Historical novels

Historical Novels

or

The Best is the Enemy of the Good

I used to love historical novels. Then I discovered Dorothy Dunnett, and all other historical novelists began to seem awkward and pale. That was in 1968. Perhaps it was because the other aspirants lacked Dunnett’s panache and wit; maybe it was just because I was no longer young enough to fall in love with a writer in the same way. But the same seachange has hit me with other forms of genre fiction: who can read fantasy after Tolkien? For awhile detective novels all failed before the model of P.D. James, but then I discovered Nordic noir. However, that’s another blog post.

(I’m not sure why I no longer love science fiction. There isn’t a single towering writer who has spoiled me for the rest. But it’s been a long time since I’ve encountered the sort of wide-ranging imagination that characterized the books of the early 50’s, when I spent the first $2.50 I earned babysitting on a subscription to Astounding Science Fiction. Or maybe it’s just that I’m no longer twelve.)

Here are some of my requirements for historical novels. They cannot be just fictionalized history; therefore, the principal characters should not be actual historical figures. The settings must be convincingly dense and complex; therefore the author must have done a good deal of serious research. But once she has done that research it must fade into the background; she must convince you that she knows what it was like to live in that period and take the details of daily life for granted. That means she must do much more research than she will use in the book. (What makes Tolkien’s fantasy so convincing is that he invented the languages, the history, the mythology long before he wrote The Lord of the Rings, or even The Hobbit. So his characters only know a little about their world and its history, just as we know little of ours, and the vast unstated background makes the foreground figures real.) Next, no thinly veiled sermons about current issues (The Crucible, even though it’s drama and not fiction). Finally, the historical setting should not be just a gimmick for fiction about psychologically modern characters. That’s why I don’t like Marguerite Yourcenar’s Hadrian’s Memoirs.

Of course, all requirements drop away if the work is good enough: Hilary Mantel writes fictionalized history about real people and even uses the historical present which I usually detest. Yet her books are excellent, and getting better. More about that below.

Herewith, one historical novel that I recently discovered and highly recommend (although it was written seventy years ago), followed by an annotated list of some favorites. The Long Ships, by the Swedish author Frans Bengtsson, first appeared in English in 1955. It was republished in 2010 in the wonderful series of New York Review Classics. Witty, exciting, and solidly grounded in scholarship, it tells the life story of a tenth century Viking. Moving from Denmark through Cordova, England, Sweden, and finally Russia, through paganism, Christianity, and Islam, the pace never slackens and yet the characters are fully developed and their trajectories convincing. If you like fiction set in the past but don’t want to compromise your standard of excellence, this one is for you.

As are many others:

Dorothy Dunnett. There are two series, the 6-book Lymond Chronicles set in mid-16th century Scotland, France, and elsewhere; and the 8-book House of Niccolò, set in the mid-15th century. There is also a stand-alone novel, King Hereafter, about the historical Macbeth. I much prefer the Lymond Chronicles to the others, but opinions differ. This is the gold standard. The prose is accomplished, the plots breathtaking, the characters addicting.

Hilary Mantel. I’ve seldom seen an author refine her skill so visibly from one novel to the next. Her first historical novel, A Place of Greater Safety, about the French Revolution, is hard going. Wolf Hall, her first novel about Thomas Cromwell, though excellent, is a bit baggy. Its almost flawless sequel, Bring up the Bodies, makes it hard to imagine what heights the third novel in the Cromwell trilogy will reach.

Sigrid Undset. There is a new translation of her 14th century trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter, but I don’t think I could love it any more than the old one. Her books are being reevaluated after a period in which she was regarded as the emblematical Scandinavian who got a Nobel Prize just because of her ethnicity. I like her lesser-read tetralogy, Master of Hestviken, even better. These books are very serious, psychologically complex, and sure-handed in their grasp of the historical background.

Robert Graves. I, Claudius and Claudius the God have lost none of their sly charm over the years. If ancient Rome was not as Graves depicts it, well, it should have been. 

Thomas Mann. The further back an author goes into the past, the more difficult it becomes to reconstruct that world convincingly. On the other hand, it is also more difficult for a critic to prove him wrong. In the four-volume Joseph and his Brothers, Mann used the research of scholars investigating the sources of Biblical stories in the mythologies of the ancient Near East, and tried to imagine the world of the 14th century B.C. in that light. The most engaging of the Biblical narratives (along with additional stories taken from Jewish legend) combines with modern scholarship to bring his characters alive. Mann certainly convinced me that it could have been as he tells it.

