Henry James despised all forms of historical fiction. “The ‘historic’ novel is, for me, condemned…to a total cheapness,” he declared. His main gripe was technical rather than aesthetic. No author, he held, could truly imagine him or herself into a past consciousness: “You have to think with your modern apparatus a man, a woman - or, rather, fifty - whose own thinking was intensely otherwise conditioned, you have to simplify back by an amazing tour de force - and even then it’s all humbug.”
Underpinning James’s complaint is the assumption that fiction based on historical characters makes for poor history (while the question of whether it makes for good novels remains moot).
Such an opinion not only expresses a narrow view of the modern novel’s possibilities, but betrays a naive view of the historian’s task as well. It also overlooks the fact that the historian and the historical novelist’s methods are similar. Both rely on unearthing, selecting and ordering facts - a point made by Nobel laureate Jose Saramago when he wondered, at a lecture delivered in Oslo, “if there is too much fiction in history and…whether there is enough history in fiction”.
To the ancient Greeks, istoria meant history as much as a story or tale. And literature too can be a supplement to, and even a source of, historical knowledge. At its best, the so-called historical novel can be a critical act of historical interpretation.
A recent crop of novels based on well-known historical characters illustrates the many ways in which history and fiction feed off each other. In his Oslo lecture, Saramago singled out Max Gallo as one of the authors successfully supplementing historical facts with imaginative elaboration. The Immortal of St Helena is the fourth and last book in Gallo’s muscular Napoleon series, which charts the Corsican soldier’s spectacular rise and vertiginous fall.
Gallo is a French historian turned novelist, whose prodigious output includes books on the Romans, the crusades, the French revolution, Garibaldi, Victor Hugo and Charles de Gaulle. He uses fiction to counter what he describes as the impossibility of expressing the whole of the past through history.
The Immortal of St Helena offers a minutely reconstructed account of Bonaparte’s final years. We look over the emperor’s shoulder as he is forced to retreat from Russia. We are in his campaign tent as he writes to his wife Marie Louise, and stand at his side as he is betrayed by those closest to him. We share his frustration during the captivity on Elba, and the misplaced hope of returning to France. The book closes on the morning of June 15 1815, hours before the battle that will seal Napoleon’s fate.
There is no doubting Gallo’s mastery of the factual details of Napoleon’s military, political and personal history. What makes this a successful novel is the deftness with which those details are woven into fragments that could only be imagined: the emperor’s spoken words, his innermost thoughts, his emotional twinges.
Readers see events unfolding through Napoleon’s grandiose and ultimately flawed vision. “Who can imagine, apart from those who are at my side, what is happening here,” Napoleon muses as he surveys the carnage at the Battle of Borodino, the bloodiest single-day battle of the Napoleonic wars. “I see those muskets have been thrown on the ground because the soldier’s hands freeze on the metal…I see men lying on the side of the road, the ones who have toppled, asphyxiated, into fires because they’ve got too close to the flames, and all the wounded who’ve been abandoned and, among the scattered loot, seem to form a long, black trail.”
It is a sign of Gallo’s restraint that he brings the novel to a close before Waterloo - since we know the outcome, the ending is all the more poignant. Iain Gale, meanwhile, has made the famous battle the topic of his debut novel, Four Days in June. He narrates events from the perspective of five of its main players, including Wellington’s quartermaster-general and Napoleon himself. Gale’s Napoleon, like Gallo’s, has moments of self-doubt: “He sat down for a moment on the millstone…They are waiting for me, he thought. Waiting for my orders. For my miracles. They know that I will win. But do I know it? Can I be sure? Have I over-reached myself? Am I too old?…Around him, the generals, the orderlies, the courtiers, marvelled at the emperor’s composure…What a man. Not a man, surely, but a god.”
Gale’s novel is thoroughly researched, but so eager is the author to show off what he knows - about period uniforms, military ranks, tactics and weaponry - that his characters, spouting spurious dialogue over a chronology of well-known events, are stripped of intimacy or individuality. Experts on the Napoleonic wars will judge whether this book is historically sound. As a work of literature, it is unmemorable.
