I was telling a friend about my current novel work-in-progress, Nightingale, a couple of days ago, and he asked me an interesting question: to what extent is the main character... me?
On the surface, it seems like there's very little in common. Simon de Montbard is the scion of minor French nobility in the thirteenth century, and gets himself involved in political intrigue that takes him to the king's court in Paris, then to Scotland, and finally to the Holy Land. He was crippled as an infant by polio, with the result of partial one-sided facial paralysis and a stunted right leg. His physical deficits result in his being continually misjudged and devalued; this was a culture where deformities of any kind were considered to be God's punishment for some kind of sin, and always to go along with mental and spiritual defects. He has to prove himself, again and again, to every new person he meets.
But internally -- yeah, there's a lot of similarity. Simon's struggles have made him hesitant, slow to trust, taciturn. But despite his reluctance to engage, there's a deep yearning for more from life than what he thought he'd have -- managing the family estate, leading a life of idleness and the privileges of being comfortably wealthy during a time when the vast majority of people never had enough to eat. Because of that drive, he is impelled to take chances, almost despite himself. Some work out well; he finds deep and abiding love in a very unexpected person. Others -- not so much. People he trusted take advantage of him, eventually cornering him into a situation where he has no choice but to kill someone, an event that overshadows the entire rest of his life. All along the way, he questions whether he's made the right choices -- or, indeed, if he even could have chosen differently.
And throughout, he receives guidance from Procellus, the mysterious, quasi-angelic figure whom no one else but Simon seems to be able to see or hear. Is he a figment of Simon's imagination, an internal guide made external -- or something more real? In the ship on the way to the Holy Land, they have the following conversation:
“What awaits us in the Holy Land?” I asked Procellus.
“You know I cannot tell you that.” A faint smile touched his lips, but his expression still held sadness.
“But you know.”
He shrugged. “I know some. Other things—well, as I said, it is still up to you. Your whole path until this very moment, every step of the way, you might have chosen differently, and the trajectory of your life would have had a very different shape. I’ve never forced you to do anything. It’s always been your choice.”
“It feels like fate.”
“That’s only because you’re seeing it from the perspective of right now. From that vantage point each step you take shapes the next one, but the destination lies in deep shadow. But it is the way of all humans, is it not? So do not worry yourself overmuch about the possibility of getting to the end of your life and finding you did not choose perfectly every time. If you can lie down on that last day and smile, and say, ‘I did well enough with what I knew at the time, and things worked out as they should have’ you will be far ahead of most.”
“But even so, Procellus—people will still harm each other and deceive each other and… die.”
I almost couldn’t choke out the final word.
“Yes.”
“No matter what I do.”
“Yes. But don’t take that to mean you don’t make a difference. Each person’s choices create what is. There is no such thing as an insignificant choice.”
It's something I've wrestled with all my life. What would my life have been if I'd made different choices? What I've many times called "the worst decision I ever made" -- to live at home while I went to college, instead of venturing out and going somewhere out-of-state, a decision made purely out of fear of the unknown -- would have led to my not meeting people who have been friends ever since. I would never have met my first wife, so my two sons wouldn't have been born. I'd never have moved to Seattle, and might not have ended up in a 32-year career of teaching in which I touched hundreds of lives.
Or, what if I'd come out as queer when I knew it -- age seventeen -- rather than staying in the closet until I was 54? I could have lived life more authentically, and avoided years of fear and shame. But -- this would have been in the 1970s in a very religious, conservative part of the country. And I was in my early twenties at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when testing positive was still pretty much a death sentence. I can easily imagine myself being one of those first victims.
Everything is contingent.
Or maybe -- nothing is. Is it the way Procellus describes it, that we could all along have made different choices? Or that choices only seem like choices with the benefit of hindsight, and we truly did the only things we could have done given who we were, and what the circumstances were, at the time?
This gets into the whole issue of free will versus determinism, which has been debated endlessly and upon which I am dramatically unqualified to weigh in. Interestingly, just a couple of days ago, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder commented on a paper alleging to show that quantum physics precludes the possibility of free will. The claim hinges on the no-cloning theorem of quantum physics, which seems to forbid our making high-fidelity models of reality in our own minds, rendering us incapable of representing choices well enough to made decisions. She was dubious that the argument holds water, and like her, I seriously doubt this will settle the matter to anyone's satisfaction.
So, like Simon, I'm stuck endlessly questioning my decisions, and wondering if I chose right, or if I even could have chosen any differently.
Anyhow, in answer to my friend's question; yeah, I guess Simon de Montbard is a lot like me, if not in the circumstantial characteristics, in the deeper, internal ones. Maybe we authors do this all the time, though -- writing out our own victories and tragedies, joys and sorrows, through our characters. Writing as therapy, in the hopes that others who have been through similar situations will find it as therapeutic to read.
And -- back to work on Nightingale. I'm three-quarters of the way through, but Simon still has a long voyage yet to take. I hope to finish it early in 2026; we'll see how it goes. It's been an interesting story to tell, featuring a few pivotal points in history, including the beginning of the Scottish Civil War, the Siege of Acre, and the collapse of the Templars. But I hope that when it's done, it'll be the characters who stay with you. They seem so real to me it's almost like I know them, as if I'm witnessing what real people are doing and simply writing it down. A story I am somehow compelled to tell, and about which I have little agency to change.
Whether that sense of compulsion is itself an illusion is beyond my ability to parse.
