fiction


“In February 1884 – it was very fortuitous – it was at the moment of a huge strike. Where 12,000 miners are out on strike, Zola zooms up to the borderland between France and Belgium… and he spends a full week interviewing miners, interviewing colliery managers and learning about the whole spectrum of mining activity and the community cultures around mining. “At the centre of this was a wonderful opportunity for him to actually go down into a mine. So he gets into the cage, and he experiences that terrifying drop that Étienne does as well at the beginning of the novel, drops to the bottom and is able to experience crawling on all fours down a very tight tunnel to get a literally close-up experience of the miners’ work.” But a novel does not become journalistic through the use of research alone. Historical fiction too relies on extensive study of a topic and time — but, crucially, not modern-day society. And, while all novels in some sense speak to the era and society in which they are produced, most do so indirectly.


recognise offside”. Her research involved holding meetings and interviews with giants of the footballing world, including Alex Ferguson, Kenny Dalglish and former premier league chairman Richard Scudamore. In her extensive acknowledgements, which she describes as


“the longest thank-you letter ever written”, Cooper also credits advisers on football journalism, horse racing, cancer and explosives.


Speaking to a wide range of sources would be second


nature to Cooper, who started her writing career as a journalist. Similarly, Charles Dickens “poured into his novels” his “instincts as a reporter”, says O’Hagan, and he aims to do the same. “Whenever I can, I find facts to pour into a novel – that give it a realistic energy like this. Why would you not want the facts?” It was a conclusion no doubt also reached by Émile Zola


when composing his Rougon-Macquart saga, a series of 20 novels that set out to provide a panoramic view of France’s Second Empire (1852-1870). Though the novels were mostly composed after the empire’s fall, the France in which Zola was living was still grappling with many of the same issues — including the potential restoration of monarchy. Among the most famous of these works is Germinal. This


novel tells the story of desperate poverty in a mining community in the north-east of France and its attempt to wrest back its dignity through a strike. In a recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, Susan


Harrow, professor of French at the University of Bristol, explains Zola’s preparation for writing Germinal. As well as library research on mine engineering, the conditions of miners and the landscapes in which they lived and worked, Zola carried out “remarkable fieldwork”, she says.


The reported novel, on the other hand, often includes real-life fact and social commentary in and among fictional characters. It uses observational skill to bring vitality to an imagined scenario. This often involves a character playing the role of journalist within the action, observing and making enquiries. Germinal begins with Étienne, the protagonist, encountering the pit at Le Voreux – “evil looking, a voracious beast crouching ready to devour the world”. Throughout, he provides an outsider’s way in to an insular community. In Tackle!, characters frequently explain the intricacies of the football world in conversation with one another. Like the journalist’s need to summarise complex subjects for a lay audience, these techniques allow vast quantities of research to be distilled into the everyday components of a fictional universe. These novels have vastly different styles, but look closely


“


and you’ll find each reflects the journalistic forms of its day. Both Zola and Dickens produced many of their novels in serial format. Dickens was fond of cliffhangers, while Zola’s chapters often end with philosophical observations and invective — but neither would be out of place in the news pages of their time and place. Dickens’s novels also include parodies of newspaper copy,


These novels have vastly different styles, but look closely and you’ll find each reflects the journalistic forms of its days


which draw attention, as the critic GL Brook put it, to the journalist’s “need to make much out of little”. Less consciously, descriptive passages in his books include plenty of unnecessary detail and veer quite suddenly into editorialising of a kind that is a recognisable trait of the 19th century British press. In the modern day, O’Hagan’s style reflects the


contemporary journalistic principle of ‘show, don’t tell’. He says: “I don’t editorialise in this book. I let the drama unfold, and you the reader will, hopefully, come to see just how deeply corrupt and inter-connectedly self-interested these institutions and these people are. So, by the end of the book, I think that the reader’s been on a journey into the heart of a corrupt Britain, really.”


theJournalist | 21


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32