The Rest Is History - 14. Historical Fiction

Episode Date: January 11, 2021

Is the author’s responsibility to the quality of the novel or the truth of history? What makes a great historical novel and which authors have contributed to our understanding of history. Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook range across literature in search of the best of historical fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. It is a truth universally acknowledged that two men in possession of a podcast must be in want of a weekly subject. And especially, Dominic, to paraphrase Dickens, when it's the worst of times, it's the worst of times. It's the age of foolishness.

It's the age of foolishness. Only Tom Holland there could possibly believe that he could improve on Charles Dickens. So let's get on with the podcast. Hello and welcome to The Rest Is History. Today we want to talk about historical fiction. And the reason we want to talk about historical fiction is that a few weeks ago Tom and I had a, I think what the critics would call a minor spat, about the merits of the great Patrick O'Brien. And Tom's final comment, if I can just read it out to damn him for all eternity, is everyone tells me they're great, he wrote on Twitter. But honestly, after 30 pages of rope, I had lost the will to live.

And this caused well justified uproar. So we decided it needed the full podcast treatment. Emma Darwin said, You too, Tom. Having grown up on C.S. Forrester, I'm sure I'd love Aubrey Maturin as much as so many mainly male friends told me I would, but the gorgeous period detail never adds up to anything,

just sits there. You're quite wrong, Emma, I have to say. No, very, very wise. Emma, you are right. Well, Chris Kendall said said this is like giving up on Proust after three pages because it's just about cake um Chris Kendall is obviously a very fine judge um anyway Tom Patrick O'Brien you're not a fan it's too much rope for you you're gonna give it another go I don't think so there's so much I want to read and they just kind of the

thought of plowing the way through all that stuff about yardarms and foxholes and weevils and stuff. I'm just, I'm simply not interested. And I wasn't ever particularly interested in Hornblower either. I think novels about the admirals and midshipmen and things in Nelson's, I'm just not interested. I'd much rather read, you know, the actual campaigns of Nelson. All right right fair enough well let's get into historical fiction so do you read historical fiction for pleasure that's obviously the first question are you a historical fiction buff well like most men i basically stopped

reading fiction when i was 40 oh for goodness sake so i i used to read a lot i mean i read historical fiction obsessively when I was a child. I'm sure lots of people who become interested in history, it's a kind of gateway drug to it. Yeah. I've read a lot of historical fiction over the course of my life. But yeah, basically, I mean, about for about 10 years, I haven't really read it. But I'm aware that that's because I actually I've become more and more interested in reading history and less and less interested in reading fiction. And that's weird. That corresponds to the fact we used the fact, I began my writing career as a novelist. And all the novels were set in historical periods. And I just began to realise that the

history was just much more interesting than the bits that I was making up. So that's why, essentially, why I changed course. You're selling the listener short a little here. You weren't just a novelist. You're a novelist of historically themed vampire fiction. I was. Yes, I was. Yes, I was. Let's get into the nitty gritty. Yeah, I was very interested in people's attitudes to the supernatural, for instance. And I enjoyed writing, said, in historical periods because it was a way of accessing that.

And for me, actually, one of the things that i find fascinating about the past is is all the kind of weird stuff that people believed in the past and i'm sure that in 200 years time people will look back at art you know 2021 again wow they believe that i mean actually we were talking about that last week on conspiracy theories people say they believe q anon blimey yeah so in a way i think i think fact is more interesting than fiction is basically what i've come to believe. But it's interesting what you say about it being a gateway drug, because I was thinking about this today, sort of looking forward to the podcast,

about when I first, the first history books I read, like most people listening to this, were the Lady Bird history books. And they were sort of packaged and presented in exactly the same way as the Lady Bird books about myths and legends. Or for me, the Lady Bird books that I love are Robin Hood and King Arthur and then I went from them to Kings and Queens of England, Nelson, Elizabeth I and all these other stories without really seeing a sort of disjuncture. It seems like part of the same thing and obviously kids history books are often written if they're any good they're written in a sort of slightly

fictionalised style, aren't they? I mean, how many people come to Roman Britain through Rosemary Sutcliffe, The Eagle of the Ninth, or, you know, come to any of the great stories of history through fiction rather than from fact? You know, for me, I mean, for me, what got me particularly interested in the Romans was Asterix, which I suppose, in a way kinds of novels i mean born destiny um yeah and then you're right that rosemary suck cliff who do people still read her i mean for the benefit of yeah they do they're still my son reads them i mean they have they the folio society that's amazing yeah we're a very normal family. Full of 1950s historical fiction. I don't know. I mean, I thought all her books were wonderful.

There was a fantastic one about the Roman invasion in AD 43 that I think was all about a war dog. So it was a kind of Jack London, only Celtic. And then, of course, The Eagle of the Ninth is the absolute classic. And that clearly does have an enduring influence. There was a whole rash of films that came out a couple of years ago about people going north of Hadrian's Wall, looking for kind of lost eagles and things like that. So that clearly does have an enduring influence.

And the other one you talked about, King Arthur, is The Sword at Sunset. That's for adults, though, isn't it? That's brilliant. Yeah, but that is a fabulous novel about a kind of historical Arthur who in the fifth century after the Romans have left. And there's a kind of climactic scene after they've won the Battle of Baden against the invading Saxons.

