ESSAYS ON WRITING
HEARTBEAT journalist ANTHONY HORLINGTON invited CHRISTOPHER STERLING to provide in-depth, written answers to some long-form questions.
This is what he had to say.
THE EPISTOLARY IMPERATIVE
Q – Unlike most of today’s novels, The Lady of Beaumont has no central narrator. Can you tell us why you wrote in that way and how it benefits the story?
A – The Lady of Beaumont is not a typical novel! Most fiction is written either with an unseen narrator or through the eyes of a single character. The Lady of Beaumont does neither…
Using a third-person narrator is the least demanding on a writer, who simply explains what is happening. It’s highly versatile, because the voice can jump from scene to scene, but it inevitably grounds the book in the writing style of the present day. I wanted to write The Lady of Beaumont as if from within the nineteenth century. A contemporary narrator would carry modern fingerprints, and I was adamant that this book should not be ‘a contemporary novel set in the 1890s’, but rather ‘a novel that might have been written in the 1890s’. So, all trace of the modern world had to vanish—it was never going to be about ‘modern’ people in period costumes.
However, there is an even greater drawback to the third-person narrator, which is that the reader instinctively trusts the writer. The Lady of Beaumont is a book of unfolding truths and deliberate misdirection. That would simply not be possible with a conventional narrator.
This, then, suggests the second writing style: through the eyes of one of the characters. Indeed, this is a mechanism favoured in much nineteenth century writing: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing as Dr. Watson, for example, or H.G. Wells’s unnamed narrator in The War of The Worlds. That mechanism allows enormous freedom of observation. It also enables the writer to convey personal emotion—which is a key pillar of the book—but it has one fatal flaw: if the writer wrote down what happened, the reader already knows that the writer must have survived the story. Again, The Lady of Beaumont is not a typical novel. It is a multi-genre book, spanning romance, adventure, mystery and psychological thriller—and I couldn’t allow it to have a single voice, because the reader would know, from the outset, that the narrator must have lived—and that knowledge destroys suspense.
That is why I turned to a device that had been expertly deployed by Bram Stoker in the novel Dracula: the epistolary novel. Within this structure, I present the reader with narratives from many perspectives. These appear as diary entries, letters, newspaper clippings, telegrams, coronor’s reports, court transcripts, and so on. This way, the reader is never entirely certain what the truth is, what will happen next, or—crucially—whose voice they can trust. As they read through the novel, they will learn to trust certain characters—or is that trust misplaced? They will hear many, many voices—and, for me, that was part of the joy of writing: the opportunity to develop multiple characters from the inside out, rather than simply recording what one person observed them to say.
By the end of the novel, the reader will have pieced together the narratives in their own mind and will understand the various voices. But, as I have said elsewhere, I also borrowed one final trick from Mr. Stoker: I will keep you guessing until the very last line. That is my promise.
TRUTH BEFORE COMFORT
Q – The Lady of Beaumont is set primarily in the 1890s—a time of social, cultural and racial inequality. How do you deal with that in your story?
A – I don’t. My characters do. As you know, The Lady of Beaumont is an epistolary novel. There is no unseen narrator to impose commentary. The story unfolds entirely through the voices of those who live it. As a writer, I make no commentary on the world in which they live. This is vitally important, because I wanted to remove everything that would make the novel appear to have come from today’s world—including my own writer’s hand. To maintain the illusion that the book is a work of Victorian minds, it has to come, essentially, from those minds themselves. So that’s the superficial answer to your question.
The deeper answer—and I suspect the heart of your question—is how the novel engages with those realities. Again, it has to do with the characters themselves. Before I wrote one word, I had decided that the book would be true to its characters. I would give them voices and they would speak. They would not speak as people of today might speak. They would speak with the experiences, the knowledge, the culture, the beliefs—and, yes, the prejudices, if they held them—of the era they inhabit. If I had a Victorian suddenly speaking in a modern voice, that would be anachronistic and instantly break ‘the spell’ of Victorianism.
But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t alive to the issues you allude to. Frances Beaumont encounters a great deal of prejudice on her journey through the novel. She encounters poverty—and she rights whatever wrongs she can. But most significantly, she spends time in America. She meets people from many walks of life: Italian-American, White American, Apache, and so on—and she meets them with eyes open. Frances is the heroine—not because she has modern sensibilities imposed upon her, but because she possesses a clarity of virtue. She has eyes that see injustice, and a heart to correct it. She meets a survivor of the Reservations, who speaks of suffering and disease; the Governor of Arizona, where she campaigns on behalf of the Apache and Navajo nations; a front-line Cavalry officer, who recounts the brutality his men endured; dissident Apaches bent on murder; and, perhaps most significantly of all, she is touched by the courage of an Apache woman—courage that borders on myth (and this will become a central tenet of Book II). Each character speaks with the truth of their own experiences, and Frances learns from them.
To portray characters as ‘two-dimensionally good’ would be as false—and just as prejudiced—as portraying them as ‘two-dimensionally bad’. Like everything else in the book, they must be true to themselves. That’s why you won’t hear nineteenth century characters taking about ‘Native Americans’. That term is not true to that period. They speak of ‘Indians’—whether pejoratively or respectfully. It’s also why you won’t find a ‘cowboys and Indians’ set piece; but neither will you find a ‘revisionist western’ undertone. You will see the truth of what the characters have experienced, in as historically accurate way as I could research. I saw my task not as being to correct the nineteenth century, but to reveal it—and to let the characters inhabit it and speak their truths, however illuminating or uncomfortable that may be.