going to need a very brief and truncated account of how very different things were in, say, 1978 or 1984 or 1994 or whenever said novel is set. Just to place the reader on the right path, as it were, so that he or she is not making unfair judgments of characters or growing too exasperated with them.

The account would have to read something along the lines of:

People used to write letters to share news in the latter part of the 20th century and important phone calls were often missed because answer phones were yet to be the norm. So don’t take it out on our hero when he keeps his lover waiting endlessly on the corner – and don’t upbraid her for waiting so long in the rain. Because that’s what people did back then …we stoically, no doubt foolishly, weakly, pathetically – but loyally – gave him the benefit of the doubt and just waited!

For after all …

The past is a foreign country

And we did things and thought things and believed things differently then.

Happy New Year to everyone!