Three Very Good Historical Novels
I’ve been reflecting on what makes a good historical novel. I certainly have read a number of them that seem very good— are in sharp contrast in fact to others that disappointed. But what is it to say that an historical novel is “good?” As with any judgement of this sort, it seems best to establish some criteria against which the books could be judged.
Historical accuracy would seem to be the chief criterion, and of course gross inaccuracies are jarring. Small ones too, such things as, for example, horseshoes or knitting in a book taking place during the second century of the Roman Empire. But is this criterion met by a mere catalogue of objects? Perhaps another question should be answered first.
Why do readers read historical novels? Mere escape for many, I suppose, and, to satisfy them, exoticism, lurid events and action may be enough. But others may read for the appreciation of an historical period, for an evocation of the differentness of a period or culture, and I think this is better brought out by art than in straight historical writing. This evocation of another time and place requires, I think, much more than mere accurate description of the clothes, food, or architecture of the era (with perhaps the odd word thrown in here and there from an old language in order to decorate a sentence). I think that to accurately evoke an historical era, the important social aspects of the society must be shown and should even inform the theme or the plot. Thus historical accuracy, it seems to me, must extend to some significant degree, to the manners, beliefs and behaviors of the characters, and not merely to what they wore, or what they ate, or whether their roofs were thatched or tiled.
Now, no novel written by a modern about ancient times will be entirely free of clues to the period in which it is written. Such clues creep in much as 1950s and 1960s hair-styles and eye-makeup showed up in the historical films of the period. Nonetheless, I think that an author should study the period and read some of the literature of the time, in order to arrive at feeling for the concerns of the period and the issues faced by people living then.
In view of these things, I would recommend three novels about different periods of the ancient world as particularly good in communicating a feeling of difference and as particularly good at illustrating the concerns and difficulties faced by people in different times.
I recently re-read Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, a novel based upon the myths of the birth and rise to kingship of Theseus, King of Athens and was impressed then by Renault’s ability to evoke the Greek Bronze Age not merely as some distant, simpler time, but as a time and a culture in which people thought in ways that are alien to us today. The views of honor, obligation, death, and fate in the book are at a sharp remove from ours. To read the book is to glimpse the Bronze Age, and to see it as menacing and remarkably foreign. She was familiar with the archaeology the Bronze Age Greece and Crete, and so she did not misstep archaeologically: her descriptions of the palaces and towns are what, in part contribute to the convincing otherness of the setting. Of equal importance, though, is Renault’s startling descriptions of the cultural practices of the time. It’s clear that Renault was familiar with Frazer’s Golden Bough and its descriptions of sacred kings and their periodic sacrifice for the benefit of their people. Renault interwove the material aspects of Bronze Age society with its cultural practices into a remarkably vivid account.
Cecilia Holland’s Death of Attila takes place much later— not at the start of western civilization, but in the last twenty years of the tottering Western Roman Empire, some two thousand years later. It follows the friendship of two young men, a German prince and a Hun, both part of the Hunnic kingdom. The focus is on these two as they move at the margin (and sometimes into) the late Roman Empire. The reader sees mingling of the Huns and their Germanic subjects, the effete, Late Roman nobility, the use of German federate soldiers to guard the frontiers and so on. The picture is perfectly drawn. The reader is given a convincing picture of the time, the place, and the conflicts, both internal and otherwise, of the period.
A winner of the Pegasus Prize, is Mario De Carvalho’s A God Strolling the Cool of the Afternoon: A Novel. This is the story of Lucius Valerius Quintus, a provincial roman of high station in a fictional city in Lusitania who must face barbarian invasion, the inertia of his fellow magistrates, the remoteness of a government whose task it is to protect its citizens, and shifts in the culture. The last concern is illustrated by the rise of a man of low social station (a distressing affront in a traditional and hierarchical society), and the appearance of Christianity in the community. The events are well-described, the conflicts between the characters handled deftly, and the issues presented are those that had begun to trouble the Roman Empire in the late second century, which is rather earlier than many readers might have expected. It is likely that Quintus’s concerns reflect those of any thoughtful contemporary westerner, and these reflections only make more interesting and poignant his struggle to save his city.