And Arthur says that they are still upholding the values of Rome and they dream that the emperor in distant Constantinople will know it. And in a sense, it's Rosemary Sutcliffe in all those novels is casting Rome as the kind of embodiment of civilisation. And therefore, in those novels, you have a clear sense that Rome is good and that barbarism is bad. Yeah, that's that's a that's a kind of polarity that I think children particularly respond to. But of course, part of the fascination of history is that you start to realise that those slightly stark polarities aren't actually true. Yes, true. Yeah, but that's but i think that's part of i mean that's part of

children's history whether it's fact or fiction right that you're setting up these myths that you later debunk i mean actually talking of that and in sort of stories that you debunk i used to read i mean tons of kind of g.a henty style imperial did you yeah i mean this was a cartoon and all that precisely yeah this will astonish people and all that precisely yeah this will astonish people who are used to my incredibly incredibly left-wing views on um british imperialism but all that stuff those sort of rousing stories they do more i think to get people interested in history than any number of i mean let's be honest they do more than any number of academic history books don't they?

But again, you've got the same thing because in those books, the guiding assumption is that the British Empire is positive, that it ventures into darkest Africa or whatever. I mean, it's kind of still there in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Yeah, absolutely. That gives you a kind of, again,

a kind of clear sense of goodies and baddies that obviously now would not be acceptable. You wouldn't get novels written like that. And I guess that what's interesting about that is that it suggests that historical novels themselves become historical artefacts, that they become actually very, very rapidly. Yeah, of course they do. I mean, you look at, but actually the goodies and baddies thing

is an interesting thing, isn't it? Because you think about the most successful, or the most sort of prestigious historical novels of the last 10 years, Hilary Mantel's books. They have goodies and baddies in. Thomas Cromwell is the goody, Thomas More is the baddy. And that is a complete reversal of the Robert Bolt,

A Man for All Seasons, where it was the other way around. And I think what's interesting about Wolf Hall and that trilogy is is hillary mantel's attempt to overcome what is perhaps another issue with historical fiction which is that you know what's going to happen whereas you have to the not the skill of the novelist is to persuade you that that the characters within that historical sweep do not know what's going to happen and so hillary mantel does it very cleverly by putting it all in the present tense so you have a sense of events happening um as she she writes

about it and i guess the converse of that the the other attempt and it wouldn't traditionally be thought of as a historical novel or a series of historical novels would be the game of thrones novels which are objectively completely fantasy but obviously take elements of um recognizable history so the core of it is the wars of the roses and if you read a series of novels set in the wars of the roses you know exactly what's going to happen i mean you just have to look at a kind of a history book to know you know who's going to die who's going to win the battles and so on part of the the thrill of game of the thrones is that you you know you get the same archetypes you get the same patterns but you don't know who's going to die.

And I think that that's a kind of interesting way of spicing it up. That's interesting because the Game of Thrones novels are partly inspired by a French series. Have you ever read these books by Maurice Drouin, Accursed Kings? Set in the Hundred Years' War, aren't they? Yeah, set in the Hundred Years' War. And they're a strange thing to read because as an English reader, you don't really know what's going to happen. You don't know all the characters

because they're all these sort of French noblemen, the sort of Warwick the Kingmakers and Simon de Montforts of French medieval history who are presumably well-known or were well-known to sort of 1950s French readers, but are basically completely unknown to any but specialist English readers. So there you're reading historical fiction that's quite fun.

I mean, they're not great works of literature, but they're quite engaging. But you have this strange experience as a reader that you don't know what everybody else knows who's reading it. Well, I remember from the English point of view, Arthur Conan Doyle's The White Company and Sir Nigel, which is set in the Hundred Years' War, but from the English side. Sir Nigel, that's not a name you choose now, is it?

And when I read it, it features Sir John Shandos, who's a real central figure in the Hundred Years' War, and is cast as the absolute model of chivalry. And it features the Black Prince and the Battle of Poitiers and all kinds of kind of truthful elements. But it's very much, I suppose, an Edwardian take on it. And chivalry is something true and authentic and you don't really get the peasant's perspective. But actually what I found the most brilliant section of the Game of Thrones novels was the sequence in, I think it's the second and third

ones, where basically you have the Hundred Years' War going on. And this tends not to be featured in the TV series, but in the novels, you get a brilliant sense of what it must have been like to be a peasant, basically, in the Hundred Years' War. It's kind of, you know, companies of gangs of armed thugs roaming around, that the lords in their castles are essentially predators. I mean, it's absolutely terrifying vision. And I think vastly truer to The Hundred Years' War, even though it's set in Westeros, than anything, any kind of historical version of The Hundred Years' War that I've read. And I think that that's a kind of really interesting slant on what can be done with historical fiction that actually doesn't have to be entirely accurate.

And in many ways, if it's not accurate, perhaps you get a better sense of what the reality was like. Yeah, I completely agree with you about that. It's the second book of Game of Thrones. So the war's just started and they're sort of going around raping and pillaging. So this is the stuff that you don't expect in a sort of historical fantasy novel. It's the sort of Second World War style gritty realism um we'll get onto that question of accuracy in a second but before we do that um tell me do you are there some historical books that sort of historical novels that really stand out to you as having meant more than others or having caught a period better than others well there's one we mentioned already, which is Ian Peer's instance

of the finger post, which if I had to nominate the single best historical novel I've read, that would get my vote. And the reason for that is that it offers multiple perspectives. So it's four different perspectives on, I think it's set at the end of the protectorate, the beginnings of the restoration. And it's a kind of a mystery. And you get the perspective of, you know, a scholar at Oxford and a cavalier and so on. And I think that the idea that there isn't an objective kind of sense of what historical fact is, is brilliantly evoked through that. But also it's brilliant because without giving anything away, there's a twist that is true to how people in the 17th century would have understood the world, but isn't necessarily true to how we would see it. And I think that historical fiction that I tend not to like is condescending,

