Hello everyone
I’ve been thinking about counterfactuals.
What If?
Counterfactuals are events that did not happen or a statement which expresses something contrary to the facts. In short, a counterfactual is an untruth. But with the counterfactual, comes the question: what if?
What if the falsehood were true?
And when we’re thinking about novels—which I do—that leads us to an interesting literary subgenre, the alternative history novel. This is speculative fiction in which known events took a different course, that course being different to the truth.
Alternative History
An example of an alternative history scenario is if Nazi Germany had won the war. Or if John F Kennedy or John Lennon hadn’t been murdered—what might the two have done had they lived.
The alternative history novel is very different to, say, my novel The Murder of Henry VIII where there was a conspiracy at the heart of the novel.
The difference between an alternative history and a conspiracy, is truth.
In the world of the novel:
- the alternative history is true
- but the conspiracy theory is a lie.
Fatherland by Robert Harris
One of the best alternative history novels (in my opinion) is Fatherland by Robert Harris. The novel is set in 1964 and adopts the conceit that Nazi Germany won the war and Adolf Hitler is still alive.
Fatherland is not the first alternate history novel, and nor is it the first alternate history novel to use the premise that Nazi Germany won the war. But it is a great novel and Harris follows the logic of his alternative history perfectly.
At its most basic, Fatherland is a police procedural. However, Xavier March, the police officer investigating a murder, is working within the Nazi system.
Despite winning the war in Europe and defeating much of Russia, Germany has become a sclerotic nation still secretly fighting a war on the Eastern Front. The Jews have been wiped out, but that hasn’t made the country successful. Instead the machinery of government is paralyzed by fear of the capricious decision-making of the aging and increasingly erratic Fuhrer who is now approaching his 75th birthday.
For Xavier March, what should be a straightforward murder investigation becomes life threatening (to him) because of the context in which he is working.
What Works?
Fatherland works because it’s a great story. But it also works as an alternative history because the counterfactual is so compelling.
If we go back to one of the other examples I gave—the murder of John Lennon—then the counterfactual (that Lennon wasn’t murdered) is far less compelling as a basis for a piece of fiction.
We all wish Lennon had not been murdered, but if he had lived beyond December 1980, how would the world have changed?
To guess, the world probably wouldn’t have changed. Lennon would likely have gone on to write more songs—he may have even written some more great songs, although likely none would have surpassed Imagine—and he probably would have been involved in many political issues.
But there’s no obvious mission that he would have pursued. There is no obvious if John Lennon had lived, he would have done this… to form the backdrop to a (longform) work of fiction. This is why I suspect that the fictional counterfactuals where Lennon lived beyond 1980 (such as his very minor appearance in the 2019 film Yesterday) are few and far between, and are not consequential to the storyline.
And yes, maybe there’s a family drama to be played out. If Lennon had lived, would he have stayed with Yoko Ono? But—to me, at least—that feels a rather invasive line of speculation, and any tale that followed this line may not be particularly interesting for the reader.
There are many alternative histories still to be written, but JFK or John Lennon not being murdered will not be the central conceit.
Until September
That’s me until September.
Go and read Fatherland if you haven’t already read it. Read it, not because it’s an alternative history, but because it’s a great novel with a gripping story at the heart of the book. And, of course, you’ve already read The Murder of Henry VIII, haven’t you? If not, you should read that too 😁.
All the best
Simon