I’m sure there are many others that escape my memory at the moment (or that I haven’t found yet). Next blog post: actual history that is serious, but enjoyable for general readers.

Red Childhoods

The sweet spot in reading a memoir comes when the page dissolves and suddenly you seem to be living the life you are reading about. Fiction did that for me when I was young (and especially when I was a child), but now I have to search long and hard for the novel that can work that sort of magic. I don’t know whether the change is in the novels, or in me, or both.

Extreme memoirs -- such as Holocaust tales, or those of the Chinese Cultural Revolution -- intensify the experience. By definition, Holocaust accounts are written by survivors, and the reader survives with them, in triumph and relief (temporarily forgetting that the survivors were a small minority, and that those who died included many who were just as brave and resourceful, just not as lucky). As for the Cultural Revolution, most memoirs are the work of Chinese who have emigrated and generally found success, often amazing success, in their new lives.

Few of these rags-to-riches stories can match the one Ping Fu tellis in Bend, not Break. Now the CEO of Geomagic, an American software company specializing in 3-D printer technology, she tells us that she left school after the first grade. When she was eight, Red Guards in Shanghai snatched her from the loving woman she had called her mother and told her she was not that woman’s child and had no right to live in Shanghai. They stuffed her through a window into a crowded train going to Nanjing. She arrived in time to see her actual parents departing in a truck, while she was thrown into a bare dormitory room where her four-year-old sister was wailing alone. She had to find food, potable water, and furniture, and bring up her sister by herself. At age eight. The rest of her adventures are just as extreme. Can they be true?

Not according to a blitzkrieg of Chinese commenters on Amazon’s page for Bend, not Break. There is nothing new about this sort of coordinated patriotic rage at any book appearing in the West that presents China in a less than rosy light. Such comments have an effect opposite to their authors’ intent, as the vituperation and poor English reveal their source. In this case, however, they have some validity, since Fu herself has admitted that some episodes were exaggerated, and others omitted. Maybe she didn’t actually witness a teacher torn apart by four horses. In her defense, however, she notes that memory is unreliable and often it is the emotion rather than the facts that survive. Penguin, her publisher, has decided to stand by her after examining the evidence. 

Secret Piano, by Zhu Xiao-Mei, has kindled no such controversy. Nevertheless, I found it difficult to believe that Zhu’s mother could ship a piano to the miserable village where she was exiled during the Cultural Revolution, and that it could arrive in one piece and be tuned to usable condition. Zhu had been a piano prodigy before the Cultural Revolution, and after the forced hiatus during her exile to Mongolia, she moved to Paris and managed to resume her education. She specializes in Bach’s Goldberg Variations (you can hear her on Youtube here), and I owe her a debt of gratitude. I had never listened closely to the Goldberg Variations before I read this book, and now I can’t stop listening.

Huang Wenguang’s The Little Red Guard, despite its title, should probably not be in this company. It is not really a Cultural Revolution memoir, but a story of family obsession. Huang’s grandmother insisted that she must be buried with her long-dead husband in his ancestral village, and this at a time when burial was forbidden and cremation required. She directed her son to prepare her coffin, and young Huang slept beside it throughout his childhood. Large amounts of money would have to be found for bribes if the clandestine funeral were ever to take place. For twenty years the family of seven suffered even greater material privation than those around them, as every extra penny went to the burial fund. Ironically, Huang’s grandmother outlived her devoted and guilt-ridden son. The grandmother’s burial fell to the daughter-in-law who had endured years of misery at her hands. Chinese (and all East Asian) family dynamics are enormously alien to the western experience. This book, cool and measured in tone, is a fascinating introduction.

But for an honest, probing, unsensational view of the Chinese people and their dealings with their recent history, I must recommend not a memoir but a novel. It is not a novel you will have heard of, since the English translation is published by a small private press. It is Hu Fayun’s Such is This World@sars.come. Ruyan, a youngish widow, receives a computer and an introduction to the internet from her son before he leaves to study abroad. She joins a chat room of parents like herself, and finds her literary talents welcomed. In the real world she begins a romance with the mayor of her city. But then she encounters a group that questions the received narrative of Chinese history since the 1949 Revolution. At this point the SARS epidemic begins, and Ruyan sees for herself the gap between what her own eyes tell her and what may be publicly expressed. Throughout, Hu Fayun maintains respect not only for dissidents but for those who oppose them. No one is a caricature. To understand people’s motives, we must understand their lives.

