Reviews

The past in print, sound and vision

Historical NovelsHistory Today has not by tradition reviewed historicalnovels, but it's a position that has seemed increasinglypurblind as more such novels are published. Severalrespected historians are turning to fictionalise theirsubjects and major novelists are delving into the past togreat effect. In future occasional reviews of historicalnovels will appear and this month a series of articles andreviews discuss the genre: why it has come to recentprominence, what insights it might bring, what historicalfiction might add to the record, or whether it constitutesa different beast altogether to be evaluated andappreciated by very different rules.

It is a protean field: novels bringto life the past from prehistorictimes to decades that nudge ourpresent one. Apart from the nov-els discussed below, this autumnsees a departure by Lindsey Davisfrom her successful Falco seriesset in the Ancient World (aCorripanion is promised in 2010)into the English Civil War, withRebels and Traitors (Century,£18.99); Fiona Mountain's latestnovel. Lady of the Butterflies(Preface, £12.99), is based on thelife of Lady Eleanor Granville, apioneering 17th-century lepi-dopterist; Mary Hoffman's7rouÍ3adour (Bloomsbury, £10.99)is a 'story of poetry and persecu-tion; published 800 years after thecrusade against the Cathars; KateMosse, fresh fronn the triumphs ofLabyrinth and Sepulchure, movesinto the 20th century with a mys-tical story set in the aftermath ofthe First World War, The WinterGhosts (Orion, £14.99); whilePhilippa Gregory releases another,

no doubt bestselling Tudortumult, White Queen (Simon &Schuster, £18.99), the story ofElizabeth Woodville. There will bemore, many more...

'We need a new kind of historicalnovel because there's a new kindof history,' urged a successfulpractioner ofthe former art, SarahDunant, speaking at an eventorganised by the BirkbeckInstitute for the Humanities,University of London, in June.Dunant, whose latest novel.Sacred Hearts, the final volume ofatrilogy set in Italy'within 100years ofthe Renaissance', was inconversation with Hilary Mantel,whose acclaimed exploration ofthe life of Thomas Cromwell, WolfHall, was also published thissummer, and with JohnSutherland, Emeritus LordNorthcliffe Professor of English atUniversity College London, critic,biographer, autobiographer andauthor of such literary teases as isHeathdiff a Murderer? anú Can

Jane Eyre Be Happy! Birkbeck'sProfessor Joanna Bourke, one ofBritain's most imaginative andinnovative historians, held the ring.

Dunant's challenging wordswould seem to have alreadyfound a response. In 2009 alone,other major novelists such asSarah Waters {A Little Stranger),

Adam Thorpe (Hodd) and GilesFoden [Turbulence) have minedthe past for their plots and theircharacters.The historian Saul

'A Lady Coming fromthe Circulating Library',iilustration, 1781.

David has projected his interestsin imperial conflicts into thesphere of fiction in Zulu Hart andStella Tillyard, whose Aristocratsset a benchmark for the empa-thetic history of women's lives, isnow finishing her first novel set inthe Napoleonic Wars.

Empathy and evidenceButwhat isitthat is'new'abouthistory that such novels reflect? 'Ihate the term historical novelist,'

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Mantel protested.'It makes itsound as ifwe all write the samesort of book. I would prefer it tobe thought of as contemporaryfiction about past events. It washistory that brought me to histo-ry, not novels, and I try to write akind of fiction that balancesempathy with evidence.'

Dunant, however, admittedthat it was reading historical nov-els when she was young that kin-dled a love of history:'! grew up inthe suffocatingly dull 1950s,'sherecalled,'and the question wasalways how to escape it. As a fast-track the past was compelling. Itwas everything the present wasnot. Vibrant, flamboyant, immoral,careless, war-torn and so interest-ing. Or, in other words, romantic'

Yet having come to study historythrough the romantic pages ofwriters such as Anya 5eaton,Margaret Irwin, Jean Plaidy andMary Renault, Dunant found that atCambridge she had that romancebeaten out of her and it tookanother lifetime, a new writerlycareer, before she felt she had thenovelistic skills to grapple vi/iththe complexities of history - andthen found that in all those yearsaway from libraries and archives,the past had changed, or ratherthe study of it had.

Confidence in a grand narrativeof history peopled by monarchsand statesmen preoccupied withpolitics and economics has beenchallenged in the last 15 or 20years', Bourke claimed, and all thespeakers agreed. What had seepedin was the history of'emotion, inti-macy, the everyday', the very stuffof novels. And it was this histoiredes mentalités, this people's history,this history from below, that had

Sacred HeartsSarah DunantVirago 471pp £14.99ISBN 9781 84408 596 S

HoddAdam ThorpeJonathan Cape 309pp £17.99ISBN 978 022 407 943 3

The LittleStrangerSarah WatersVirago 501pp £16.99ISBN978184408 6016

Sir Leslie Stephen [author,critic and the father of

Virginia Woolf and VanessaBell) once famouslydismissed the historicalnovel as 'Pure cram orpure fiction'. The worsthistorical novels are weigheddown by facts and stifled by theneed to ensure that thecharacters conform to thedictates of Malthus, Marx or(post)-Moderntsm.

