This webspace (WordPress blog plus these linked webpages holding the longer features) explores the underlying factual stories in subject areas familiar from mass-media fiction of one sort or another - thrillers, TV dramas, films etc.
My premise is that the former are usually more interesting and meaningful than the ad hoc contrivances of the latter. As the phrase 'stranger than fiction' is a commonplace one, and not very useful as a searchable key-phrase to find any of our pages, I've added a hyphenated sub-head preceded by a pen-name - Sireadair.
For the curious, Sireadair is the old spelling of a Gaelic word occasionally seen in Old Irish tales. It means someone who travels freely - something you need to do in this type of research. The initial Si- is pronounced as in the names Sian and Sean, and the stress lies on the penultimate syllable, which is pronounced ay - with a long "a", and the final syllable as a short unstressed "-er." In its original context, it also carried the connotation of someone who may appear to strangers to be just a wanderer, but whose travel has a purpose - often making an excursus into unknown or frontier territory for intelligence gathering purposes, as we must do here.
The usual saying is “Truth is stranger than fiction”. This quote has been attributed to writers as diverse as Byron, Mark Twain, and GK Chesterton. Byron’s version (in his 1823 poem Don Juan) is “Truth is always strange, Stranger than Fiction.”
Twain’s version is a humourous take on an existing phrase he thought a cliché: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.” GK Chesterton’s version (in a 1905 novel) is “Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction…For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore congenial to it.” To this list we could also add the dramatist Pirandello in his Six Characters In Search Of An Author, and I’m sure readers could suggest others.
Truth however is a broader and more ambiguous term than "Fact". The authors above no doubt meant truth in the everyday sense of fact. Truth also has a more abstract meaning of personal conviction which is incapable of (perhaps resistant to) proof. So here, I've used "fact" as a more tangible term, implying something observable by others. Of course it carries its own inherent imprecision. For what is a fact when it comes to history? And if something isn't provable as fact, is it then fiction, or (a favourite get-out term) all a "myth"?
These features won't be the usual nit-picking "myth debunking" of easy targets. Often here we're exploring real, versus fictional, mysteries. Sometimes the "factual" story itself starts to look more like ad hoc fiction - perhaps propaganda of some sort. I've been studying this theme most of my life, and sometimes there are just no ready answers. (Some of the first features I'm putting up here have appeared earlier elsewhere online, in slightly different form.)
The standard disclaimer is that readers must make up their own mind in each individual case, but I think it might be more appropriate to say we should always be prepared to review our formative conclusions as we go along. Each answer leads to a new question which in turn leads to a new ... well, you get the idea. §
- Sireadair
Flashman And The Case Of False Documents
The author George MacDonald Fraser OBE, who died January 2nd, has received the full round of newspaper obits. Most people will have encountered his work through his screenplays like Octopussy and the Michael York-Oliver Reed Three-Musketeers films trilogy. However the obits and news headlines are nearly all “Flashman Author Dies” variants, all focusing on Fraser’s 12 'Flashman' novels (1969-2005), which are examples of what is known as the False Document. This is a literary device where a work of fiction purports to be a real document such as a memoir or official report
... [read feature].