is historical fiction that is condescending towards the culture of the age. So although I like C.J. Sansom, for instance, very much, I find that as novels, very gripping, as he'd done, it's very, very gripping. Or indeed, Bernard Cornwall's Lost Kingdom set in the Anglo-Saxon period. Again, they're kind of very thrilling and exciting what I dislike about them

is that both lead characters are kind of cast as liberal humanist sceptics who yeah

they're Philip Pullman and Richard Dawkins aren't they yes basically and so you have this guy who's been

in a monastery and is now kind of saying I don't hold with Catholicism or Protestantism. It's all nonsense. Let people believe what they think. But I'm just going to carry on reading the God delusion. Essentially, it's the perspective of a 21st century liberal skeptic.

And maybe you need, I mean, maybe people need that, a kind of sense of continuity. But I don't think so I think it's kind of more interesting to um to try and get people to to see the world in so far as possible through eyes that are not those of the well that's the point of fiction right I mean yeah exactly but that's true of the Bernard Cornwell right I like the Bernard Cornwell books as sort of holiday reads or whatever but it does always amuse me that utrid the lead character is this 21st century guy trapped in a half saxon i mean he kills people and he's got very good with an axe but but he often says like i don't like christianity you know i i they're very they're all hypocrites all this kind of stuff which is completely implausible yes yes uh uh do you have a favorite um well we mentioned before the leopard um by giuseppe

tamasi de lampedusa and i think that is a brilliant book it's a one-off so it was published in the mid-20th century it's looking back at the period of italian unification it's a very conservative book it's a book about the sort of anxiety of change so it's this guy who the the prince who is sort of besieged by the rise of the italian middle classes and by the sort of um the new values of nationalism and what he sees as vulgarity and and all this kind of thing but it's beautifully written it's a sort of one great one-off um it has this famous stuff about for everything to stay the same everything has to change which has become a sort of um become one of the great sort of mottos of intellectual conservatism liberal conservatism i guess the other book that i'm i don't think anybody mentioned on twitter that surprises me um it's probably the most famous historical novel is war and peace

yeah um so there you've got a book that's not just a historical novel but it's also about history history and how history works and i i'm very sympathetic to tolstoy's non-great man um school of history the history is sort of made by the masses who don't really know what they're doing and that great men are sort of then imposed on history almost and become nearly the vehicles for for great forces have you are you a war and peace man yes i i well i'm more a dostoevsky man to be honest oh no i can't deal with that the troubled relationship with god and suffering is much more you're just so dark tom you're so deep well this time last year i was actually in saint petersburg

i've been commissioned by the economist to write an article about crime and punishment. So I was going around St. Petersburg in the footsteps of the murderous Raskolnikov. But yeah, of course, I mean, Tolstoy's great. But what I, my chief memory of reading War and Peace is that, you know, it's brilliant. You get through, you've got the bottle of Baradino and all that kind of stuff. And then right at the end, you've got this 50 page essay on why napoleon isn't very important that's right yeah it's very strange that is a bit like kind of climbing a mountain and you see what you think's the peak and you get there and then there's another bloody great peak waiting for you to crawl up

and that i do remember being being quite a slog um one one one other thing i think quite strongly about historical fiction is that it's very much easier to write it um if it's set in a period in which novels actually exist so yeah so if you so basically if you let's say that the fiction begins well i suppose it begins with with don quixote and cervantes but let's say in the 18th century because that's when you start to get mass novels yeah so if you want to set a novel in the 18th century you can read richardson or or um smollett or whatever yeah if you want to write something set in the in the in the regency you can read jane austen if you want to write something set in the in the in the regency you can read jane austen if you want to write something victorian period you can read zola or dickens or whatever and so on

but it becomes much much harder if you go beyond that period so into the middle ages or classical period or um ancient egypt it just in ancient egypt it's just really difficult you know for a man to get out of bed and walk through a door because we can't we don't know how an egyptian would describe that yeah so agatha christie has an ancient egyptian have you ever read agatha christie's ancient egyptian murder mystery to me at least i think it's called is it appointment with death i can't remember the title and anyway it's not very good because she's so clearly out of her comfort zone and you just don't believe any of these people exist. It's completely mad.

Ah, the little grey cells that said... No, as you say, I mean, because you sort of think this... I even think this with... I mean, I don't think this all the time, but I even think this with, say, Bernard Cornwell's books, which are narrated by Uhtred. He's telling you the story. But you do sort of think to yourself,

not only why is he thinking like a 21st century kind of liberal, but also, why is he using this essentially 18th, 19th century literary form to order his thoughts? And the way he... Well, well, and I think the answer for that is that the historical novel is basically invented by Walter Scott. That's true. yeah. You know, in the early 19th century. And so, in a sense, the default mode for historical novel is kind of early 19th century. And even though people don't read Scott anymore, the kind of the influence of it lingers on whenever people kind of write. I mean, it's a kind of constant temptation and and so you mentioned agatha

christie writing about ancient egypt i think one way for for people to get around the problem of say you know how do you how do you write a novel set in ancient rome or whatever is is precisely to focus in on anachronism so thinking of lindsey davis who's written a series of falco novels a series of who's a detective in ancient Rome. The anachronism kind of is the point. I mean, there's all kinds of tremendous detail. It's all very accurate, lots of characters. You know, Rome is brilliantly evoked,

