“It is the spirit of our age,” wrote Gore Vidal, “to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.” That Vidal himself was infected, at least partially, by this spirit is made evident by the number of historical novels he ended up writing. Nothing legitimises an imaginative exercise better than giving it a solid footing in the no-nonsense world of facts. And historical fiction, at least in its ideal form, embodies that perfect synthesis of reality and imagination that helps put the anxieties of our truth-obsessed age to rest.

Yet it’s difficult to make sense of the abiding appeal of historical fiction across the ages. The spiritual flaws that Vidal had detected in his time — and that we detect in ours — actually pervade literary history. So when the critic Perry Anderson warns us against considering the historical novel as a sub-genre of the novel, we must pay heed. The historical novel, Anderson wrote, is rather “a path-breaker or precursor of the great realistic novel of the 19th century”.

Anderson’s thorough and balanced evaluation of historical fiction, published in 2011 in London Review of Books , is perhaps the most generous treatment the subject has been given by any professional historian (he is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles). In general, historians have tended to dismiss the historical novel as gimmicky and double-dealing trash. And this dismissal often takes the form of militant revulsion towards the novelist who dares cross the bounds of fancy and attempts to actually usurp the role of a historian.

A few years ago, the British novelist AN Wilson made so bold as to cross that divide, with his half-baked work of non-fiction that he titled Hitler: A Short Biography . He could have chosen to play it safe by calling the book, like Norman Mailer did his study of Marilyn Monroe, a ‘novelised biography’, or something else equally spurious. He could have chosen to write a historical novel about Hitler. But no. Wilson had written a biography. The horror of horrors: a novelist had attempted a serious work of history.

For his transgression, Wilson was justly ripped apart in a vicious review of his book by the historian Richard J Evans, whose area of study happens to be the Germany of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Among the most scalding passages in Evans’s review is the bit where he attacks Wilson by pointing out the “repellent arrogance of a man who thinks that because he’s a celebrated novelist, he can write a book about Hitler that people should read”.

That’s why the tag ‘historical novel’ is of such value to some writers today. It not only safeguards you from the ire of certified and curmudgeonly historians like Evans, it also helps stoke general interest in your book by repositioning a work of fiction (something insignificant) as essentially a work of history (something important).

Some would argue that our collective record of the human past is anyhow ambiguous enough to render meaningless all the categorical differences between history and historical fiction. A historian, according to this line of thought, is as much an interpreter of history as a novelist is. And so, it’s somewhat unfair to hold the historical novel to such high standards of authenticity, of verifiability, as historians would like to.

But what about standards of literary value? The critic James Wood once famously called historical fiction “a gimcrack genre not exactly crammed with greatness”. The greatest work in the canon of world literature that can, in any sense, be called historical might be Tolstoy’s War and Peace . But informed readers, including Wood himself, have always refused to regard Tolstoy’s classic as historical fiction, and have never cared much about the many factual inconsistencies in its narrative, some of which, by the way, were fixed by the author after the novel was published.

According to Wood, Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall — perhaps the most successful historical novel of the last few decades — is actually a fine contemporary novel, all of whose characters were later given historical names by the novelist. In other words, all the history in Mantel’s great historical novel is just window dressing, concealing a more immediate, more compelling landscape. It’s worth noting, then, how the tag “historical novel” can sometimes weigh down an honest work of imagination.

How does one channel into a consciousness entirely alien to oneself? That’s the question historical novelists need to ask of themselves more often than they do. Virginia Woolf addressed this quandary with her beautiful parody of historical fiction, Orlando . The novel spans some 400 years of British history, even though its protagonist, Orlando, the book’s immortal core of consciousness, stays the same. But then, Orlando also doesn’t stay the same: halfway through the novel, somewhere before the Victorian era, we are told that Orlando has become a woman. This historical novel contains within itself a powerful critique of historical fiction, making confusion and fluidity — of gender, memory and time — its main subjects.

Talking about his/her Elizabethan past, Orlando at one point says: “The age was the Elizabethan; their morals were not ours; nor their poets; nor their climate; nor their vegetables even. Everything was different.” So here’s the real challenge of historical fiction: capturing that sense of difference between now and then. It’s very difficult to do that well, if not nearly impossible. The next best thing is to write a modern masterpiece and give all its characters historical-sounding names.

Vineet Gillis a journalist with The Sunday Guardian

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