I have to say, right away, that I enjoyed Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves, which was named the Costa First Book of the Year. But one aspect disconcerted me and diminished my liking of it. Penney, a sufferer from agoraphobia, had been unable to travel to Canada, where her book is set.
She conducted all her research in the British Library in London. No doubt some Canadian readers with experience of their country’s wilderness in winter will point out that Penney hasn’t got it quite right. They will be small in number compared to readers who would be ignorant of any mistakes or, if they knew, would not care. To me, though, her lack of direct knowledge matters. As a reader, I feel short-changed and disappointed. When place plays an important part in a story, I expect the writer to have been there. Admittedly, Penney’s book is set in 1867, but I still would have felt more satisfied if she had absorbed the atmosphere, the cold and the scenery at first hand. She, at least, had an excuse for not doing so.
True, when I read a book about a place foreign to me, I may not know whether the writer’s portrayal is accurate, so why should it bother me?
First — and here I wear my hat as book reviewer — there is often a quivering of the antennae which tells me that, even if I haven’t been to the place in the book, the writer doesn’t know it well, either.
Something about it feels wrong. The writer will make sure he gets the name of a restaurant right, but will he have listened to the way people talk, noticed the little manners and eccentricities of life, smelled the smells?
In the field in which I mainly review — crime fiction — all the best books come from writers who describe what they know intimately: Ian Rankin, James Lee Burke, George Pelecanos, to name a few masters of the genre. (When, as happens occasionally, a series detective finds himself investigating something away from home, the story is rarely as convincing.) This principle isn’t just true of crime books; it applies to all fiction. Can you think of a great novel that takes place where its author has never been? (Be reasonable; obviously I exclude Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four and other fantasies.)
Second, I’m bothered because if the writer can’t get the geographical and social background right, can he, or she, be trusted to deliver the crucial human and emotional elements?
Those with a contrary view misguidedly accuse me of following a slippery slope, which leads to the proposition that in literature no healthy, happy, rich, heterosexual or white person can really appreciate and, therefore, write about what it’s like being ill, suicidal, poor, gay, or of another ethnicity. The end of that path would forbid male novelists from making their main character a woman. So much for Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary.
That is irrelevant to the point I’m making. It is evident that great novelists have the ability to inhabit and describe the minds and feelings of people who are different from them. But making a convincing emotional impact does not excuse a writer from taking care, and being accurate, with the surrounding social, linguistic, scenic, cultural, professional and artistic accessories.
If those are lacking or lacklustre, the novel cannot reach the heights, or even get close. To achieve full veracity, the writer has to have been there. Think of the novels of Graham Greene (the first example that entered my mind), then try to think of them if he’d found out about Haiti, Sierra Leone and the rest only from the British Library. —