Great read and congrats on getting to the end of your novel. You have inspired me to get back to work on my own historically-themed novel, which I’ve been tinkering with for years.
The trickiness of the genre that your writing workshop leader referred to, for me at least, is that my novel is set so long ago, I struggle to summon the urgency here and now. Historical fiction can wait! (I tell myself in the immediate present.) But it has waited long enough, and despite all the research my novel requires, the idea—the characters—won’t leave me. They are very much alive and on my mind, persisting in their “coquettish way” (as you delightfully put it), luring me to write their story. Do not delay, they say—as time ticks away in my ear.
And so, to paraphrase a master, I will beat on… “…borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Thank you. Thought provoking. Mark Twain blaming Sir Walter Scott for the American civil war. Is Scottish Australian Rupert Murdoch simply following in Scott’s footsteps in his creation of a global corporation the purpose of which is to manipulate hearts and minds ?
Congratulations on the work. Best of luck with the difficult Endgame of writing a book and navigating the period of emotional anti climax.
I love historical fiction, and I agree that’s what most novels (and memoirs) are in any case. I’ve never been drawn to the conceit of the “contemporary present” in novels, especially literary novels, that present the action as happening in some kind of universal now with almost nothing to ground it in a particular political/social landscape. Even when historical fiction drifts into stilted dialogue or wonkish explanations of masts on a schooner, I far prefer that to an ahistorical account of any life.
Good article. I would mention George Macdonald Frasier's Flashman novels here. They are immersive and accurate and show the Victorian world as quite different from our own, as well as being funny and entertaining. Because he wrote them as entertainment, their literary merit and historical precision are overlooked.
Never heard of John Williams or a book by him about World War I, and a quick Google search does not disclose one. What book or books are you talking about?
“the internet would seem to give writers completely new (and, I think, somewhat untapped) resources: more documents and images are available than ever before”
Is this really true, though? The internet can point to things, but the thing itself is often behind an academic paywall, or housed in an archive, or destroyed (there was a great fad recently in university libraries for scanning old books and then discarding them).
A really interesting taxonomy of the genre, Sam! I only realised I had written a historical novel after finishing it, as a lot of what is called 'literary' fiction is set in the past and I thought I was writing literary fiction!
As for which camp I'm in, I find I have to ground my plot and description in as much fact as possible and I've actually just got back from a research trip to Paris (my forthcoming novel is about the Surrealists) where I chose half-arbitrary, half-researched locations to photograph and take notes on. But I have also gone a little way down the Quentin Tarantino route and changed some outcomes to more positive ones in order to put my feminist point across.
Reading your piece has helped me to place my choices in context, so thank you.
https://www.americanheritage.com/little-big-mans-man. That sends us to a conversation with Thomas Berger that includes chills and thrills. In Little Big Man book you have the likely story of I guess what was liable to happen to a work that lives and breathes. Didnot sell until after the H-wood movie. But Vine Deloria said in Custer Died For Your Sins that LBM was the best treatment of native life in fiction! On the plus side, you can gather from the interview t the book gave Berger a lease on life, kind of like a positive Munchhausen syndrome where he almost lived as long as Jack Crabbe.
A few other nominations to add to your illustrious list.
Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy.
David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.
The Scarlet Letter
A Dance to the Music of Time
Great read and congrats on getting to the end of your novel. You have inspired me to get back to work on my own historically-themed novel, which I’ve been tinkering with for years.
The trickiness of the genre that your writing workshop leader referred to, for me at least, is that my novel is set so long ago, I struggle to summon the urgency here and now. Historical fiction can wait! (I tell myself in the immediate present.) But it has waited long enough, and despite all the research my novel requires, the idea—the characters—won’t leave me. They are very much alive and on my mind, persisting in their “coquettish way” (as you delightfully put it), luring me to write their story. Do not delay, they say—as time ticks away in my ear.
And so, to paraphrase a master, I will beat on… “…borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Thank you. Thought provoking. Mark Twain blaming Sir Walter Scott for the American civil war. Is Scottish Australian Rupert Murdoch simply following in Scott’s footsteps in his creation of a global corporation the purpose of which is to manipulate hearts and minds ?
Congratulations on the work. Best of luck with the difficult Endgame of writing a book and navigating the period of emotional anti climax.
I love historical fiction, and I agree that’s what most novels (and memoirs) are in any case. I’ve never been drawn to the conceit of the “contemporary present” in novels, especially literary novels, that present the action as happening in some kind of universal now with almost nothing to ground it in a particular political/social landscape. Even when historical fiction drifts into stilted dialogue or wonkish explanations of masts on a schooner, I far prefer that to an ahistorical account of any life.
Good article. I would mention George Macdonald Frasier's Flashman novels here. They are immersive and accurate and show the Victorian world as quite different from our own, as well as being funny and entertaining. Because he wrote them as entertainment, their literary merit and historical precision are overlooked.
Never heard of John Williams or a book by him about World War I, and a quick Google search does not disclose one. What book or books are you talking about?
“the internet would seem to give writers completely new (and, I think, somewhat untapped) resources: more documents and images are available than ever before”
Is this really true, though? The internet can point to things, but the thing itself is often behind an academic paywall, or housed in an archive, or destroyed (there was a great fad recently in university libraries for scanning old books and then discarding them).
A really interesting taxonomy of the genre, Sam! I only realised I had written a historical novel after finishing it, as a lot of what is called 'literary' fiction is set in the past and I thought I was writing literary fiction!
As for which camp I'm in, I find I have to ground my plot and description in as much fact as possible and I've actually just got back from a research trip to Paris (my forthcoming novel is about the Surrealists) where I chose half-arbitrary, half-researched locations to photograph and take notes on. But I have also gone a little way down the Quentin Tarantino route and changed some outcomes to more positive ones in order to put my feminist point across.
Reading your piece has helped me to place my choices in context, so thank you.
https://www.americanheritage.com/little-big-mans-man. That sends us to a conversation with Thomas Berger that includes chills and thrills. In Little Big Man book you have the likely story of I guess what was liable to happen to a work that lives and breathes. Didnot sell until after the H-wood movie. But Vine Deloria said in Custer Died For Your Sins that LBM was the best treatment of native life in fiction! On the plus side, you can gather from the interview t the book gave Berger a lease on life, kind of like a positive Munchhausen syndrome where he almost lived as long as Jack Crabbe.
Great article but you missed David Milch’s “Deadwood”! Now that’s how you do historical fiction!
Gore Vidal did a pretty good job with American history across multiple novels.