Napoleon’s Spy: Ben Kane Interview

The historical fiction author has recently published a novel set during Napoleon's 1812 march on Moscow and he met our editor recently to chat Ridley Scott, Napoleon and duels of the period.

Ben Kane we're here to talk about your new book, Napoleon’s Spy, and the Napoleonic era, and actually it's very timely because there's the Ridley Scott movie. Firstly, Scott has said that people who complain about his film being historically inaccurate ‘need to get a life.’ But what he's also said that's caused a few rumblings amongst historians; he said to historians who don't like the film for its inaccuracies, ‘Were they there? Then how do they know?’ The final comment was that the first two history books written on Napoleon are the right ones. And the remainder are making things up (I’m paraphrasing).

Right. I get what he's saying about people need to get a life because I don't know if you're aware of the phrase rivet counters? So for any of your readers who don't know, rivet counters are the World War II enthusiasts who know how many rivets there were in the Spitfire in January, February, March etc. of every month of World War II. And if you write a novel and you've got the wrong number of rivets in your Spitfire wing, they will email you in a very angry way. And they exist to do with every period of history. Let's be frank, the number of rivets in the wing of a Spitfire is completely irrelevant unless you're writing an engineering textbook and then stops it from flying properly. So facts shouldn't get in the way of a good story.

I try very hard. I believe it's very important to try and get the history as correctly as we can, while being acutely aware that we can't always get it right. We can only do the best to the best of our ability using the texts and the archaeology that's available to us. With something like Napoleon, because literacy was very widespread by the 18th century, there are an extraordinary number of texts that survive from the time. With first-hand accounts of Napoleon's invasion of Russia books, and that's a staggering amount of information.

To try and answer all Ridley Scott's points, ‘how do you know, were you there?’ I don't know what he's talking about, but if he's put stuff in his film that's plausible and isn't mentioned [in the historical record], I don't have any problem with that. I do that all the time. I won't say Napoleon was somewhere where he wasn't. If we know he's in place X on a particular date, I'm not going to say he was in a different place. If he did something in place X that isn't mentioned, but also doesn't interfere with the facts of what we know, then that doesn't matter. So I wouldn't have a problem with that.