Dateline 11th March 2020; COVID was declared a pandemic across Europe and I decided to write a novel. What better opportunity. The decision came to make a big impact on the way I think about the world, especially the world of fake news, conspiracy theories and unchained social media.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.
William Shakespeare – 1564-1616. As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII

Sculpted Love and its follow-up Chiselled Features are fiction. So is the third in the trilogy, Cold Steel, coming in 2025. Novels of fiction, yes. But my whole mindset in creating these novels has also been fiction.

What if I told you that writing has been, for me, a game? What if I told you that my whole life has been game? Have I been a “player” throughout, acting on the “stage” of my life. When I went to board at Winchester I played the game, conformed and succeeded. As a choral scholar at Cambridge I worked hard at the great charade, then of being a pop singer too, appearing on telly and making records. I rebelled (it was the late 60s, forgive me), grew hair down to my nipples, rode motorbikes and worked in the music business. What if I told you that I was pretending?

In my professional career – call it marketing – I had the ability to project a product into the future, to establish the product positioning so that by the time it hit the consumer there would be no real option but to want to buy it. I used wish-fulfilment to turn my dreams, and my employers’ dreams, into reality. Launching the careers of rock artists, launching new TV channels, launching the world’s first privately-funded television satellite, bringing 75 fledgling internet start-ups to the bigger stage and constantly working towards a better (imagined) future has been the fundamental element of what I do. This requires imagination and self-confidence, the same qualities required for writing fiction.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players is the motto of the media-centric Garrick Club in London where many of my friends there enjoy the blur between fact and fiction. If we agree with the bard’s contention that we are all just players then the fiction of my life is as real as the facts of my life. They are indistinguishable.

I like to refine this idea to “a good fantasy is indistinguishable from reality”. If you write some fiction down, and it comes straight from the ground-spring of your creative thought, and if it is imaginative and real enough, then your fiction is actually reality. Bend this idea backwards on itself and you have the very popular historical fiction (Robert Harris, Sebastian Faulkes, Ken Follett, Nevil Shute, Hilary Mantel) where real people are described with a fictional narrative. Robert Harris’s latest, Precipice, pirouettes round the love affair between 26-year-old Venetia Stanley – aristocratic, clever, bored, reckless – with the British Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, a man more than twice her age. He writes to her obsessively, sharing the most sensitive matters of state as he leads the country into war with Germany in 1914. The letters from Asquith to his young lover are real, quoted word-for-word. The letters she sent back were destroyed so Robert Harris imagines them. The made-up letters are indistinguishable from the real ones.

I also draw from this debate the claim that my fiction, swelling from the ground spring of my creative thought, is a pure act, a creation and, if you consider it good enough, indistinguishable from reality. I have chosen not to rework over a period of years my book Sculpted Love. I wrote it mostly by dictating into my iPhone, so that the flow and choice of words is as natural as conversation; I finished that in two months. Yes, many corrections of grammar and book structure needed hard work, another three months, but you get the idea. I conceived the story. I wrote it down. That is my story what it is, as Monty Python pleaded. In fact, if a set of literary rules or a well-meaning agent required me to write it again differently or change it substantially, then it would no longer be my story what it is. Would it? Here is a wonderful (fictional) excuse for not having spent months and years on the perfection of the text of Sculpted Love. Here is my story. Put some pictures in to keep the reader entertained. Upload it to Kindle Amazon. Let people buy it.

So like many of the promotional constructs of my business life, not only is Sculpted Love fictional, but the whole process of my writing it. Spoiler alert… this opinion piece might be fiction. Or is it?

I get asked why I set the novels in Nancy in northeast France. Why not in the artistic melting-pot of the Côte d’Azur, a second home for me for thirty years? Firstly, the inclusion of real characters in my novels required a real place. I do not care much for the plethora of imagined worlds even if those of Tolkien and C.S.Lewis’s Narnia are immensely convincing and popular. Secondly, it suited my notion of fiction that the location was not one I lived in; I could be more liberal with my depiction of people and events. Thirdly, Nancy in the 1890s had the fledging moments of the Beaux-Arts and arts-and-crafts, 19th century industrial might (to pay for the art!) and an invasion by the Prussians in 1870.

What are the books about? Two girls In Nancy are swept up in the changing cultural, industrial, medical, scientific and geo-political tides of the late 19th century in France; they act without hesitation on the new empowerment of women, in business and in love. Against this background and the art nouveau of the Ecole de Nancy, a solitary sculptor is drawn into the girls’ lives. Twenty years earlier, as the Germans advance on Metz in August 1870, a two-horse carriage driven by a gnarled deserter from the Prussian army escapes south towards Nancy. In the rear, a young French entrepreneur is hand-in-hand with a stunningly beautiful lady speaking German with a coarse accent, pregnant by another man and masquerading as a countess. Each book has its share of human relationships, questionable parenthood, accidents, crime, death, psychology and the supernatural. The paintings of Nancy’s child Émile Friant, and other artists, illustrate the books and he makes cameo appearances.

Sabine Noelle-Wying wrote for Riviera Buzz in 2021 “I enjoyed a really good read. An easy read but with super detail and believable characters. Clarence Bicknell, his grand-father’s uncle, was in the prime of life in the 1890s and surrounded by women; Marcus wrote a paper on his personal life. The book is set in northeast France but could it all have happened here on the coast? Marcus and his wife Susie live at Castellaras between Valbonne and Mougins for five years. I wonder.”

Yes, it could have happened anywhere. In fiction or in reality. My fictional characters are as believable as the real ones which they surround. There is no rational distinction between my fiction and reality. So too, the lines between fact and fiction in today’s online chatter and the mainstream media are blurred. Putin and Trump are so far-fetched in their beliefs that, if they had been created by a fiction writer, the critics would have deemed them unrealistic. Impossible.

Similarly, my claim to be a fiction writer is false; I made it up.

I made it all up.

Marcus Bicknell was for many years in the music business promoting groups like Genesis, Supertramp and Police. He was at the start of multi-channel television with satellite operator SES Astra in Luxembourg. He has lived in seven countries including 15 years in France. He has been an advocate of his great grand uncle Clarence Bicknell – botanist, archaeologist and artist of Bordighera and Casterino near Tende. He led the research team on MARVELS – The Life of Clarence Bicknell by the late Valerie Lester, organises exhibitions and seminars, writes academic papers and runs www.clarence Bicknell.com. Back in the UK he enjoys horse-riding at home in the Chilterns, racing cars, collecting art, helping people and associations pro bono and running web-sites.

https://marcusbicknell.wordpress.com Purchase his books on Amazon, search Marcus Bicknell