ABSTRACT
I Thomas Gifford’s 1977 novel, The Man From Lisbon, has a bold, three-word preface: ‘It really happened.’ Since the novel would have us believe that every single modern history of Portugal is wrong about what really happened, we may beg to disbelieve. Nevertheless, much modern bestselling fiction is devoted to a similarly quixotic attempt to authenticate the fantastic, and either strains or wins over our credulity. (There is a large fund of credulity to strain: the author of the Flashman series, George Macdonald Fraser, reports that he regularly gets letters-mainly American-from readers who honestly believe that his Victorian bounder’s confessions are genuine.) A number of tricks are used to pull off the hoped-for illusion. One trick is to encrust the narrative with a surplus of researched information; this has the incidental and therapeutic function of reassuring the reader that he is not merely enjoying himself, he is learning something. Another trick is the recruitment of a novelist who is a privileged insider (e.g. the former Vice President of the United States) or who has knowledgeable connections that are prominently disclosed by the publisher. One might note the vogue in the late 1970s for novels written by front performers in news-media. Television in Britain furnished such newscasters-turned-novelists as Michael Nicholson, Sandy Gall, John Snow and Gerald Seymour. In America, CBS and ABC collaborated in the authorial persons of Marvin Kalb and Ted Koppel on In the National Interest, a saga of middle-east shuttle diplomacy enigmatically endorsed by Dr Kissinger as ‘A great work of fiction’. The association of novels with newscasters tends, of course, in the opposite direction-to validate them, that is, as ‘great works of fact’. And the subjects chosen by such novelists-political intrigues, coups, international crises-are carefully consonant with their familiar broadcast messages to us.
