Fictional Stories, Unforgettable Truths: How Imagined Narratives Help Us Make Sense Of The World & Its History

“The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist can tell you what it felt like,” wrote the American novelist and critic EL Doctorow, referring to fiction’s unique ability to go beyond the historical framework of events and into the moment itself – and the minds of influential figures. Through their novels, writers deliver us into the heart of an experience, giving us context, motives, and emotion, so we can experience the lived reality of a moment beyond our own experience.  

Take Small Boat, Dua’s Monthly Read for July. Vincent Delecroix takes us back to 24 November, 2021, when an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the UK began taking on water in the middle of the Channel. They repeatedly called for help from the French authorities, who replied that the boat was in British waters. By the time help finally arrived, all but two had drowned, their bodies washing up on French shores. Vincent tells the story primarily through the interior monologue of the radio operator who took – but denied – their calls for help. In her refusal to accept responsibility for their fates, Vincent asks if we are all, in a way, morally culpable. As the operator protests: “They were sunk long before they sank”.  

In a similar vein, the epigraph at the beginning of Beloved, Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is an instant reality check for readers. “Sixty million and more”: the number of Africans and their descendants who lost their lives to the Atlantic slave trade – so vast a number as to be unfathomable. Yet Toni’s novel distils it with pin-sharp precision, through the eyes of Sethe, a freed slave. Beloved is the daughter she killed to prevent her being taken back into slavery. Toni was inspired by the story of Margaret Garner – who committed this almost unthinkable act. “I would invent her thoughts,” Toni writes in her foreword, “plumb them for a subtext that was historically true in essence, but not strictly factual in order to relate her history to contemporary issues about freedom, responsibility, and women’s place.” 

Angie Thomas’s urgent, fearless The Hate U Give cuts through the confusion and noise around racial violence and police brutality, crystallising debates about race and the Black Lives Matter movement. Angie was moved to write after the shooting of Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old Black man who was killed by police in Oakland in 2009. Her protagonist, 16-year-old African American Starr Carter, has been schooled by her parents on what to do if stopped by the police: “Keep your hands visible,” her father advises. “Don’t make any sudden moves.” When she is in a car with her best friend, Khalil, the police pull them over and an officer shoots the unarmed Khalil at point-blank range, killing him. Starr is the only witness, carrying the weight of loss, truth, and the outrage of her community. It is a startling, eye-opening, utterly revelatory reading experience.  

You might think that replaying real-life events as fiction dilutes the message, but as these examples reveal, it often serves to heighten impact, bringing a sense of immediacy to an event that has already taken place. Fiction is an empathy machine that has the power to build bridges between us by holding a mirror up to the humanity of an experience. There’s a reason the war novel has long been a genre unto itself. Martin Amis’ The Zone Of Interest is a bleak, audacious reckoning with one of history’s most incomprehensible episodes: the Holocaust and the ordinary human beings who were complicit in one of the worst ever crimes against humanity. Martin’s camp commandant is based on Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The writer gives Martin Bormann (Hitler’s secretary) a fictional nephew who oversees the slaughterhouse bureaucracy, allowing us further insight into the Nazi operations. The novel transcends the simple dichotomy of good versus evil, and shows the latter in their true monstrous banality.

“As I’ve said a million times, I didn’t make it up,” Margaret Atwood has oft-remarked of the dystopian landscape of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments – set in an America controlled by a far-right dictatorship that strips women of all their rights. (Sound familiar?) She drew from real-life historical events: the Communist reign of Ceaușescu in Romania – he passed laws insisting women have four babies, and imposed monthly mandatory gynecological exams to monitor pregnancies; the Lebensborn movement in Nazi Germany, when SS men were given racially pure wives in order to breed a super race; the battles over women’s bodies and rights in the 1980s (chillingly echoed today in the rise of the anti-abortion laws and the overturning of Roe vs. Wade). “What Offred, the handmaid, lived as some cautionary tale felt very much like my lived reality. One woman’s dystopia is another woman’s reality,” the Saudi-American poet Majda Gama remarked upon reading The Handmaid’s Tale.  

And no news story – bound by the necessary conventions of reporting – conveyed the human impact of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s (then the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and candidate in the 2012 French presidential election) alleged rape of Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean hotel worker in 2011, in quite the same way as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count. The novel holds up a mirror to the lives of four Black, African women: three live in privileged, middle-class comfort, one – Kadiatou – is a poor, uneducated, immigrant maid who believes in the promises of America, until she is sexually assaulted by a white guest at the hotel where she works. It is Kadiatou (the powerless) – not the perpetrator (the powerful) – who finds herself vilified, hounded, broken. The episode and its aftermath form the novel’s centrepiece, written – Chimamanda explains – as “a gesture of returned dignity. Clear-eyed realism, but touched by tenderness.” She adds: “The point of art is to look at our world and be moved by it, and then to engage in a series of attempts at clearly seeing that world.”  

Yes, you nod vigorously. Yes. This is why literature matters: It opens our eyes and our hearts. It makes us see truths we might otherwise miss – truths that remind us of our humanity.

Small Boat is Dua’s Monthly Read For July – discover Vincent’s full video interview with Dua here, or listen to it with the Service95 Book Club podcast here