all that kind of thing. But you don't have the issue of trying to find a kind of style that is appropriate to the Roman period because you can, you know, you revel in the anachronism. Whereas something like um margaret usenor's uh memoirs of hadrian or indeed very boring um i claudius yeah well it is it it is i agree it is boring because it's it's an attempt to to mimic hadrian's voice but it's so accurate that by the standards of a modern novel you know it it's quite dull yes i count

belisarius robert graze is count palisarius which i find incredibly boring because it just reads like a sort of byzantine account of a campaign whereas um i claudius works because the source material is so brilliant i mean he's basically adapting satonius and tacitus and that is such fun there's such scope for kind of murder and depravity that, you know, he can, Claudius can kind of write as Claudius might have done. I mean, obviously, you know, he's very much Graves as well. But I think I, Claudius is the most successful attempt to ventriloquise somebody from a period before the invention of the novel that I can think of, the most kind of enduring one. Before we go to the break, which you probably should,

I want to just bring up one of the tweets, because talking about ventriloquising a period, I think the best example of this, we had a message from somebody called Potchcott, and he says, do you have any time for George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman books? Now, I think the narrative voice in Flashman is as good as any narrative voice in any historical novel. It absolutely captures for me how a Victorian cad would tell the story of all these campaigns. And I think the Flashman books are the cleverest, actually. I mean, maybe Tolstoy or whatever apart,

because they're playing so much with your expectations of victorian imperial fiction and there's the the ambiguity of the way it treats the the story of britain's empire is so cleverly done because you can take of that story whatever you like i think but it is also i think the novels are very much products of a time where the attitude to the empire is less complicated than it is now. I mean, it kind of, I wonder if it would. Yes, I do. The language in it is not the kind of language I think that

even if one was trying to ventriloquise a Victorian would necessarily be used now. You see, here, Tom, I would disagree with you. I would say the flashman books are actually reflective of a time where attitudes to empire are more complicated than they are now because... Yes, OK, that's possible, yeah. Fraser...

Flashman describes all these sort of British victories and all the rest of it. And there's no doubt that he is patriotic and that both Flashman and his author are patriotic and all the rest of it and and there's no doubt that he is patriotic and that and that that both flashman and his author are patriotic and and and all the rest of it but at the same time the stories always show the exploitation the greed uh flashman himself is a terrible coward and he's a rapist and he sort of exploits people and all the rest of it. And the hypocrisy of Empire is laid bare at the same time that it's celebrated. So it has its cake and eats it.

I agree, I agree. But yes, he does have his cake and eat it. So he's a rapist and a racist. But would a rapist and a racist now be as acceptable to the reading public as it was in the 70s or whenever it was? No, because we're more frightened of the ambiguity, I think, because we want the story to be black or white, don't we?

We want it to be good or evil. We don't like... Readers now would perhaps find it more troubling to use the current words. But I think that people's sense of what is acceptable with ambiguities has changed and evolved. And so, again, in that sense, I think Flashman is becoming a kind of historical artefact. I mean, I think it'd be very, very interesting for historians who want to study changing attitudes to empire over the past 50 years. I think it's a key piece of evidence. And also, Tom, you know what?

You couldn't teach the Flashman books at a university now because of the language. So if you wanted to use them in a course, I mean, they'd have to be preceded by all kinds of trigger warnings about all the material and the way that the Flashman and the narrator describes them. Anyway, I couldn't recommend them highly enough. And on that note, let's take a break. And when we come back, if we haven't been cancelled

we'll look at some of the tweets I'm Marina Hyde and I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment

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Nicholas Nickleby. The producer writes all these sort of fortune cookie style. So now you're dissing Dickens. You're dismissing the greatest novelist in the English language as fortune cookie. Oh, Dominic. Now, Dickens, of course, is a historical novelist, Tom. So you've stirred up things on Twitter by talking about the historical novel that you think has done most

to fix the image of a particular period, haven't you? And you think that is? Yeah, well, I think that that is A Tale of Two Cities. And in fact, because David Haskier actually puts this, he puts this down very nicely. One question, which works of historical fiction have influenced popular understanding of the period they portray the most and have they done so for the better or the worse so i think that um tale of two cities by dickens is probably the single most influential novel on the way that people in the english-speaking world understand a period of history because although dickens is obviously you know he's drawing on burke who is the first person to kind of really clarify the idea of the french revolution as terror um and then carlisle who is

is doing the same dickens um you know with his inimitable genius portrays this image of the french revolution as um being awash with, as the guillotine, as tricoteurs, women sitting in front of the guillotine, tumbrils, aristocrats having their heads chopped off. But also the sense of just how depraved and evil the aristocracy are and how they have it coming. And the kind of stark colours of the French Revolution, kind of as a morality tale, is really defined for us by Dickens. And I remember I was in Paris in 1989 for the bicentenary of the celebration of the revolution. Le Monde, I think, asked, the G7 meeting was going on in Paris. Oh, I know where you're going with this. This is Margaret Thatcher, isn't it?

Yeah, of course. And um le monde asked um all the leaders of the g7 nations for their take on the french revolution and six of them went on about you know uh human rights and liberty and fraternity and equality and all this kind of thing um and mrs thatcher said well it was terrible it was all about agility and thumb drills and things and she obviously got that from um from uh um tale of two cities which i think really does define the french revolution up to this day for the english-speaking world i remember when i was a child in sort of 1970s 1980s britain seeing a a kid's tv program one afternoon, which was about the French Revolution. And I can still remember the scenes of sort of sweaty, horny handed sons of toil bursting into a palace, and all these sort of pretty ladies and waiting hiding in the cupboard, while these sort of

slavering dogs of the proletariat dragged them out on their way to the guillotine. So this sort of stuff is very clearly deeply embedded in the kind of Anglo-American, you know, imagination and our sense of the French religion. So I buy that. I suppose, I'm surprised you don't mention I Claudius. Or do you think it's because I Claudius is too obviously based on Suetonius and Tacitus?

