I’ve written about intent
before. As this A-Z enters its twilight I thought I’d address the subject
again. Those who prefer to think of Afrika
Reich as a ‘straight’ thriller might want to look away now...
Prior to Afrika Reich, I wrote four unpublished
novels on subjects as diverse as Barbary
pirates and literary forgery. The one common thread was the mode of writing:
FANTASTIC REALISM, something I continued in my tale of Nazi Africa.
So what is fantastic
realism? It’s a rather amorphous term and unlike its better known cousin –
magic realism – evades definition. Personally, I feel it employs realistic
conventions but mixes them with elements of the fantastic, grotesque, comic and
horrific. Perhaps it’s easier to explain with an example and so once again I
reach for Sergio Leone, a great practitioner of fantastic realism. Here’s an
image from his film, Giù la Testa:
It shows Sean, an IRA
terrorist, having dinner with Juan, a bandit (off screen), in the Mexican
desert. This combination of unexpected characters meeting in a realistic
setting is already taking us into the realms of fantastic realism but the
clincher is the details. They are sitting down to eat in the wilderness but are
dining off porcelain plates with all the finery (the wingback chairs, the
decanters of vinegar and oil) of a lord’s banqueting hall. I particularly like
the crêpe suzette pan. It is a combination of unlikely elements – though
crucially there is nothing
supernatural about the scene.
My book begins its fusion of
reality with the fantastical on page one with opening epigraphs that combine
the real (Hitler’s quote) and the imagined/fantastic (Hochburg’s). Elsewhere we
see two arch enemies overlooking a square paved with human skulls discussing
Himmler’s constitution. Or Patrick tortured within a cement factory where the
main production material is not mineral-based but a trough of human bodies.
Sometimes it’s simply in the small details – the SS guards with their pink
ladies parasols (a direct reference to Leone). Unlikely? Yes. Impossible? No.
Alternative history has
always struck me as something of a fantastic genre – it posits an unknowable
reality – so I felt it was an ideal match for fantastic realism. However, due
to the success of books like Fatherland,
and more recently Dominion, a
naturalism seems to be creeping into the genre: the idea that a writer can
accurately describe a speculative world that never existed. It certainly seems
the mindset some people have tried to read my book in – no wonder they’ve been
confused! But that is to miss the point. It’s not my book wasn’t thoroughly
researched or employs real, historical details – it’s that I’m not a slave to
verisimilitude. Indeed the notion of verisimilitude in alternative history
must, by definition, be a contradiction.
What interests me most, what
excites me enough to want to spend several years writing a book, is the point
where reality and the fantastic meet – and the friction the two generate. That
is what Afrika Reich is about:
something a little more subversive than reality.
