Getting it right

In Finding Nemo, Albert, the clown fish’s wife and whole family-to-be- of clown fish eggs are eaten at the start of the film.  One egg, which hatches into Nemo remains and, when Nemo gets lost, Albert sets out to find him.  It’s a delightful story and very funny, too.  However, when a mother clown fish is killed, the male clown fish turns into a female.  I know this, because the director said so on the DVD extras.  The makers of Nemo chose to ignore it because it would make the film just too damn complicated and they were absolutely right.  That’s a creative decision that makes the story work better.

However, on the weblist DorothyL this week, a point was raised about accuracy in historical fiction.

The heroine of a book set in the First World War motors around Britain without any thought of petrol rationing.  Was there, Dave Bennet asked on the list, any fuel restrictions?  The question pulled him out of the world of the book.  The notion of fuel restrictions should at least have been raised, because there were petrol restrictions and, like most things which seem like a problem at first, the very problem could have been creatively used to give a better sense of the period.

Restrictions, in the form of licences, were imposed early in the war and were tightened up as the war went on.  I had to think about this for my WW1 spy thriller, Frankie's Letter, where the villain whizzes round in a Daimler (so handy for kidnapping heroes and carrying them off!). That's 1915, but by the following year, newspapers would report incidents of joy-riding very censoriously.  Private driving became semi-respectable again in the summer of 1917 by attaching large gas-bags, which looked like miniature Zeppelins, on a wooden frame to the car with six feet of pipe for recharging at gas-points.  There were plenty of cases of drivers filling up illegally at lamp posts! (All lamp posts were fuelled by gas, often tapping into the sewers for a supply).

Is it important to get it right?  On one level, no.  The story can be good and the writing fine, but if you are setting a story in a particular era, it seems like only fair play to the eventual reader to at least try to get it right.  And, by getting details right, the chances are, the overall impression of the time will be right, too, so the reader gets the impression of living in another world.  Besides that, it’d be fun watching the heroine get free gas from a lamp-post!