Yes, yes. I mean, obviously it has its spin, but I think it's going with the grain of the way that Suetonius and Tacitus portray the Roman Empire. And I think that also that was kind of compounded, obviously, by the TV series. I would I would say that the key is novels that have radically altered and transfigured it. So another one would be Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, which is set in medieval England. And I think that that's influential

because that kind of really beds down the idea that medieval England is about Saxons and Normans and that these are completely different people and it's kind of like apartheid South Africa or something, which is still an idea that is very strong in movies and historical fiction to this day. And of course they weave in Robin Hood with Richard the Lionheart,

which you're still getting in Prince of Thieves and all that kind of stuff. So I think that's influential. And one last one, which I think has its influence is now basically dissolved is gone with the wind i think that that had a really really seismic influence on how people saw the antebellum south and i think that that now the understand that that has basically dissolved and and no one would regard that as um an authentic vision but i agree with you that gone with the it was very influential for a long time.

I agree with you that Gone With The Wind is colossally important, though I think Gone With The Wind wasn't going against the grain, it was going with the grain of a lot of scholarship in the way that Americans remembered the Civil War and Reconstruction. And of course, Gone With The Wind is also building on the success of Birth of a Nation. So the film in the 1910s that was the film of its day and established that.

I mean, Birth of a Nation is an incredibly racist film if you watch it now. I used to teach it and it is, I mean, I'm not easily shocked, but it's pretty shocking kind of stuff.

And another novel, actually, talking about America and it's kind of mythology of America, might be The Virginian. Yeah. Which is the first kind of Wild West novel. Yes. first kind of wild west novel yes um and and kind of really establishes the template with shootouts and saloon bars and

cattle ranching and everything that then gets picked up by the by the hollywood and i was about to say yeah so i think i think they're good um but actually on on the topic generally of um how accurate uh historical fiction you know, should it be accurate? Does it matter? We've got one from Killian Mabuba, who says film director Stephen Frears once said about historical films, never let facts get in the way of a good story. Do you agree with this approach to historical fiction? Or is there a responsibility for artists to deal in facts when dealing with real historical figures or events? Dominic what do you think? So my take on that would be quite complicated I think if you're writing let's say you write let's stick with novels if you're writing a novel about a

historical period I think by and large your responsibility is to the novel so you you know if I'm writing a novel about Sasanian Persia or the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, I don't think my chief responsibility should be to the facts because it's clearly a novel. I think my responsibility is the artistic product of the book and to the readers. Where I think there's possibly a distinction

is where you're dealing with subjects that are very recent. So the relatives of people who were in the book are possible readers. Or it's some sort of incredibly traumatic moment. So, for example, if you were writing a book about the Holocaust, you would obviously's a there's an expectation and a responsibility of sort of fidelity to fact but you know i i'm not one of these people who gets hot under the collar about people have the wrong carriage in the tudors or you know people are carrying the wrong kind of sword in the the sort of bernard cornwell adaptations i mean i think that's completely irrelevant i mean they're clearly fiction so it doesn't matter but when you get to let, let's say, The Crown, the most recent series,

where the people in it are still alive, I mean, they're human beings with lives. They might be rich and well-known, but they're still human beings like the rest of us. I think the authors should have a responsibility to fairness, I guess is the word. What about you? What do you think? Yeah, I think even with the most sensitive topics, it's possible to engage in fantasy and to make play with the facts. So I think of a recent novel by Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad, which weaves the fantastical into the story of slavery

in the antebellum period in the United States to brilliant effect. And I actually think that a kind of an obsession with realism actually, you know, it's going back to Scott. Basically what you're doing then is you're writing an early 19th century novel. You're writing a novel in the tradition of Walter Scott.

Part of the best way to write a historical novel is actually to accept that an obsession with getting the facts right is actually, you know, quite a recent idea. So that if you're writing about periods where people believe in ghosts or gods or whatever, I think, you know, I don't have any issue at all with them being woven in. I think that can often kind of add to it. So, you know, we mentioned Game of Thrones, but I would say Lord of the Rings actually is, in a sense, a much more creative response to early medieval history than a kind of rigorous attempt to work out exactly what Attila might have said or what the Varangian Guard did.

I think that, in a sense, letting loose the kind of the moorings that tether you to the known historical facts in certain periods of history can be incredibly liberating. And that's why you would want to read fiction, I think, rather than say straight history. Agreed. And I think there's also a danger, before we move on, that your research can overwhelm you as a novelist. I think that's an issue that some people have actually with Hilary mantel that she wears her research very heavily and there's an enormous amount of stuff about the clothes that they have and the right kind of cloth and the food that they're eating and all that and you can feel the weight of all this stuff that she's done um and perhaps a bit of judicious cutting i mean not that i she's won two prizes so it's not like I know. Yes, I'm sure she'd be grateful for your advice.

Yeah, thanks for watching. I won three. But I agree that with kind of bad historical novelists, that, you know, the dread is the kind of clunking speech. You mean the Duke of York and his three children are coming? Well, they talk in that sort of civil, discontent way. Verily, I'd say to thee, you know, all this kind of stuff. Yes.

