{"id":30427,"date":"2016-09-14T01:00:38","date_gmt":"2016-09-14T05:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30427"},"modified":"2016-09-06T19:12:04","modified_gmt":"2016-09-06T23:12:04","slug":"qotd-historical-novels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/09\/14\/qotd-historical-novels\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Historical novels"},"content":{"rendered":"

… the historical novel as we know it emerged at the end of the 18th<\/sup> century. The great historians of that age \u2013 Hume, Robertson, Gibbon and others \u2013 had moved far towards what may be called a scientific study of the past. They tried to base their narratives on established fact, and to connect them through a natural relationship of cause and effect. It was a mighty achievement. At the same time, it turned History from a story book of personal encounters and the occasional miracle to something more abstract. More and more, it did away with the kind of story that you find in Herodotus and Livy and Froissart. As we move into the 19th<\/sup> century, it couldn\u2019t satisfy a growing taste for the quaint and the romantic.<\/p>\n

The vacuum was filled by a school of historical novelists with Sir Walter Scott at its head. Though no longer much read, he was a very good novelist. The Bride of Lammermoor<\/em> is one of his best, but has been overshadowed by the Donizetti opera. I\u2019ve never met anyone else who has read The Heart of Midlothian<\/em>. But Ivanhoe<\/em> remains popular, and is still better than any of its adaptations. Whether still read or not, he established all the essential rules of historical fiction. The facts, so far as we can know them, are not to be set aside. They are, however, to be elaborated and folded into a coherent fictional narrative. Take Ivanhoe<\/em>. King Richard was detained abroad. His brother, John, was a bad regent, and may not have wanted Richard back. There were rich Jews in England, and, rather than fleecing them, as the morality of his age allowed, John tried to flay them. But Ivanhoe and Isaac of York, and the narrative thread that leads to the re-emergence of King Richard at its climax \u2013 these are fiction.<\/p>\n

I try to respect these conventions in my six Aelric novels. Aelric of England never existed. He didn\u2019t turn up in Rome in 609AD, to uncover and foil a plot that I\u2019d rather not discuss in detail. He didn\u2019t move to Constantinople in 610, and become one of the key players in the revolution that overthrew the tyrant Phocas. He wasn\u2019t the Emperor\u2019s Legate in Alexandria a few years later. He didn\u2019t purify the Empire\u2019s silver coinage, or conceive the land reforms and cuts in taxes and government spending that stabilised the Byzantine Empire for about 400 years. He didn\u2019t lead a pitifully small army into battle against the biggest Persian invasion of the West since Xerxes. He had nothing to do, in extreme old age, with Greek Fire. Priscus existed, and may have been a beastly as I describe him. I find it reasonable that the Emperor Heraclius was not very competent without others to advise him. But the stories are fabrications. They aren\u2019t history. They are entertainment.<\/p>\n

Even so, they are underpinned by historical fact. The background is as nearly right as I can make it. I\u2019ve read everything I could find about the age in English and French and Latin and Greek. I\u2019ve read dozens of specialist works, and hundreds of scholarly articles. My Blood of Alexandria<\/em> is a good introduction to the political and religious state of Egypt on the eve of the Arab invasions. My Curse of Babylon<\/em> is a good introduction to the Empire as a whole in the early years of the 7th<\/sup> century. The only conscious inaccuracy in all six novels comes in Terror of Constantinople<\/em>, where I appoint a new Patriarch of Constantinople several months after the actual event. I did this for dramatic effect \u2013 among much else, it let me parody Tony Blair\u2019s Diana Funeral reading \u2013 but I\u2019ve felt rather bad about it ever since. This aside, any university student who uses me for background to the period that I cover will not be defrauded.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing special about this. If you want to know about Rome between Augustus and Nero, the best place to start is the two Claudius novels by Robert Graves. Mary Renault is often as good as Grote or Bury on Classical Greece \u2013 sometimes better in her descriptions of the moral climate. Gore Vidal\u2019s Julian<\/em> is first class historical fiction, and also sound biography. Anyone who gets no further than C.S. Forester and Patrick O\u2019Brien will know the Royal Navy in the age of the French Wars. Mika Waltari is less reliable on the 18th Dynasty in The Egyptian<\/em>. In mitigation, we know very little about the events and family relationships of the age between Amenhotep III and Horemheb. He wrote a memorable novel despite its boggy underpinning of fact.<\/p>\n

Richard Blake, “Interview with Richard Blake, 7th March 2014”<\/a>, 2014-03-07.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… the historical novel as we know it emerged at the end of the 18th century. The great historians of that age \u2013 Hume, Robertson, Gibbon and others \u2013 had moved far towards what may be called a scientific study of the past. They tried to base their narratives on established fact, and to connect […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,62,7,28,41],"tags":[858,134],"class_list":["post-30427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-europe","category-history","category-media","category-quotations","tag-byzantium","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7UL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30427"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30428,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30427\/revisions\/30428"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}