No one else in China writes like this. The new Chinese Nobel Prize winner, Mo Yan, specializes in magic realism and “daft hilarity” (the description is Perry Link’s), precluding any attempt to see his characters as actual human beings. You won’t find Such is This World@sars.come on Amazon, but you will find it here at Ragged Banner Press. If you have any interest in China or in how people cope with difficult history, I urge you to read it. (A very few libraries have bought it, so you can probably get it through interlibrary loan too).

Bad Dinner Parties

“A revolution is not a dinner party,” said Mao Zedong. But there are dinner parties that can make you wish you’d gone to a revolution instead. When we’re reading about them rather than experiencing them in real time, however, the mayhem can be quite enjoyable. And after all, what better stage for character revelation than the dinner table with its fixed rules and mandatory interaction, and where escape is almost impossible? Here are two such bad scenes, from recent novels.

The first takes place at a restaurant. This restaurant should actually be considered one of the main characters of Herman Koch’s wildly popular Dutch bestseller, The Dinner. Two brothers and their wives have met to discuss a troubling incident in which their two sons are imbroiled. Paul is the unreliable and (you will soon conclude) unsavory narrator, while his brother Serge is a rising politician who is likely to be the next prime minister. 

And that is the first problem. Why would they choose to discuss such a sensitive topic at a trendy restaurant, where Serge is well-known and other diners drift over to ask if they can be photographed with him? In their place I would have opted for a disused subway tunnel. The answer is because satirizing the place -- where the waiter points out specials with his pinkie extended, the food arrives on enormous plates with vast white spaces, and every ingredient is sourced to an innocent garden plot somewhere -- is part of the performance. Koch is good at this and if you like novels of manners (I do) you’ll enjoy it. Nevertheless, after awhile you may feel the restaurant is just too easy a target and the performance gets old.

For the rest, we have sibling rivalry, and -- well, mostly sibling rivalry. There is some buildup of suspense as we learn just what it is the boys have done, and just what plan of action each of the four parents will propose. It is all fairly slick and well presented, if also fairly horrible (a neurological diagnosis of the evil is unconvincingly suggested). You probably won’t be bored, but you may well be disappointed.

The second novel, Sadie Jones’ The Uninvited Guests, is quite a different affair. Here we are in an English country house in 1912 or so. Downton Abbey territory, but the Abbey this is not. The family are social climbers (just how far they have climbed is not revealed until the end), servants are all too few, and ruin is staring them in the face. The literary influence here is Saki, the elegant and somewhat malicious Edwardian satirist. Just in case we’ve missed it, one of the characters bears the name of Saki’s main character, Clovis. And while Jones cannot quite match Saki’s purring prose, she does a very good job trying.

The host family includes a beautiful, recently remarried widow, and her children: charming, languid son (Clovis), nubile daughter (Emerald, whose birthday dinner this is), and an eccentric, neglected, much younger daughter (Smudge -- yes, really). The guests are another brother and sister, more virtuous, stodgier and with unrequited crushes on Clovis and Emerald. There is also a rich mill owner who is courting Emerald with no success.

Before the family sits down to their dinner (two toiling servants doing the work of twenty), word comes that there has been a “dreadful accident” on a nearby railway line, and they will have to shelter the survivors. Soon a pale, bedraggled crowd of third-class passengers arrive and are shuffled away to an unused morning room. The family seems to forget their existence very easily, unless periodically reminded. One of the passengers, however, is quite different: a raucous, self-confident semi-gentleman who charms Clovis and gets himself invited to dinner.

The succeeding events, orchestrated by this particular uninvited guest, include every kind of disaster, one of the cruellest party games ever described, and finally a large dollop of the supernatural. Needless to say, there is an epic storm outside the house, and no hope of rescue. As in any nightmare, escape is cut off -- even the prosaic mill owner finds that his Rolls-Royce will not start. There is a whole auxiliary cast of perfectly realized animals, some of whom are quite essential to the plot. I especially liked the kitten, Tenterhooks, with her three-inch legs and tiny claws.