Anyway. Right, do we have another question? Do we have another question? So Tim Vasby-Burney says, what are our earliest examples... Oh, the reverend Tim Vasby-Burney. Really. He says, what are our earliest examples

of people writing historical fiction? In contrast to, say, writing down myths or embellishing the stories of saints. So you must know the answer to this tom well i if we're talking about historic novels yeah um i mean historical fiction then then it comes slightly you know our medieval romances um you know yes they're not fiction i mean they're not fiction are are they? So I think, well, I think the first novel in kind of the modern West is Cervantes' Don Quixote. And the thing about Don Quixote is that he's driven mad by reading what we would call medieval romance. And the humour in Cervantes is that Don Quixote is a man out of time so we have a portrait of

16th century Spain which of course for Cervantes is contemporary Spain yeah you have this man in armor going around um seeing giants instead of windmills and so on so I guess the the Don Quixote is a novel about the tension between the past and the present, you could argue. That's nice. The dynamic of it is generated by the fact that Don Quixote has a sense of reality that is rooted in the historical past rather than in the kind of the dusty reality of Philip II's Spain. And it's a novel with a sense of two things, I guess.

One, a sense of historical process, so a sense of historical change, that thing that you're talking about. But it's also very postmodern as a book because halfway through the second volume comes out in a world in which Don Quixote has already come out. So Don Quixote is then, you know, people know about him in the story. And they're like, oh, you're the fellow from the book, Don Quixote.

I mean, that's, you know, that's like sort of Martin Amis cropping up in, you know, Martin Amis' own books. I mean, Don Quixote is such an amazing novel because it seems to contain almost the entire future of fiction within it. And was it in the Spanish tradition of historical fiction, it opens up a kind of much more, I think, playful relationship to reality than we have because we're the heirs of Walter Scott. So in the Anglophone tradition, we're absolutely nailed to the sense we've got to get the facts right.

But in Spain, I think of actually Mexicanican novelist carlos fuentes he wrote he writes this extraordinary novel terra nostra which is a a counterfactual novel in which philip ii has married um elizabeth tudor um and the new world is discovered in his reign and don quixote is a character within that novel. And it's clear that in a sense, he's the kind of destabilising figure, which, and his understanding of reality as being something different to what it is, is what has opened up the kind of fissure

that has enabled this different sense of history to be played with. And you get it in Bourges as well, who's kind of, in his short stories, is brilliant at riffing on history and giving kind of strange angles, elliptical perspectives on it. But actually, the mention of counterfactual... You're going to bring in Jim Longhurst, aren't you?

Jim Longhurst is waiting off stage. Yes, he is. And his question, what are your thoughts on alternate history novels? In my opinion, the best in the genre recognize how absurd the whole idea is and integrate that critique in the text so you could absolutely say that about um terra nostra carlos frentis's novel um eg the years of rice and salt by kim stanley robinson which is a brilliant novel or the man in the high castle by philip k dick which was a series very recently i think on hbo or something uh so dominic what's your take on counterfactual history so um oh i think it's

fine in in novels i mean in a sense all fiction is counterfactual by definition right just like all fiction is historical by definition all fiction is set in a given moment and all fiction um explores something that hasn't happened so i don't have any problem with that and of course we all have a fascination with the what-if question. Even the driest, most desiccated historian can never really resist it. And I think, obviously, the... Well, a good example is,

everyone would expect me to say Robert Harris. And I guess, you know, Fatherland is a fantastic book. I can well remember being on a bus reading the the last chapter and you know wanting to finish it before I got to my stop but it also won't surprise you Tom to know that I have a very big soft spot for Kingsley Amis's The Alteration which is um uh so have you read that Kingsley Amis's The Alteration? Is that the one about Elizabeth about England not going um about England not going Protestant? England, England,

not going Protestant. The Armada win. Yeah, so it's the story of a boy called Hubert Anvil who's about to become a eunuch. He's about to be castrated so that he can preserve his beautiful

singing voice. And America is this sort of, you know, it's this sort of New England Protestant republic that people flee to. So it's a book

very much of its time, I think 1976. So it's a book very much of its own, I think 1976. So it's a book about obviously all Kingsley Amis' strange hang-ups but it's also a book about the Reformation and what would have happened if things had been different. But it's also a book in which Catholic England is standing

in for the Soviet Union and for the Eastern Bloc and people are fleeing over this cold war with the Protestant world led by America. And it's just an immensely entertaining book in all kinds of ways. And I remember the opening of that and there's a description of Elizabeth's black teeth

and she gets shot and her wig has fallen off and her teeth are all black and everything and she dies from the bullet as the Spanish capture Hampton Court or whatever. I would nominate Fatherland. I remember Robert Harris wrote a kind of, a pitch for it in the Sunday Times before it came out.

And I read it and I was so desperate to read it and it didn't disappoint. And the bit I was remembering that is the Beatles are in it, which really brought home how close. What are they doing? I can't remember that bit. The Beatles are in it which really brought home how close I think what are they doing I can't remember that bit the Beatles are just you know

they're four lovable mop tops from Liverpool and the Nazis are slightly suspicious about them but let them let them play do they still go to Hamburg

presumably they do easier journey I imagine I can't remember I think they're just kind of a mention but I guess it's kind of anchoring you in the fact that actually the 60s

might have been completely different and that really provided a jolt I mean it's kind of anchoring you in the fact that actually the 60s might have been completely different. And that really provided a jolt. I mean, as a kind of serious one, it's mentioned by Jim Longhurst, The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson, who is mainly a science fiction writer, very concerned with environmental issues, global warming and habitat loss and all that kind of thing. And Years of Rice and Salt is the Black Death wipes out all the Europeans. And so Europe then gets colonised by Muslims who have not been wiped out. And it then slowly traces the course of what happens. Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah, it's really interesting. And the thing that's interesting about it is unlike most counterfactuals, which are all about kind of Hitler and great men and, you know, people get lost or whatever, this is a kind of much more long durée kind of perspective. And that's why it's rice and salt.

