Publishers of fiction distorting history

I was in the mall today, waiting to get my hair cut. As I do when I'm hanging around a mall, I browse. I love books, but hardly ever spend much time looking at the bookshops here, because they are typically full of cook books and crap fiction. It's so much easier to hone in on what I want online and order it.

But today, since I had a bit of time I wandered into Whitcoulls where a new book by Philippa Gregory caught my eye. I opened up the jacket cover and read the following:

The Lady of the Rivers is #1 New York Times bestselling author Philippa Gregory’s remarkable story of Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, a woman who navigated a treacherous path through the battle lines in the Wars of the Roses.

Descended from Melusina, the river goddess, Jacquetta always has had the gift of second sight. As a child visiting her uncle, she met his prisoner, Joan of Arc, and saw her own power reflected in the young woman accused of witchcraft. They share the mystery of the tarot card of the wheel of fortune before Joan is taken to a horrific death at the hands of the English rulers of France. Jacquetta understands the danger for a woman who dares to dream.

Standing there in that bookshop, I was furious! Joan of Arc was not a practitioner of witchcraft! Philippa Gregory was maligning her by writing as if she were. She would never have had anything to do with Tarot cards, except maybe to burn them if she came across them. She was a devout Catholic woman who went to daily Mass and had a profound air of holiness around her. So much so that the men who went to war with her treated her with total respect and absolute awe. To invent a false Joan who was actually a witch just like Gregory's character in the book is to do violence to history.

Philippa Gregory should know better. She has gained a reputation as being historically accurate.  She's even a real historian.  Check this out where she talks about the book.

"[Witchcraft is] a very interesting way that women express their power in this period.  The women have no political power whatsoever but when they lock themselves into this other world, they use their intuition.  If they use their herbal skills or their healing skills, they have access to a power that nobody can control, that nobody understands.  So for women's history, I think, witchcraft and spirituality are very, very important qualities."

She has a very strange way of looking at the women in Medieval times. Yet, this is typical of our age. Untold lies are printed about the past in fiction and few have the knowledge to realise that they are being lied to.  What Philippa Gregory said above is what a friend of mine who reads historical fiction believes of the past.   But it seems the only way she could have come to such a conclusion is that she's been lied to in many of the books she's read, and even though they are fiction, the use of real historical characters and events lends an authority to the book that is believed.  If these people existed and this and that happened, then this idea must be true.

This makes me so angry as few things do.  For I was an avid reader as a child and teenager, and I loved historical fiction.  I also read non-fiction, so I had a pretty good idea, I thought, of what was likely to be true and what wasn't.  Yet writers such as Philippa Gregory fooled me about the late Medieval times and the Crusaders and I discarded my Faith as a result.

So what to do? 

The only way to counter such books is for more and more writers to start writing more truly without pandering to the prejudices and fancies of our time. A false world view could do battle with what is good and true. However, one of my favourite Catholic authors, Micheal D. O'Brien wrote in an article on his website that when he tried to get his first book published, no publisher would touch it unless he rewrote the story in a more contemporary fashion:

For two decades I collected a stack of rejection letters from mainline Canadian publishers, most of whom said something like the following: “We like your writing very much, and it’s a great story. However, the reading public is no longer interested in this worldview. If you would resubmit your manuscript with the appropriate revisions, expressing a more contemporary vision of life, we would be happy to publish you.” By my worldview they meant the orthodox Catholicism, the inheritance of two millennia of civilization, integrally woven into the tale. In other words, if you wish to fulfill your artistic calling in this land, we invite you to tear out your heart and soul, forget your true story, and contribute to the emerging brave new world. You will be richly rewarded if you do so.

No wonder there has been such a dearth of good fiction out there, it has been blocked by the publishers themselves! Either thinking the public is not interested in any alternatives or actively seeking to prevent anything that varies from the acceptable worldview - the result is the same. Publishers have turned into gatekeepers. The medium of the story as a way of presenting some truth is no longer allowed. Only fake truths need apply.

Maybe the only way around this will be the Internet, yet again. Whereby blogs are now known to be openly challenging the mainstream newsmedia and have changed the way the news is reported, ebooks will be the only way to get alternative stories out there. They're just going to need some damn good writers.

Related link: Cankultur at the End of an Age ~ Michael D. O'Brien