A shocking twist?

April 22, 2008 8:39 AM

Looking for examples of fiction where: a.) someone uncovers an unsettling/surprising/shocking truth about a major "historical" (for that setting) figure or event, b.) the story itself is in the form of a journal or diary that gives the unsettling/surprising/shocking perspective.

As examples of this to put you in the right frame of mind, I offer up Fitzpatrick's War by Theodore Judson and A Talent for War by Jack McDevitt. Non-fiction examples also welcome.

posted by adamdschneider to writing & language (28 comments total)

Lisa the Iconoclast fits the bill perfectly.
posted by moxiedoll at 8:54 AM on April 22

This fits the "a" half of the bill -- and I believe it's based on a short story that, for all I know, may even fit the "b" half -- but I must confess, it's really pretty bad. Almost certainly better for you than the National Treasure movies, though.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 8:56 AM on April 22

"The Cold Six Thousand" and "American Tabloid" by James Elroy are fictionalised accounts of events around the Bay of Pigs invasion and Kennedy's assassination. The majority of the main characters are based on real people.
posted by Jofus at 8:57 AM on April 22

I just got finished reading Alternate Presidents which had quite a few stories like that.
posted by JJ86 at 8:59 AM on April 22

I came here to mention the Ellroy books as well, but they do fail your (b) requirement.
posted by Bookhouse at 9:01 AM on April 22

Oh, sorry. To clarify, it only has to satisfy A or B, not both at the same time. I saw the first National Treasure, and it is indeed atrocious, but I'm looking for printed matter.
posted by adamdschneider at 9:04 AM on April 22

The print version of the story I mentioned upthread is in here (if it exists online anywhere, I can't find it). The "Masters of Horror" episode drawn from it is frankly awful, but per your specifications, I think "George Washington ate people!" is about as shocking as (fictional!) revisionist history can get.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 9:18 AM on April 22

Dracula by Bram Stoker - Told from multiple perspectives taken directly and solely from journal entries and letters. It also, sort of, fulfills requirement A (although, Dracula (Vlad the Impaler) was sort of made historically significant by this novel and subsequent film adaptations).
posted by Detuned Radio at 9:29 AM on April 22

As I recall (it has been 40 years since I read it), Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge would be an example of a story in the form of a journal or diary with an unsettling/surprising/shocking perspective.
posted by thomas144 at 9:35 AM on April 22

Possession: A Romance by A. S. Byatt.

"The novel concerns the relationship between two fictional Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, as revealed to present day academics Roland Michell and Maud Bailey. Following a trail of clues from various letters and journals, they attempt to uncover the truth about Ash and LaMotte's past before it is discovered by rival colleagues."*
posted by xod at 9:43 AM on April 22

The general term for Requirement A stories is "secret histories", which may help in poking around.
posted by ormondsacker at 9:46 AM on April 22

Do the Flashman novels count? Though I don't know how shocking their historical perspective is, it is occasionally unsettling.
posted by small_ruminant at 10:02 AM on April 22

(This looks like a better Flashman site.)
posted by small_ruminant at 10:04 AM on April 22

Thanks, all. I'll check that one out, xod, sounds interesting. My father's been trying to get me to read Flashman for a bit. I'm just out of Sharpe, though, so I'm steering clear of giant series for a while. Thanks also to ormondsacker for a tag suggestion!
posted by adamdschneider at 10:12 AM on April 22

Use of Weapons, by Ian M. Banks should fit the bill - part of the culture series, and the surprise twist was deeply shocking for me. It's actually written as two stories in one (alternating chapters) - one going forward conventionally, and the 2nd is flashbacks going every further back to explain the formation of the main character. It works surprisingly well.

Quite a dark book, though I think it's the best of Ian M. Bank's work so far.
posted by ArkhanJG at 10:30 AM on April 22

Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Star" comes to mind.
posted by stevis23 at 11:14 AM on April 22 [1 favorite]

The Da Vinci Code
posted by mkultra at 11:35 AM on April 22

I know of a very engaging historical novel that does the trick. It's a private publication (very professinally done), and not in very many libraries, if any at all. Title: The Mao Affair. Author: Angus McDonald, Jr.
Circa 1997

Its main conceit is that Mao all along loved the example of American liberty and democratic ideals, and intended this for China. There's a chase after some textual proof of this... can't remember the details just now.

Hope that its being the product of an unknown author is not prohibitive. I just checked, and it's available used, from quite a few booksellers.
posted by yazi at 12:11 PM on April 22

Sounds like you're after the subgenre known as secret histories, adamdschneider?

Fatherland by Robert Harris. Nazi Germany, 1964; as the Nazis are celebrating Hitler's 75th birthday and their victory over most of the world, a lone detective in the Kriminalpolizei is following a trail of cold dead Nazis and uncovering a shocking secret that, if revealed, would annihilate the Nazi party. The novel is somewhere in the Len Deighton realm of pulp fiction, but enjoyable and well written, and pretty bleak.