It's very, very good. Anyway, should we have another question? Yes. Pat Roberts, a good friend of the show, but also kind of picking up on some of the stuff we talked about. Do high status novels set around the time of the author's birth count as historical? Middlemarch, Vanity Fair, Most of Hardy, Some of Dickens,

and of course we could include War and Peace. And I think the answer to that is absolutely, isn't it? Yes, yes, it is. I mean, Vanity Fair is a great historical novel. Middlemarch is great. war and peace and i think the answer for that is absolutely isn't it yes yes it is so vanity fair is a is a great historical novel middle march fantasy fantasy fair is a historical novel i think of stondahl's uh the charterhouse of palmer um uh they don't have to be around the time of the author's birth so another question rebecca hutchinson asked about emile zola another french writer and zola is another 19th century writer who's writing about events about 20 or 30 years previous.

So he was writing about the Franco-Prussian War, for example, and La Débarque. And I think they all are historical novels. And actually, I think often those are the historical novels that were best. So The Tale of Two Cities is an example. It's only 50 years or so between the events before. So the writer can slip

quite easily into the idiom of the day before yesterday yeah and they don't need to sort of affect this sort of bizarre archaic conversational style and nor do they oppress you with the minutiae of detail to show that they've done their research so they just quite easily you know look slightly backwards and the same is true of scott's waverley which i guess is is classically the first historical novel um set in the kind of background of the jacobites and yeah variants and and and that's very much kind of it's it's removed from the time that scott is writing about it but it's kind of within basically living memory. Yeah.

People do that now, don't they? I mean, people write books, Jonathan Coe, The Rotter's Club, Philip Hensher, The Northern Clemency. People are writing books set in the 70s and 80s and they're historical novels. Well, Scott was very much conservative. Yes. And you, Dominic, as a leading left-wing historian yeah here's a question

for you and it's from william i wrestle with this i wrestle with all this is historical fiction typically conservative scott dickens talking i don't think dickens is conservative i mean dickens is ambiguous isn't he dickens is very ambiguous he's very much he's you know we talked about this before he's very much in favor of um philanthropists turning up and scattering gold but his his his moral sense of moral anger at poverty and so i don't think he's he's really conservative but anyway scott and tolkien uh they're definitely conservative change being estranging and chaotic and continuity a guarantor of freedom and hope yeah and that's also that uh the ethos of the leopard the book i mentioned earlier the lamp Tomasi de Lampedusa book. Tolstoy, again, an ambiguous figure, I guess, both conservative. I guess the question is, is the process of looking back to the past

rather than writing about the present, is that not in itself inherently a conservative thing to do? Yes, it probably is in some ways, isn't it? I don't think people tend to look back in the past. Very rarely do people look back to the past and write books that are shot through with horror about the period they're writing about. They tend to write out of love, don't they, do you think?

Well, an interesting one, and you might say that this was the very first historical novel, would be Defoe's Record of the Plague Year. Okay. I mean, he's writing that when, kind of 70 years after the Great Plague of London. But he writes it so convincingly that everyone now treats it as a,

you know, an actual record of what went on. But it's not, but it's not, is it a conservative book? I mean, I don't think you, I wouldn't, I don't know enough about it. No, but he's writing, it's a novel that is about horror, I guess. Yeah.

Teller to Cities, which you mentioned, is clearly a conservative book, isn't it? Yeah, very, I think. Yeah. Thus exploding your claim that Dickens was not a conservative writer. Well, as we said, it's ambivalent because his portrayal of the brutality of the regime is absolutely brilliant.

I mean, the count of the Monseigneur with his chocolate who rides out in his carriage and they knock over the small boy. That's right. And the bereaved father who pursues him and kills him in the chateau is, you know, I mean, you wouldn's necessarily no you're right a conservative writing i mean there's kind of yeah there's kind of tension there anyway i'd say i think that's a kind of a reserved yes to that answer isn't it i think um what else should we do um we've done rebecca hutchinson oh here's a good one uh love reynolds and graves for the first person approach and war and Peace for tackling the whole question of who's writing history or is history writing itself. That's from Tobin Ober.

Okay, so the question of first-person narratives over kind of third-person omniscient narrator. Do you have opinion on which works better? So Tobin Ober mentions Mary Renner, who we haven't mentioned at all it's mary reynolds dominic yeah mary reynolds shocking it's it really is mary reynolds of all the people of all the people to affect a french pronunciation i would be the last that anyone would um expect anyway so that book's the persian boy and the middle one in the Alexander trilogy, and the best one, I think.

And it's narrated by the eunuch Bagoas, who Alexander picks up. The most hideous description of a castration, which still makes me want to cross my legs just thinking about it. And I think it works actually pretty well. I mean, it sounds like a ridiculous idea for a novel. I'm going to basically have a Persian eunuch narrate the conquests of Alexander the Great in this, again, in a novel which is an inherently kind of 18th, 19th century literary form.

