The Double Edged Sword: Does Historical Fiction have any Value?

I must admit I have a love / hate relationship with historical fiction both written and cinematic. I can’t deny that my interest in history was partly fuelled by historical novels, nor that once in a while a film or TV series comes along which contains elements so atmospherically accurate they transport me back in time. Yet usually I am quite scathing of mainstream efforts to reconstruct the past, as the difficult trade-off between historical accuracy, accessibility and engaging story-telling often comes unstuck somewhere along the line.

Having said this, I do strongly believe that it’s the ‘story’ within the historical record which both drives and engages us in our ability to understand the past – albeit through the filter of our twenty-first century experiences. As we read about history we can’t stop ourselves from imagining past events, building a mental picture of what it ‘might actually have been like’ based on a whole raft of evidence and experiences; and I firmly believe that the best historians are those who poses what I like to think of as the ‘historical imagination’ – a predisposition to imagine the past fluidly, to day-dream a bit – and see themselves back in the era they are studying.

It is, after all, those sources (both primary and secondary) which contain the most engaging and atmospheric narrative which open up the past as if it were still alive. To give a couple of examples, Jerome Carcopino’s ‘Daily Life in Ancient Rome,’ (1941) has an almost gossipy first-hand quality which vividly explores a world of apartment blocks, fast-food joints and nouveau riche dinner parties; while Kellow Chesney’s 1970 book ‘The Victorian Underworld’ (which draws heavily on contemporary accounts such as Mayhew) bring Victorian London’s darker side to life with a realism I have experienced nowhere else. Reading these books is like eavesdropping on the day-to-day realities of a long past life, hearing candid gossip first-hand.

Another interesting angle on imaginative historical interpretation is first-person presentation of history in which a real-time eyewitness style is applied to the interpretation of historical facts taken from written, archaeological and comparative sources. Of this alternative approach three books in particular have been notably eye-opening to my understanding of the past:

Ian Mortimer’s ‘The Time Traveller’s Guide to the Middle Ages,’ (2008) is a nuts-and-bolts interpretation of Medieval England, based on years of research, presented as a how-to guide to navigate daily life and social norms. Mortimer also includes a couple of interesting essays about the creative interpretation of history which are well worth a look at.

Closer to the traditional historical novel is Keith Hopkins’ ‘A World Full of Gods,’ (1999) in which, through a variety of quirky inter-disciplinary devices, the author explores Roman attitudes to religion, and in three superb narrative passages sends two time-travelling PhD students to ancient Pompeii, Egypt and Ephesus, where their personal accounts help open up Roman culture (in the light of their 21st Century experiences) in a way neither traditional historical narrative nor historical fiction ever could.

Finally the truly monumental ‘After the Ice,’ by archaeologist Steven Mithen (2003) is a work I would consider nothing short of ground breaking. This masterful account of world history between the Last Ice age and the invention of farming, uses the vehicle of a time travelling academic (the modern counterpart of Early Victorian archaeologist John Lubbock) to recreate archaeological scenes first hand based on scrupulously accurate use of archaeological evidence (couple with comparative anthropological interpretation) in a way that is witty, engaging and a bona fide act of time travel. Mithen has engaged his extremely powerful imagination to recreate his picture of the Mesolithic, but his use of evidence is so scrupulous that one cannot detect the faintest trace of supposition.

But is such an alternative method of retelling history less academically valid than a more traditional approach? At the very least such books are more accessible and often more interesting, helping to open our imagination in a way that drier works perhaps do not – and I firmly believe that imagination is the key – a faculty which must be engaged to make sense of all primary sources. At best, all of our historical reconstruction is guess-work, a coupling of fact mixed with supposition based upon many varied sources – with imagination as the glue to give our ideas life. So why shouldn’t such an approach be employed?

One of the biggest problems of trying to write well-informed historical fiction is how to explain events and activities which would make no sense to the modern reader whatsoever without footnotes or lengthy interjections by a narrative voice. It is at this point where historical fiction often comes unstuck, creating either a world of modern action dressed in historical costume, or a world so historically accurate it is too intellectual to be mainstream. The real pleasure of studying the past is to use it as a lens through which to examine the present, the contrast between our world and past ages being the most fascinating thing about history: and as mentioned, this is hard to make clear without either having present day characters discuss the past from afar or send them back into it. In The Unnatural History Museum, I found myself drawn into the latter, with the ridiculously well-informed Dr Speedwell on hand to make sense of the action-killing nuts-and-bolts which are necessary to maintain the narrative.

I personally believe historical fiction has a place in our understanding of the past and more than once while teaching have had a student note that their interest in the Middle Ages was first kindled by reading works of fiction such as Ken Follett’s ‘The Pillars of the Earth,’ and as such I will keep on letting my imagination run wild as I read about the past - or walk amid ancient ruins - and hopefully I will create a more vivid picture of long-dead realms because of it.

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