In contrast, the best historicalfiction is a delight to historians.These three novels are excellentexamples. In SacredHearfs,Sarah Dunant encourages read-ers to meditate on the power ofreligion and friendship. Set in1570, at the Santa Caterinamonastery in Ferrara, the novelcaptivates with the story of 16-year-old Serafina, a reluctantBride of Christ. AdamThorpe'sHodd demolishes the romanticlegend of Robin Hood, trans-forming him into a drunk andpsychopathic mystic.The novelis presented as a translation of amedieval manuscript, found inthe ruins of a bombed churchduring the First World War. SarahWaters's The Little Stranger is an

eerie ghost story set in postwarWarwickshire. A doctor of hum-ble background is drawn intothe world of a local county fami-ly. Their lives slowly unravel.

Although all three authorsconducted a vast amount ofresearch, calling them 'historicalnovelists' is clumsy. Isn't all fic-tion - all writing, indeed -'his-torical' in some sense? Or per-haps no novels are historical.Writers can never entirelyescape from their own location

in time and place.There are many ways of

'doing'historical fiction.Thorpeis writing about a real historicalfigure. Similarly, in Pat Barker'snovel Regeneration, key charac-ters are the neurologist WilliamRivers and the poet SiegfriedSassoon and Hilary Mantel's WolfHall, is a revisionist account ofThomas Cromwell. In contrast,the protagonists in the novels ofDunant and Waters emergenewly born from their imagina-tions. Some historical novels arekeener to ape their historicalcousins than others: Dunant'sconcludes with a bibliography.Less successfully, Thorpe's has408 footnotes in which the nar-rator laboriously provides trans-lation and commentary.

What is certain, however, isthat good historical fiction recre-ates a feeling. It must bridge thedistance between the past andthe present, without flatteningout radical differences betweenthe now and then. In his prefaceto Ivanhoe {1820), Sir WalterScott (whose Waverly novels areoften regarded as establishingthe modern genre of historicalfiction) set out the main rules.The historical novelist must'introduce nothing inconsistentwith the manners of the age', heinsisted: 'His knights, squires,grooms, and yeomen, may bemore fully drawn than in the

hard, dry delineations of anancient illuminated

manuscript, butthe character andcostume oftheage must remaininviolate.'Aboveall, readers mustbe deterred fromInlaying the gameif'spot theinachronism'.Yet the relation-

ship between histo-ry and historical fic-tion is a jealous one.Historical fiction tries

to have it both ways: appropri-ating the authoritative voice ofhistory while eschewing whatWilliam Godwin in Of History andRomance (1797) called its'dryand frigid science'. Historiansrightly complain that readers ofhistorical novels may fail to dis-tinguish between fact and fic-tion. Reading historical fictionmay allow people to enter imag-inatively into the past, but thereare worries that this may engen-der a false sense of identificationwith radically different peoples.

Nevertheless, ever since clas-sical Greece, there has been alively conversation between fic-tion and history. Fiction is a stim-ulant for the historical imagina-tion. Barker's Regeneration drewattention to shell shock amongthe'other rank'. Dunant's SacredHearts enables readers to askquestions about agency andpower at a time when the price ofmarriage dowries had becomeprohibitive for half of all daugh-ters. Time and again, novelistshave drawn attention to the for-gotten peoples ofthe past.

Of course, the historian andthe historical novelist areengaged in different enterprises.Historians have set much stricterlimits to processes of selecting,narrating, and interpreting.Novelists have much to tell histo-rians about the emotions. Bothgenres may agree, though, withMargaret Atwood's observationthat'bytakingalong hard lookbackwards, we place ourselves... The past belongs to us,because we are the ones whoneed it.'

JOANNA BOURKE

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Reviews

admitted not only a new con-stituency ofthe previouslyunrecorded or unheard - wonnenand the poor in particular - butalso gave weight to the power ofirrationality, to the role of accidentand contingency, the natural turfofthe novelist and the poet.

'All novelists who write histori-cal fiction are preoccupied withwhat has been lost, what hasslipped away, or was neverinscribed in the record,'saidMantel.'Our concern is to exploreinner as well as outer experiences,to restore the balance in the rep-resentation of what it is like to behuman. We want to give a voice tothe voiceless, to represent misrep-resentation, to encourage people

"Trust me, come with me and I willnail you to the moment". '

Trust is vitally important toDunant too. Yet while Mantelspins her story around real histori-cal characters, Dunant's are madeup - the nuns ofthe convent ofSanta Caterina, Ferrara in the16th-century - a time when asmany as 50 per cent of all high-born women were married toChrist and banished to a nunnery- are entirely her creation. Doesthis mean she enjoys licence toinvent whatever suits her?'Absolutely not'she insists.'Mycharacters are composites basedon what I have read and discov-ered. Before 1 start writing I do animmense amount of research. I

'Fiction can't recover the pastfor us, but what it can do is ofgreat importance - it definesour relationship to the past'

to look again and to think again.'In the case of Mantel's latest bookit was to look at the Tudor era,which is 'our national soap opera'.She addedi'When I was research-ing Wolf Hail I could find dozens ofbooks with the name ThomasCromwell on the jacket, butnowhere did I find the man insidethem ... it was not possible, giventhe evidence, for historians toreconstruct his private life, but asa novelist I can use informed spec-ulation to fill in the gaps. And, ofcourse, the arc of history is alsoirresistible. How did Cromwell risefrom being the son of a black-smith and, in his own words, a ruf-fian when young, to becomeeffectively minister of everything?That is what I wanted to explore.'

