On reading footnotes

Most people, when they read a book, treat the footnotes the way they treat the chairs in a hotel lobby — they assume someone responsible put them there, they decline to sit in them, and they continue on to the bar.

I have spent forty years arguing with that assumption.

A footnote, properly understood, is a small confession. The author, having said something they cannot fully justify in the body of the text, has tucked the trouble into a smaller font at the bottom of the page in the hope that nobody will follow it down. Most readers oblige them. A few — usually the ones who write their own books — do not.

The Footnote Mysteries began with a real footnote. In the autumn of 2003, I was reading an article on Byzantine reliquary practice published in the Journal of Byzantine Studies. The piece was unremarkable. Its author, a doctoral student whose name nobody now repeats, had buried in note 17 the bare assertion that a particular reliquary listed in a 1264 Venetian inventory had not in fact been where the inventory said it was. The author offered no source for this. They offered no further explanation. They offered note 17, and they moved on.

I went and looked. The reliquary was where the inventory said it was. It is also where it was not. It depends — and this is the kind of sentence one is allowed to write only in footnotes — on which inventory one trusts and on the year one trusts it in.

I did not, at the time, write a novel about this. I taught Byzantine history to teenagers in a coastal town in Massachusetts and I made my husband Earl Grey twice an evening and I read other people's footnotes for the pleasure of it. But I kept the article. And many years later, when somebody very nearly killed me over an entirely different reliquary, I went back and read note 17 again, and I understood for the first time that the doctoral student in question had known precisely what they were doing. They had hidden a confession in the smallest font available. And they had trusted the reader.

That is what a footnote is. A confession waiting for the reader who looks down.

In The Empress's Wake, the footnote that matters is in a 1994 monograph on Mediterranean monasticism that almost no one has read. In The Marginal Hand, it is in the margins of that same monograph — in a copy that has spent thirty years on the shelf of a Herefordshire library that almost no one has visited. In the next book, which I am still writing, it is on a piece of headed stationery from a foundation in Geneva, and the foundation would prefer you not to read it at all.

This is not coincidence. Every novel in this series will turn on a footnote. That is the deal I have made with my readers, and with myself.

I am asked, occasionally, why I write mysteries about archives. The honest answer is that the archive is the only place left where the past is allowed to be inconvenient. Everywhere else, the past is asked to summarise itself — to fit on a plaque, in a documentary, on the printed card beside the museum vitrine. In the archive, the past is permitted its full awkwardness. It is permitted to contradict itself. It is permitted to keep its receipts. It is permitted to retain the marginalia of a sixteenth-century reader who, on coming across a particular passage, was so angry that they pressed the nib of their pen straight through the page.

That is the past I want to write about. The one with the broken nib.

I think often about what it means to read carefully. Not closely — that has been claimed by literary critics and is no longer a useful word. Carefully. With care. As one might read a letter from a friend whose news matters to you, or a doctor's report, or a will. Slowly enough to let the sentence finish, and then to let the silence after the sentence finish too.

It is a slow practice. It is unfashionable. The footnotes are very small and the lights in archives are not always good and the chairs are dreadful.

But the doctoral student in 2003 hid a confession in note 17, and I read it, and twenty-three years later it has become a novel. So I say what Martha says, when somebody tells her she is being too thorough.

I have other footnotes. — C.H.