Based on a true story

How true should historical fiction be?

I've had lots of discussions with people about this. There are lots of different opinions. Here's mine.

When I first learned about the astonishing life of James Brooke, I thought it was a story worth telling. I spent the better part of a year reading his diaries, reading the autobiographies of his contemporaries and researching the practical realities of life in the Far East in the mid-19th century. When it was over I knew about as much of how he came to power as anyone (certainly enough to pick up the errors in some scholarly biographies). I wrote a book that was a fictionalised account of his adventures but every tiny detail was as true as I could make it.

It got enough interest for me to be given the help of a professional editor who worked with me on it for a while before he suggested that I would be better off producing a non-fiction biography. That's when I realised that if a novel is to work as a novel, you need to remember that the facts should never get in the way of a good story.

I put aside the idea of writing about James Brooke for a very long time (decades, in fact). Then I was looking for a way of writing a book about why people who start with the best of intentions can end up doing terrible things. And I remembered that Brooke, despite all the good things he achieved, had been involved in a massacre so appalling that it had even shocked Victorian England, although the Victorians were not noted for getting too agitated about the way that British colonists treated the native peoples of the world. And so I came back to the idea of writing a book based on events in Sarawak but from a different point of view.

I deliberately didn't go back to the source material about Brooke because I wanted to allow my imagination more free rein. But, obviously, I still remembered a lot of what I had researched before and I tried to stay true to the character and events I remembered.

In the end, the story remains very closely based on real events. When the book comes out, you'll find a note at the back that highlights some of the places where I have taken liberties with the historical record. The biggest of these is the introduction of the narrator, who is identified as John Williamson, Brooke's interpreter. Brooke did have an interpretor called John Williamson (although he died during the period covered by the story) but the real Williamson has nothing at all in common with my invention. Most significantly, my narrator becomes Brooke's lover. Whilst there is a huge amount of evidence that Brooke was gay, it is extremely unlikely that he had any relationship like the one in the book - and certainly not with his interpreter. But the story needed a character who was close to James and whose eyes we could see him through. Given Brooke's sexual orientation and the fact that there are no women in the story, Williamson's role developed very naturally and by the time I'd finished it was the emotional core of the book.

Am I wrong to manipulate the facts like this? I don't think so. I'm writing a novel and I never claim to be doing anything else. Why, then, base it on a true story? Because, I guess, we all have to get our inspiration from somewhere. I could have invented a fantasy figure having wholly imagined adventures on an invented island. In fact, that was my original idea. But I don't think that a wholly imagined person and situation will have the resonance and depth of someone who really existed. Sometimes, when I tried to think how Brooke would have reacted to something, I went back to my notes from his letters and diaries and read his words. In one or two places, I am actually able to use his own words in the dialogue I have given him in the book. The fact that there once was a living, breathing James Brooke made it much easier for me to see him as a real person and I hope that that makes him come alive more in the book. And, for me, he was, despite all his faults, an old-fashioned hero whose rule is still celebrated in Sarawak as a Golden Age. I hope that my book will revive interest in one of the great men of the Victorian era. If it does, then you can always read the scholarly biography after.

Sarawak

My mother-in-law used to live in Singapore. We went out to visit her one Christmas and my wife gave me a trip to Sarawak as a Christmas present.

I'd never even heard of Sarawak. It turned out to be on the north coast of Borneo, over toward the left hand end. Unlike most of the island, it's part of Malaysia rather than Indonesia.

Back in those days there wasn't a lot of tourism in Sarawak. We stayed in the Holiday Inn, which was practically the only hotel in the tiny capital, Kuching. Kuching wasn't what we'd come for, though. We'd come to see the indigenous people: the Dyaks.

We took a boat upstream from Kuching to a longhouse by the river. It was everything that you read about in books (including The White Rajah). Immensely long, it stood on stilts. Pigs and chickens lived under the house. Up above them there was a communal hall that stretched the length of the building with private rooms on one side and an open verandah on the other. The whole thing was put together from timber and bamboo and thatch with nothing quite fitting, so there were plenty of gaps for the air to circulate. For the first time in a while, we were able to sleep without the benefit of air conditioning or ceiling fans.

