A sketch of what Jim and Mary's attic bedroom ('Someday, Maybe' ) might have looked like. 

Fiction or Non-fiction?

Where do you stand on fiction versus non-fiction? Which do you prefer?

Amongst those who came to have a few words about my novels ‘Someday, Maybe’ and ‘Moving On’ when I was in South Harting the other week was an elderly gentleman who told me, with a certain touch of disdain,  that he was not interested in reading fiction.

               “Why would I want to read about imagined events that happen to imaginary people?” he asked. “Why waste my time with something that isn’t real? Fiction is pointless. Non-fiction is informational, mind expanding. When I read, I want it to be something that will teach me something, make me think.”

At my elbow at this moment are the two books that I am currently reading. One is Emma Healey’s novel, ‘Elizabeth is Missing’ and the other is professor of physics Chad Orzel’s ‘How to Teach Quantum Physics to your Dog’. Across the table, my husband has columnist and broadcaster Rory MacLean’s ‘Berlin: imagine a city’ and the novel, ‘The Finckler Question’, by Howard Jacobs. Sometimes the mood and the moment is right for the reading of one, and sometimes for the other. Surely, there is a value in both fiction and non-fiction and very much a time and a place for both.

Certainly, non-fiction can be educational, informative, engaging and educative, given the infinite variety and complexity of reality.  Slower labour is required; you have to proceed to the next paragraph only after you have managed to grasp the previous one .You need more energy!  It involves slower, line-by-line reading;   you can’t just glide over the words. Fiction may not require as great an intellectual effort, and is, of course, dependent on the experience and imagination of the author and his or her idea of how a person might feel, think or act – though non-fiction, too, depends on the research skills,  integrity and organisational skills of the author, as well as his judgement as to how to represent or interpret the information at his or her hand at hand – but some intellectual effort is required in fiction reading in order to recreate the world of the book and the characters according to  the words the author has given us. There is also an argument that information may be remembered better when presented in a fictionalized form.

More importantly, though, I am with those who think you can gain insight into other people’s lives, human nature and emotions and develop human empathy through reading novels. During my conversation with the gentleman  I mentioned David Halberstam, who spent two years in Vietnam during the early stages of American involvement in the Vietnam war and who wrote a non-fiction book about it afterwards,  ‘The Making Of A Quagmire’.  Afterwards, he said, he had felt that he wanted a way to portray the frustrations and the emptiness of the war and so he wrote a novel about it, too.  ‘One Very Hot Day.’

 Like Halberstam, I believe that stories don’t just entertain, but also enlighten and engage us and allows us to learn about social interaction, psychology, history and so on  in a way that non-fiction can’t. By drawing us into their imaginary worlds, novels don’t just give us a narrative or stimulate our imagination, but also enlarge our understanding of ourselves and increase empathy with others. We identify with fictional characters and think about how we would react and respond to their situations. We try to imagine what it would be like… As someone said, novels are word machines which carry us through time and space. 

My gentleman said that truth is stranger than fiction.  Mark Twain said that it’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

 Pity I didn’t remember that quotation at the time!