LG: I suppose it's easier to come to terms with things when you can look back and see some sort of proportion. RN: Why do you think you are drawn to the past? LG: Yes, and by the next day, they'll have falsified it, not deliberately, but they won't remember the details. RN: And also they only see through their own eyes. And that has no part in the depiction of character, because nobody sits down to consider something as a whole when it's happening all around you. Only a historian would have an overall view. I know quite well it was hopelessly inaccurate, but then he couldn't possibly have known what was going on. When I wrote The Prisoners of September about the French Revolution, the account I gave of the storming of the Bastille, which was a newspaper account read by the schoolmaster, was the accepted one at the time.
Often you have to suppress what you actually know, and do it in a way that doesn't seem as though you're doing it, and you can only do that, I find, by being very subjective in your writing. " which immediately adopts a slightly patronizing attitude. If I want somebody suffering from an incurable disease of that time, then I try to make it one that is still incurable so that you don't excite in your reader that feeling of, "Oh, if only they knew they had. It means an awful lot of research if I've chosen a particular period.
I don't want to clutter a story with unnecessary detail and I don't want to patronize my characters by looking back at them. I always take a very subjective view so that I'll only note those things that somebody living at that specific time would have noted. LG: I deliberately avoid dates because I try never to look back, but rather to look about me. RN: Can you begin by telling me about your use of time in your fiction? This interview took place in June 1989 at Leon Garfield's home in North London. Among his best known works are: Jack Holborn (1964), Devil-in-the-Fog (1966), Smith (1967), Black Jack (1969), The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris (1971), The Prisoners of September (1975), The House of Hanover: England in the Eighteenth Century (1976), The Pleasure Garden (1976), The Apprentices (1978), The Confidence Man (1978), The Night of the Comet (1979), John Diamond (1980), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1980, completion of Charles Dickens's novel), The House of Cards (1982), The Wedding Ghost (1984), Guilt and Gingerbread (1984), Shakespeare Stories (1985), The December Rose (1986), The Empty Sleeve (1988), and The Blewcoat Boy (1989).
His books have been widely translated and he has won literary awards in the United States, Holland, Sweden, France, and England. Leon Garfield, the noted author of mystery and adventure novels, and reteller of myths and stories from Shakespeare, is among England's most acclaimed writers of historical fiction for young adults.
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