The next day we carried on upriver. Like the group in the book, we caught a mouse deer. We set fish traps to check when we made our way back the following day. Arriving at the next longhouse we were shown how to use a blowpipe while more serious hunters slipped off into the jungle with a rifle, returning with a monkey that they spit roasted. Less adventurous gourmets guided us round fields of tapioca and sugar cane.

It was a short trip but a memorable one. Even while we were there, the way of life we were seeing was vanishing. Electricity arrived at the second longhouse pretty much the same day as we did and the tribe gathered to watch television for the first time. Someone sold me their ceremonial sword to raise money for the outboard motor that would supplement paddle-power on their canoe. Boarding schools of brick and concrete were being built so that the Dyak children could have a proper education. And, though we did not know it at the time, deforestation was threatening the traditional Dyak way of life.

I've never been back. I doubt that the Sarawak I briefly visited still exists. Since James Brooke arrived there in 1839 the Dyaks have changed from being warriors and head-hunters, living lives essentially unchanged for hundreds of years, to being peaceful farmers. The shrunken heads are still there but the collections are no longer regularly added to. Children nowadays get an education, decide that there is more to life than a jungle longhouse and leave for Kuching or town outside Sarawak. For better or worse, life moves on.

My short visit made a strong impression. When I decided to write a book that deals in part with the changes that colonialism brought to remote societies, Sarawak seemed a good place to set it.
The White Rajah was the result.

Soon to be available in all good bookshops

This is a blog about getting my novel, The White Rajah, published.

Every one is supposed to have one good book in them - and almost everyone seems to have started writing their masterpiece. That's the easy bit.

Assuming you get as far as finishing it, you start revising and editing. Then you send it out into the world looking for a home.

If you're lucky and persistent and your book is good enough, one day you get an agent. And your agent talks to the publishers he knows (lots of agents are women but mine was a man) and the publishers think things over and tell the agent that your book is a very good book but that it's 'difficult'. Perhaps they could sell it if the author was known but it's not suitable for a first novel. Perhaps you'd like to write something a bit easier to build a following and then, once that was published, you could come back to your first baby and they'd look at it again.

So you write another novel and you revise it and edit it and you send it out looking for a home.

And somewhere in this process, you look at your grey hairs and the liver spots on the back of your busily typing hands and you remember that when you first decided to write a novel you were young and there seemed all the time in the world. And you think, 'Dammit! That book I wrote was a good book. And maybe, one day, when the book I'm writing now has become an international best-seller, well then maybe then this book will be published by a big publisher with a huge marketing budget and it will be available in all good bookshops. But when will that day come?' And then you hear about a small publisher who is looking to publish a book just like yours and you write to them and they say, 'Yes, I like your book and I'd like to publish it. And it will be available in a few outlets I know and you'll be able to buy it on Amazon and other on-line book-stores. There won't be a huge promotional budget (or any promotional budget, really) but discerning readers will hear about your book and read it and they will be reading your actual, real book now rather than having the chance of maybe reading some notional best-seller that Penguin may or may not get round to publishing sometime in the future.' And I thought about it and I decided that my book was never going to be displayed alongside Dan Brown (because White Rajahs have class and are fussy about the company they keep) and that a publisher in the hand is better than a penguin in the bush. And I said, 'Yes, I'd love you to publish my book.'

The White Rajah will be available in November. It won't be in all good bookshops but I hope it will make it into a few of the very best. And people like you, dear reader, will be able to hear all about my book and its progress through this blog. I'll tell you a bit about the book and a bit about me and you can follow the ups and downs of the next few months until you are able to buy your very own copy as a souvenir of our little adventure. And when you've read how good it is, you can ask your local bookshop for copies to give to all your friends at Christmas. And they will get it in for you and then it really will be available in all good bookshops.

Keep checking here for more. If you're on Facebook, sign up James Brooke as a friend to be kept up to date.