Finally, however, dawn arrives. Each of the characters -- even the nasty gentleman -- has learned something and changed for the better. The sky is blue and it is May Day. A deus ex machina appears, and -- but I must say no more. If you like a good plot, I think you’ll be glad you weren’t invited to this particular party, but happy you had a chance to eavesdrop.

Human Nature

A Harvard professor wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe complaining that the Library of Congress had no subject heading for “Human nature.” I was a cataloger in the Harvard libraries at the time, and I pointed out that the books he was looking for could be found under the heading “Philosophical anthropology.” He was not appeased and I didn’t entirely blame him. (Anyway, Harvard professors are never wrong, or never admit it).

But “philosophical anthropology” would be a good heading for two recent books on human nature. The first, Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday, is an exploration of what pre-modern and modern cultures can teach each other. Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind examines the psychological (and neurological) roots of moral judgments, and why “good” people of differing viewpoints cannot talk about them. Both books, that is, question just what kind of animal we are. Sounds like pretty heavy stuff, but I hasten to add that they’re written for a general audience with lots of good stories to make it easier going.

It’s a hard stretch to realize that until pretty recently (as the history of the species goes), our ancestors lived like the hunter-gatherers and simple agriculturalists Diamond describes. But like which of them? One of the big surprises for readers may be that there is no single “hunter-gatherer culture,” or “state of nature;” these people differ from each other in many fundamental ways. For example, one group may surround women giving birth with many helpers, while in another the woman must give birth alone and may not be approached even if she is dying and begs for aid. Sometimes children are never punished, but other traditions allow severe discipline. Diamond tells us about a New Guinean friend who moved from one village to another as a young child because he preferred their methods of child-rearing. Neither group objected. Some peoples respect the old as sources of wisdom and group history, but others abandon anyone who cannot keep up and whose feeding would put too great a strain on meager resources.

There are, of course, points in common. Pre-modern people are far more violent in their everyday lives than those of us who live under the protection of even a malign state. So much for the primitive golden age. Among the New Guineans he knows best, war is a constant state of affairs, with children as young as five and six participating and often killed. A stranger is terrifying. You won’t soon forget the photo of a New Guinean weeping in fear at the sight of his first white man; he thought he must inevitably die.

Those pictures and narratives held my attention, and I learned a lot. But the framework of “what we can learn from each other” seems a little facile. No one knows better than Diamond that you cannot just lift a useful custom (like group conflict resolution) from one culture and drop it into another one. It’s as if he felt he had to provide a moral to tie up his fascinating ethnological material.

Haidt’s book is specifically about moral judgment -- and why we have such trouble discussing politics and religion with each other. He caught my attention right away by referring to the work of Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlberg’s theory that children (at least the superior ones) move through six stages of moral development, reasoning about ethical dilemmas with more and more sophistication, dominated the Brookline schools where my children studied in the 70’s. These rigid schemes did not resemble the thinking of any child I ever knew. Kohlberg was challenged by Carol Gilligan, who claimed that while those six stages might apply to boys, girls were more complex and compassionate. Worse and worse. 

All wrong, says Haidt. We don’t reason about moral dilemmas. Instead, we make instant, pre-verbal judgments, and then offer rationales to justify the decisions we have already made. Quite aside from the MRIs and the questionaires that Haidt offers to document his conclusion, it has the immediate ring of truth. We all know that we think this way (and that our children think this way). His metaphor is that the conscious, rational mind is the rider on an elephant. The elephant is the emotions.

How can our instinctive judgments be so different? Haidt offers a second metaphor: the division of the tongue into receptors for different flavors. Those who see themselves as rational, or “liberal” (in American terms) have sharper receptors for care, liberty, and fairness to individuals. “Conservative” tongues contain these receptors too, but add stronger ones for loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Haidt suggests that conservative values will always have wider appeal because they resonate with a larger palette of emotional triggers. This book was published before the 2012 presidential elections. You may feel that this particular conclusion, at least, has been strongly challenged.

But that does not in any way discredit his wider argument. You can try it out. Here’s one of the moral dilemmas from his studies: John and Julie are brother and sister, as well as good friends. They are traveling together on vacation. John suggests that they try sleeping together. Julie is on the pill, but John wears a condom, just to be sure. They enjoy the night of lovemaking, but agree never to do it again. Did John and Julie do anything wrong?

