I
recently read a historical novel by a writer I’ve always enjoyed, but I was
only a few pages in before I discovered an error. The story takes place during
World War II, and one of the characters was remembering the books she read as a
child. “Her friends had been Anne of Green Gables and Alice in Wonderland, her
adventures in Narnia and the Secret Garden.” The problem? C.S. Lewis didn’t publish
his first Narnia book (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) until
1950, a decade after the historical novel took place.
When
I first read the sentence, I was pretty sure it was wrong, but I didn’t check
it out right away. Then I watched Jeopardy on April 1 and saw this Final
Jeopardy answer. (If there is anybody out there who doesn’t know how Jeopardy
works, the questions are really the answers, and vice versa.) In other words,
this was the information the contestants were given to respond to:
A girl in a 1950 novel
walks into this & “got in among the coats and rubbed her face against them.”
I
knew the question (what the contestants have to guess) right away. The question
was “What is a wardrobe?” and the girl was Lucy from The Lion, the Witch,
and the Wardrobe. The category was “Novel Title Objects,” so it should have
been easy for anyone who has read the Narnia books, but only one of the
contestants got it right. The point here, though, is it confirmed my belief
that the first Narnia book wasn’t published until after World War II (and I
have since verified it from other sources).
I’m
not going to call out the writer of the historical novel, however, because unfortunately
it is easy to make an error about those very minor details in a historical
novel. In one of my early middle-grade stories, I had a character using a ball-point
pen before they were invented. I don’t remember what brought it to my attention,
but I caught it in time. Since then I have tried to meticulously research even
the most minor details. Even so, I can’t guarantee that no errors have slipped
in.
Fortunately,
fictional details don’t have to be perfect.
But
I try.
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