A matter of trustMantel added:'l see myself as adramatist. I have no particularimpulse to teach about the past,but to present it. My greatestpleasure is to take a scene that Iknow occurred, that is fully docu-mented in terms of place, date,who was there, who said what andto whom, and then to twist theviewpoint, write it from anotherperspective entirely. I want thereader to come away from mybook with a sense of being in theroom. I want to be able to say.

immerse myself in the scholarshipof the period and what I get fromthose quiet libraries are the fruitsof two generations of history frombelow, in this case many of themmotivated by feminism, thoughmen's work is there too, ofhistorians doing deep mining. Isimply could not have written mybooks 20 years ago - the informa-tion just wasn't available. But nowhistorians have panned for gold,sifting through court, parish andconvent records to find details,moments, small stories fromwhich I have been able to build acomposite picture of women whomight have existed,

The more I read the more theRenaissance came alive. When Iwrite, I am a pointillist joining upthe dots of what I have discov-ered, nota reproducer ofthosesources, and when you step backand view thenn from the distanceof a story it makes for a picture ofgreater depth and perspective. Iwant to sink the reader deep intothe period, to say,"Have the confi-dence to follow me because Iknow what is true and I will showyou something as close to life as itmight have been lived then, asrich and complex, and contradic-tory as we now know it to be".'

'The framing of reality doesn'twipe out evidence,'Mantel agreed.

Zulu Hart

Hodder & Stoughton 376pp £12.99ISBN 978 0340953624

Having admired Professor David's fine writ-ing on the military history of Victorianimperialism, not to mention his lucid andlively media appearances for some time,I picked up this book, his first ventureinto fiction, with pleasurable anticipa-tion. All the signs were good: the novel is set in theprecise historical territory on which he has made such a brilliantimpression, namely the Zulu War of 1879; the bright idea ofthe herocoming from a half-Zulu, half-Irish background promised many sub-tleties of identity and interpretation, especially within the imperialcontext; the events ofthe 1879 Zulu War could hardly be more dra-matic and gripping; the price is right and the book handsome. I evenhad a parallel professional involvement, in that In the late 1970s,having published a number of reasonably well thought of books ofhistory, I took a risk of sorts and published two historical novels.

How has a similar risk worked out for Saul David? There is nodoubting the authenticity ofthe detail, nor the often powerfulinteractions between the key players, nor the vim and vigour thathe brings to the description of the military manoeuvres and thebattles themselves. The dilemmas of Zulu Hart himself are mostlynicely judged and sensitively rendered.

There is, however, a 'but' - several of them in fact. To begin with Ido not think that David allows his readers enough freedom to soakup meaning and innuendo through the dialogue of the charactersthat people the book; far too often he cannot resist capping somestatement or conversation with an emphasis or interpretation of hisown.There are also far too many clichés for comfort: there are'hearty chuckles', hearts'race; people 'look on aghast', eyebrows are'raised', eyes 'fiash', situations 'hang by a thread', and so on.

The big question surely is: does David the novelist enable us tounderstand more about a particular series of historical events thanmight David the historian? This query is especially relevant whenthere is a school of thought that suggests that history is arguably ahigher form of fiction. The answer to the big question above? Notin my view. Still, I shall be interested to read the sequel.

DENIS JUDD

'It proposes a version, but a ver-sion that comes with a guarantee:"This could be true"... We all, nov-elists as well as historians, havebeen touched by the postmodernturn. We are more sceptical now,we all interrogate our sources andsay, "Why did he or she say whatthey did? What do they want meto believe? And why?"'

The novel is the highest formof individuality available to us,'insisted John Sutherland,'and his-torical fiction expresses ourselvesrather than simply holding a mirrorup to the past. Fiction can't recoverthe past for us, but what it can do isof great importance - it definesour relationship with the past.'

Dunant and Mantel hothagreed that the past cannot berecoverable in any literal sense.

'but it is recoverable in themetaphorical sense,'says Mantel.'All we write about is there. But itis documented in books writtenfor historians or students of history,not for the general readers.'

'What I do,'concluded Dunant,'is to sink my reader into feelingand sensation, but to slide real his-tory in with it so you never knowyou're reading it - and sell books innumbers and to people that mosthistorians can only dream of. Andthat is why it is so vital to me to getit right and to pay my dues to thehistorians who have done thegroundwork for me by offering anextensive bibliography at the back.Then those with an appetite formore, have somewhere else to go.'Back to the history books.

JULIET GARDINER

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