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.