I know what I would decide. But then, I’m a liberal, with a lot of receptors for personal liberty. My more traditional mother always said I had ice-water in my veins. 

What about you? 

Judaism for nonbelievers

“Do you ever mind not practicing a religion?” I asked my fourteen-year-old granddaughter. Her parents are secular Jews, neither of whom had any Jewish education. She thought about it. “No, not really. But sometimes I wish I knew more about Jewish history.”

It was a challenge I couldn’t ignore. I can seldom resist the temptation to educate, or, as my children would perhaps put it, to push knowledge at my descendants whether they want it or not. Where would I find the right books for her? As the daughter of a Conservative rabbi, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know a fair amount about Jewish history. But all the books I read were celebratory -- how great, virtuous, courageous and long-suffering we were, how cruel and and vicious the rest of mankind. Or teleological: all of history leading to the sublime moment of Israel’s foundation. These were not the sort of books I wanted.

When my oldest son was four I wanted him to know the Bible stories just as I wanted him to know the Greek and Norse myths. But those myths were the easy part. There was no D’Aulaire for Bible stories. I scanned the Blackwell’s catalogs (in those days, books were much cheaper in England, and we ordered cartons of them for the holidays) and chose a few paperbacks. But these stories were teleological in a different way -- all paths leading to Christ. I checked out some Jewish versions, and of  course they were equally biased.

I should say here that my own rock-solid knowledge of Biblical narrative came straight from Bible comics, which were given out free when my mother bought my school clothes at Gertz Department Store on Jamaica Avenue. But Gertz is gone, and so, it appears, are Bible comics. (I have also talked intelligently at many an academic dinner party about books I knew only through Classics Illustrated, another sad loss to humanity).

In the end, I decided to tell my son the Bible tales as bedtime stories. He was pretty bored  until we reached the Joseph story, and then we both got excited. It was a real lesson to me about narrative structure, what works and what doesn’t. Thomas Mann, whose four-volume Joseph and his Brothers has delighted me through at least three readings, must have made the same discovery.

For my granddaughter I wanted books that would compare the Biblical narratives with the evidence of archaeology, which often tells a different story. For example, the current consensus is that there probably was no exodus from Egypt, at least not on any large scale, and no conquest of the Judaean cities (which will come as a relief to Jewish humanitarians uncomfortable with the commandment to let no living thing survive -- not even the puppies and kittens). The books had to be pretty short, what with homework, ballet, texting, and abridged 21st century attention spans. And of course they had to be written well enough so she wouldn’t just drop them behind her bed.

In the end, I picked three books from amazon.com, none of which I had read. One was An Illustrated History of the Jewish People, by Lawrence Joffe. Well, pictures help, and who knows, it might even entice her eleven-year-old sister. The second was A Short History of the Jewish People, by Raymond P. Scheindlin. Short is good, and it got satisfied reviews. The last was Judaism: a Very Short Introduction, by Norman Solomon. Length and reviews, once again. (And the second two are both Oxford University Press, so they can’t be total trash, can they?)

I asked my daughter-in-law if our girl had read The Diary of Anne Frank. Turns out she had, but wasn’t completely enraptured. When I was fourteen, I would have sworn that book would appeal to any girl of our age (and send her out to buy notebooks and try her own miserable skills). But perhaps it has finally become dated?

Finally, I recommended a historical novel to both my granddaughter and her parents: As a Driven Leaf, by Milton Steinberg. Written in 1939, it imagines the possible story of a real second-century rabbi, Elisha ben Abuyah, who became an apostate and whose sayings (still preserved in the Talmud) are attributed to “Another,” since his name could not be mentioned. Steinberg (a rabbi) pictured him as a child who was adopted by an Hellenized uncle after he was orphaned, and brought up with a Greek education. Later, he returned to Judaism, but was seduced away again by Greek culture and a Greek woman. I don’t know if they’ll like it. My son points out that his children are unhappy with any movie or book that doesn’t have an ironic cast. This certainly doesn’t. But although it is perhaps 60 years since I read it, I still know the last paragraph by heart, and it still brings tears to my eyes.

I’d love some book recommendations! Not only for the teenager, but also for my younger grandchildren. Two of them (eight and ten years old) are not Jewish. What books can I find for them?