But I think it can work if there's an integrity to the narrative voice, I guess. Absolutely. And I think with Mary Rennell in particular, I think the integrity comes from the kind of the strangeness of the fact that she is a woman in a relationship with another woman, ventriloquising a man, or in the case of Bagavassa, a boy. A boy. Who in turn are then sleeping with men. So there's a kind of ripple effect of disorientation happening there. And actually, Reynolds' books are kind of authentically true to the spirit of ancient Greece in their kind of, by our standards, incredible chauvinism. And I remember in Far From Heaven, which is the first in that series about

Alexander's childhood and youth, there's a kind of amazing description where Reynolds, ventriloquizing Alexander, says, I'd hate to be a woman. They kind of, you know, they twitter like birds and they just have to live in cages and they cannot be like men, like we are. We go out and do things. And then you think, well, you know, it's a woman writing this. And it kind of sets up it it it distances you i think from the present and it that i think is part of the power of those novels that it unsettles our understanding of fairly fundamental notions like sex like gender in a way that may not be necessarily true to how greeks in the fourth century actually thought. But by destabilising our understanding of them,

it kind of does take you into a different sphere, which I think is what historical fiction should do. And I wonder, you know, going back to Flashman, I wonder whether one of the issues at the moment in writing historical fiction is that there are too many taboos, that the moral sense of what is acceptable is changing so fast that

actually it it almost becomes dangerous to go back and and um essentially articulate mainstream views in earlier periods because they would just seem unacceptable to to so many readers now i mean i don't know i think i'm sure that's true because one one of my favourite books set in the past, I suppose, would be, well, a couple of them, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Oh, yes. You know, that's such a powerful book. But again, a book that if it was published today, would probably get a different reaction from when it was published in, I think, the mid-80s. Right. And so we should just assume to people who haven't read that. Yeah, it's looking back to... So it's set on the borderlands between Mexico and the United States

in about 1850. And it follows a boy who is part of a gang of scalp hunters. So they're literally just going around killing people, effectively raping and pillaging. But it's told in this incredibly bleak, dark, bloody way. Kind of like Milton and King James Bible, isn't it? Just utterly overwhelming. Very heightened.

And it's got this, as you say, it's got this kind of epic moralism kind of hanging over it. So the sense that what's happening appears to be quite small scale, but actually it's got this apocalyptic... It feels like the end of the world, doesn't it? It's like...

Yeah, and I think... Same style that he uses in The Road. Yeah, and I think that that's an example of how realism is banished because there's this terrifying figure, The Judge, who's this kind of hairless albedo who... He's the most frightening character in fiction, isn't he? Yes, and I think he's basically...

At the end, it's kind of implied that he's the devil, and I don't think that I'm giving away any spoilers. He's immortal, that he's a kind of immortal representative of the impulse to destroy and kill and rape and murder. Yeah, so, no, I think that would still, I mean, I don't think anyone would think to censor Cormac McCarthy. I suppose. Because I think his greatness is too evident.

Maybe, maybe. Or what about, say, Absalom Absalom by William Faulkner? So that's a very difficult book. It's looking back to the, I mean, it's sort of difficult to read because Faulkner has a very dense sort of style. But also it's looking back to the Civil War, the American Civil War and the stain of slavery in the American South. So there's a lot of kind of very charged stuff about race in there that I think readers, a lot of modern readers, would find

very unsettling. I mean, the language is obviously, you know, language that people wouldn't use now, for example. Yeah. So, Tom, let's wrap up with, I mean, there's so many tweets and I'm sorry we haven't been able to get through more than a fraction of them, but we'll end with John Sargent's tweet. He says, if only one book on history, which was fiction, survived the coming apocalypse, the zombies, the lizard Illuminati overlords launching Armageddon, what book would that be to restart history as something humans do? So one historical novel that would survive. Tom, what would you choose?

I think I would choose probably Walter Scott's Waverley on the assumption that that really is the kind of the fountainhead of historical fiction, I think. I don't think it most gripping i don't i don't think it's the most enjoyable i think it's perhaps the most influential um i think without that novel historical fiction as we have it now wouldn't be quite the same um well i'm tempted to say flashman because it's the funniest but i mean the idea of the future human civilization being based on Flashman is probably one of my disturbing thoughts. Yeah, very disturbing thought. So maybe I should pick, maybe for sentimental reasons,

I'll pick the first historical novel that I remember reading, which is, what's the historical novel I suppose it is? It's Antonia Fraser's book about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Have you ever read that? No. She wrote that when she was in her 20s. I mentioned it once in an article in the Daily Mail. I got an email from Antonia Fraser, which I was very excited by.

And she said, I can't believe you remember this book. I wrote it when I was in my 20s. I would come home at night and I had this commission to write this book and I would bang out 500 words on Solancelot or something before I went out partying. And I've still got my copy, my copy, which is also the first book I ever wrote my name in. So there's this illegible scrawl in Antonio Fraser's King Arthur, which is the first ever recorded instance of the words Dominic Sandbrook. So one day, Tom, that book will be worth a colossal amount of money. OK, but so people are recovering from the mutation zombies

and they think, well, to do history, you've got to have people handing out swords from lakes and... Yes, love it. Yeah, right. Why not? What are you going to choose? Hard Times? I've just chosen Waverley. That's hardcore, realist history.

Anyway, that's all we've got time for, I think. Let's move on. Dominic, are you going to do the graces and finish us off? So, it's a far, far better thing than I do, than I've ever done. It's a far, far better rest, or in my case, dinner, that I go to than I've ever known. Goodbye from me. And it's bye from me.

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