Curiously enough I would also mention Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, based on a similar premise — that Germany won WWII — to depict a future, dystopic United States divided between the Axis powers. Among the oppressed, a few disillusioned dissidents are seeking out the reclusive, near-mythic author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a banned book about what might have happened if the Navis had lost the war, a book that might in fact be true. (Dun dun DUN!) Not a potboiler, but a genuine philosophical treatment on the nature of reality and real-ness.

Tim Powers' Declare purports to tell the real reason the US and Soviet Russia were tied in a Cold War for 40 years. A spy thriller in the John Le Carré tradition blended with Indiana Jones-style supernatural adventure, and wrapped around actual events and persons such as Kim Philby, the British double agent. Good, fun, well-written stuff, much better than Dan Brown.

Other books by Powers might be of interest — Last Call (Bugsy Siegel is the mythical Fisher King, and Las Vegas is his kingdom), The Stress of Her Regard (about the Romantic poets and the origin of Frankenstein) and Three Days to Never (about Einstein's secret bomb project) are all great secret histories. Powers' thing is taking historical events and providing devious explanations for them: Lord Byron is a haunted, anemic poet not because he's an eccentric romantic but because his muse is a bloodthirsty vampire thing, and Blackbeard lights fuses in his beard not to inspire terror in his enemies but to ward off the ghosts that have infested him ever since he went into that damn jungle looking for the Fountain of Youth.

This is where I ran out of steam, but The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea is also great.
posted by gentle at 12:19 PM on April 22

Oh, I just remembered a great Philip K. Dick short story — one of his best — that fits: Faith of Our Fathers.
posted by gentle at 12:22 PM on April 22

Virtually every Clive Cussler novel meets your A requirement (but none really meet your B).

From memory
- the "assassination" of Lincoln
- the Titanic
- England attempting to sell Canada to the US in 1914
- a secret moonbase
- a third nuclear bomb that never made it to Japan in 1945
- what the Nazi party really did after WWII ended
- what happened to Atlantis
- the Nautilus from 20,000 Leagues
posted by mysterious1der at 12:23 PM on April 22

Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History would seem to fit. The story's frame is a translation of a memoir of a European mercenary captain. Both the memoir and the translator's account of his work can be considered journals, and both the captain and the translator make some strange and unsettling discoveries.
posted by SPrintF at 1:03 PM on April 22

I recommend Snatches by Martin Rowson:

From the appearance of the human race in Africa, four million years ago, to our ultimate destiny beyond the stars, Martin Rowson's first novel takes us to Mexico under the Aztecs, the Inquisition in Rome, the secrets of the Internet, the bogs of Irish nationalism, introduces an alcoholic werewolf and his dog, educates us in literary and management theory, glimpses 9/11, journalism, warfare, time travel, the Arts and Crafts Movement, Global Warming, personal therapy and focuses on Hell. Retelling the stories of the worst decisions the human race has ever made - and featuring a cast that includes St Simeon Stylites, Hernando Cortes, Adolf Hitler, Evelyn Waugh, Sigmund Freud, Josef Stalin and Candide in Las Vegas, and with supporting roles from Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pol Pot and Osama Bin Laden (as well as Superman and a talking sturgeon), "Snatches" is a brilliantly picaresque, funny and ultimately worrying exploration of love, art, politics, history and just how bloody awful it is to be here.
posted by tapeguy at 1:37 PM on April 22

Wanted to say "every single Clive Cussler novel" but mysterious1der beat me to it.
posted by charlesv at 2:08 PM on April 22

While not fiction, "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" (well maybe not fiction).
This was the source that Dan Brown ripped off for The DaVinci Code.
posted by lemuel at 2:22 PM on April 22

I don't like them because the protagonist is a dick but the Preacher series of "graphic novels" (which is to say, comics) by Garth Ennis kinda fits requirement a).

Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith is just all-round awesome though, and fits requirement b) insofar as it is, yes, a diary.

The Name of The Rose by Umberto Eco could loosely be interpreted as a "biographical narrative" (which is to say, diary) and has a profound historical background. And then there's Steve Pressfield's Gates of Fire, which is about stabby Spartans, but now I've just gone completely off track and haven't helped answer your question at all.
posted by turgid dahlia at 3:26 PM on April 22

The Seventh Son series is filled with this. Famous characters are given secret motives, or odd powers that let them do what they do. Of course, sometimes they just don't do what the real-world version did at all, but that is generally the exception.
posted by Four Flavors at 4:45 PM on April 22

Perhaps Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey?

About King Richard of England. Not sure if the uncovered information will surprise you, but it surprised me.
posted by mosessis at 10:40 AM on July 15