Truth in historical fiction: Can a novel reveal the unseen faces of the Second World War?

Loghan Paylor’s acclaimed historical novel started with a relative’s diary, a personal journey, and a desire for a book that, somehow, didn’t seem to exist yet.

It also started with a question for the Abbotsford author: “What is the book my younger self wanted to find, but couldn’t?”

Unknown history

A comprehensive collection of books about the Second World War could fill the pyramids.

The quantity of literature is uncountable—and understandable. The war was a global conflict that profoundly impacted hundreds of millions of people. Each of those people had their own stories of upheaval, triumph, and tragedy. Eighty years later, we’re still reading about the war, through the eyes of the comparatively few people who could tell their stories. Their accounts fill both non-fiction books and novels that seek to reveal broader truths beyond known facts.

But those books still don’t contain everything.

Several years ago, Loghan Paylor inherited a book of poetry by a family member who, as a young man, had flown with the Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War. The poems, along with photos included in the book, sparked Paylor’s interest in the lives of those who had served in the skies over Europe eight years ago.

But there is only so much you can learn from what has already been written. The literature that exists about the lives of Canadians fighting in the Second World War is limited by the era in which it was written and the words that writers felt comfortable etching into paper. And Paylor, who is trans, knew something was missing.

Trans people have always existed—there are records of people changing their gender throughout history. And although much of that documentation comes from uncharitable third-party sources, but there are also records of soldiers who were raised as girls but fought and lived as men.

Traditionally, historians writing about such people focused on the notion that gender barriers at the time led women to change how they dressed and identified themselves. But those analyses have begun to change as society starts to recognize that some people’s gender identity doesn't match their sex at birth—and that many will seek to remedy what we know today as gender dysphoria.

That, however, can’t change the primary sources we have. Our history is based on documents and histories from times when dysphoria was less appreciated as a key motivating factor—or was interpreted negatively.

As a reader, Paylor, who is also a former historical re-enactor, couldn’t help but notice the absence of trans war accounts. And when Paylor inherited that book of poems and started researching more of what it was like for a man to live through the war, they couldn’t help wondering what service would have been like for someone who was trans.

Published last year by Penguin Random House Canada, Paylor’s novel, The Cure For Drowning, tells the story of a trans man who goes overseas to fight in the Second World War. The book is a historical novel mixed with a romance. The book begins in rural Ontario, where Paylor grew up, and its plot centres on Kit, his conformist brother Landon, and Rebekah, a newcomer to the area who is wrestling with her own identity. When war comes, it upturns the characters’ lives, as it would have done for real people eighty years ago.

The book is informed both by that inherited book of poems, significant research into the lives of servicemen, and what Paylor didn’t find in libraries and bookstores.

Paylor told The Current the book was written for the reader they had been years before.

“I had looked for a book sort of like this when I was younger, and when it didn't exist, I decided that I had to write it.”

The novel is grounded in Paylor’s previous university research into queer history and literature, and research specifically into the personal lives of those who served in militaries, both in the Second World War and in other conflicts. Paylor found letters and correspondence from people using language like the singular “they” that can today be interpreted as indicative of someone being trans or non-binary. And there is a plethora of evidence that queer people entered into relationships and lived complicated lives going back thousands of years.

But contemporary readers can only know so much about a past that was filtered through the stories and systems of the day. Hence fiction.

So after exhausting their research avenues, Paylor moved into the world of what may have been.

“I used the grounding in queer history, then let my imagination expand that further to think ‘OK, well, what might these relationships have looked like off the page?” Paylor said.

Fiction, Paylor said, can fill in gaps that exist in the historical record because of the challenges posed to trans and queer people in the past. That can help novels address present-day questions and change how readers view the past.

“I think [fiction] can be a very useful tool for drawing some links between our present and our past,” Paylor said. “There’s a kind of misunderstanding these days that the idea of being transgender and the idea of being queer was invented on Tumblr in 2001. So historical fiction is another way to show not just factual things that non-fiction does, but to draw some emotional and kinship parallels between ourselves and the past.”

It also sets up new narratives that create conflict, suspense, and drama—the lifeblood of any story—in ways that are different from the thousands of novels written about cisgender heterosexual characters over the last century. It’s one thing for a book to hinge on the future of a pair of separated lovers. The suspense is only heightened when those characters must navigate internal and external pressures related to their sexuality and gender.

“Each of us, regardless of our identity, lives in some kind of box and we are all sort of placed in different gender boxes from birth,” Paylor said. That underlying tension can bring characters to life—and impact their choices and the book’s direction.

The Cure For Drowning was on the longlist for the 2024 Giller Prize and named one of 2024’s best books by the Globe and Mail. Paylor has received emails and messages from trans readers who felt represented in historical fiction for the first time. And there has also been positive feedback from older readers who were less familiar with fiction—and openly trans people in general.

Paylor received one message from a reader who picked up the book only because it was about the Second World War and was surprised to find its protagonist was trans. The writer, Paylor said, explained that their grandchild had recently come out as non-binary and that the book helped clarify what, exactly, that meant.

“I was just bawling,” Paylor said about receiving the message.

The Cure for Drowning was not written for older straight audiences who are still trying to figure out what “cis” means. It’s a book that was written by an author with a story to tell.

But in writing about a man who didn’t exist, Paylor created a story that helps remind us about what know—and don’t know—about ordinary people living in extraordinary times.