A new novel, The Mistress of Nothing, by Kate Pullinger, raises again the debate over faction. Pullinger's book is beautifully told and moving. It is based on Katherine Frank's acclaimed biography of Lucie Duff Gordon, my great-great grandmother. But to dramatise her tale, recounted in the novel by Lucie's maid, Sally Naldrett, Pullinger ends by turning Lucie into a vindictive monster. This is very different to the impression one gets from either Frank's biography or any other account of Lucie's life in Luxor during the 1860s, where she wrote her most famous book, Letters from Egypt.
One cannot possibly accuse Pullinger of dishonesty. She acknowledges in an author's note at the end that she has "played fast and loose with the facts" and takes responsibility for all the "other untruths, fabrications and mistakes in this novel".
But why cannot novelists use the far more legitimate technique of a roman-à-clef if they wish to rewrite events or characters for dramatic effect? A change of name, indicating a parallel yet still recognisable universe, provides that one remove which prevents the reader from being misled. Justin Cartwright's novel about Isaiah Berlin and Adam von Trott, The Song Before It Is Sung, is a perfect example of a roman-à-clef used in this way.
"But people know that a novel is fiction," you may reply. Well, up to a point. Let us look at the broader implications, and the knock-on effect when the entertainment industry uses the novel as raw material. The blurring of fact and fiction has great commercial potential, which is bound to be corrupting in historical terms. We have recently been seeing a major increase in "faction-creep", perhaps partly because we have moved into a post-literate world, where the moving image is king.
Entertainment history is now the main source of supposedly historical knowledge for more and more people, but "histo-tainment" is superficial and lacks all context. Its defenders claim that, even if it distorts the material, it gives a taste for the subject. But this is sophistry of the worst kind, as a brief glance at Hollywood's legacy will show.
Historical truth and the marketing needs of the movie and television industry remain fundamentally incompatible. Hollywood's compulsion to claim that a film is somehow true, even when almost completely fictional, is a comparatively new development. The false impression of verisimilitude is bolstered from time to time by throwing places and specific dates on the screen, as if the audience is really about to see a faithful re-enactment of what happened on a particular day.
In 2003, ITV based a much-criticised drama series on the German prison camp Colditz. "We have not made the show for the veterans," said the producer in justification. "We have made it for a Sunday-night ITV audience that doesn't really know anything about the place . . . It is not purporting to be, in any shape or form, the story of Colditz." So why call it Colditz and why launch it specially on the anniversary of the prison's liberation? By all means borrow the basic story, but then change the names and do not try to claim that it is true.
"But what about Shakespeare?" is one entertainment industry retort. "He used real characters from history." The answer to that is simple. The theatre, with the proscenium arch, and in Shakespeare's case, the prologue, clearly demonstrated a dramatic ritual. Then, right at the end, all the slain victims reappear on stage for their bow, which is like a hypnotist snapping his fingers to end the trance of suspended disbelief. There are no such saving conventions in television and film, which relentlessly try to create a fake reality in every way possible, with computer-generated imagery, to say nothing of the claims about a "true story", all to trick audiences into a belief that what they are seeing is the real thing.
The barrier between fact and fiction is eroding fast. In some schools, history teachers use Blackadder to teach the first world war. At one conference, a professor justified this, claiming that all her students were streetwise and could easily tell the difference between fact and fiction. I was deeply unconvinced, but could hardly prove her wrong. Then, a few months later, the movie of The Da Vinci Code came out. My wife and I went to see it. At the end of this hocus-pocus, we overheard a young man behind us say in awed tones: "It makes you think, doesn't it?" I did not know whether to laugh or scream. Not long afterwards, a survey revealed that almost half the nation believed that Mary Magdalene had had a child by Jesus and that their bloodline continues.
This takes us beyond the blurring of fact and fiction and the corruption of historical truth. There is a far greater danger lurking, which has been called "counter-knowledge". Counter-knowledge covers the propagation of false legends and conspiracy theories often used for political purposes or fundamentalist religious propaganda. It may well stem from an obsessive person who, over the internet, makes their suspicion sound plausible to tens of thousands, even to millions of others who also have grievances and are eager to believe the worst.
Examples include the notion that Aids was created in a CIA laboratory, that Princess Diana was murdered by the intelligence services, and that 9/11 was orchestrated by the Bush administration. One of the main branches of counter-knowledge is pseudo-history, in which the pseudo-historian creates his or her theory, then cherry-picks the evidence to support it, all the while ignoring or dismissing any facts which contradict the thesis.
All this has coincided with what one might call the Wikipedia age. A populist notion has grown that anyone has the right to correct or change the truth according to their own beliefs. In a way, it is a democratic ideal taken to its most grotesque extreme, but in practice it is the opposite of democratic, because it allows the demagogue to exploit gullibility and ignorance. Who was it who came up with the slogan: "If it's true for you, then it's true"? The Scientologists, I believe. And why are they so interested in Hollywood?
This may seem a long way from the novel, in which invention of all sorts is permissible. But when the historical novel is made into a TV play or film the process of faction-creep accelerates. From selling fiction as truth in books and movies to the big lies of counter-knowledge is not such a very big step after all. The key point, surely, is that we play with facts at our peril.