WHAT DO THESE STORIES HAVE IN common? A boy taken into service with a Nigerian household; a famous football manager who takes over a famous team for little more than a month; a Scotsman who finds success and romance in 19th-century Japan? First, of course, you can read about them in Books this week, when you read the work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and about the work of David Peace and Alan Spence. A second answer, however, is that these are all true stories that have been made into fiction by different authors. Truth, as they say, is stranger than . . . And yet the process goes on. We have been here before: remember the Dan Brown case? Two historians claimed that his use of their theories for The Da Vinci Code constituted plagiarism; the court disagreed.
Now you could argue that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s piece is a different thing; she has taken events from her own life and used them, to some extent, to fuel her fiction. David Peace and Alan Spence have taken historical events and used them for flint and tinder; but I’m not sure there’s much difference in the end. Writers have the world to work with. There is no other material than that.
The image of the writer — the fiction writer — is often an isolated one, the hunched figure locked in a room, in a world of his or her own, far removed from reality, or what goes by that name. I can vouch for the fact that, perhaps, for a time, that has to be true.
But the best writers — like the best readers — are curious above all, and you can’t be curious and be disengaged from the world. Do you ever sit on the bus, listen to a fragment of conversation and feel frustrated that you won’t hear the outcome? If you’re a writer, you do, and then you can even control the outcome.
You can change history, too. I have just started reading a wonderful novel called Brookland, by Emily Barton. It has not been published here yet, but Amazon, as ever, will ship it to you. It’s about a woman who builds a bridge over the East River in New York — from Brooklyn to Manhattan — decades before any (male) engineer managed to construct the actual bridge that still spans the current. It’s a novel about New York just after the War of Independence, it’s a novel about the lives of women, but most of all it’s a novel about the power of imagination to make anything possible, to create a fictional truth that’s as fine as any “fact”.