Any writer undertaking a work of fiction based primarily on a historical character must grapple with the actual form of the individual’s life. Some lives are clearly more prone to fictionalisation than others. Napoleon’s is perfect for the bio-novel: his humble origins, his meteoric climb to absolute power and his devastating defeat are the ingredients of classical tragedy.
No less suited to the highly charged drama of a period novel, surely, is the life of Christ. Many fine authors - including Saramago, Nikos Kazantzakis, Norman Mailer and Robert Graves - have felt tempted to retell “The Greatest Story Ever Told”. Now Walter Wangerin, an American “multi-million-selling author”, asks readers to juggle fact, fiction and faith in his latest offering, Jesus.
There is something reassuring in the knowledge that the life of Christ continues to invite imaginative reinterpretations (when, one wonders, might an author within the Muslim sphere attempt to novelise the life of the prophet Mohammed?). And while it may be churlish to point out that a novel about the Son of God has “already been done”, reading Jesus it is hard not to ask what the point is of this account which is not challenging, revelatory or beautiful.
Is this an updated version of the New Testament for young and biblically illiterate readers? Perhaps by presenting the Holy Family in a human light Wangerin hopes to make it more appealing, to make its suffering more affecting? He’d have to do much better than in the following line of dialogue (chosen more or less at random), uttered by Mary during the birth of her (or is it His?) son: “Ha! EEE-Yow! Here it comes. Lift my shoulders…Ahhh! - but not yet. He shouldn’t come yet…O Lord God, look down on your son! Let all my openings ease. Wait…wait. OK! Now! Slowly. Ahhhhhh! Ha! Let the little one slowly into this world. OK. Yes. Yes. Yes. Ahhh.” Were it not for Wangerin’s earnestness, his novel would be almost comic.
Men of action may be ideal quarry for the novelist, but complications arise when trying to dramatise the life of a historical figure whose greatest impact derived not from his actions but from his ideas.
To call Please, Mr Einstein by French writer Jean-Claude Carriere a historical novel is perhaps to miss the book’s point. It is, ostensibly, about a real character from the recent past, but it aims to illustrate Albert Einstein’s contributions to thought rather than to recreate his life and times. It might even be described as an anti-historical novel, in which a nameless modern-day woman encounters Einstein in a 1950s time warp and interviews him about his achievements, while the great physicist literally opens doors on to new dimensions in space and time to prove his theoretical points. Its emphasis is not on dramatising the dilemmas plaguing one of the 20th century’s finest minds, but on doing for the Special Theory of Relativity what Sophie’s World did for philosophy.
The relationship between artists and their work is irresistible to authors, and Sarah Emily Miano has served up a colourful banquet of historical vignettes in Van Rijn, her novel about the Dutch master of chiaroscuro. Miano’s debut novel, The Encyclopaedia of Snow, was an intriguing and loosely articulated collection of stories and narrative snippets about the white stuff. She has brought the same impressionistic approach to bear on the life of Rembrandt, juxtaposing a first-hand account by Pieter Blaeu, a publisher who befriends the 17th century painter, with pages from the artist’s journals, fragments of plays, letters and to-do lists.
Miano has a keen eye for physical detail. On first meeting Rembrandt, Blaeu is reminded of “an old comfortable chair whose seat and arms were coming apart in tangled and frayed bits of thread. He appeared to be a forsaken remnant of something that once existed in an extraordinary form, and now, though weathered and worn, remained dignified and resolute.” Van Rijn is, as befits its subject, a highly visual novel. But as if viewing one of Rembrandt’s darkened self-portraits, we are kept at arm’s length from the painter. We see him, but, despite Miano’s efforts, remain far from understanding him.
If the connection between a painter’s life and his finished canvases is hard to chart, how much more so is it to fathom the relationship between a writer and his published works? It is only natural for novelists to wonder about how their predecessors went about their business. Few modern writers, however, have succeeded in creating a novel that is both true to the novelist’s craft and true to the life it recounts (Colm Toibin’s The Master is exemplary, though one can guess what Henry James would have thought of being the subject of a “historic” novel). The difficulty lies in turning a writer’s inner life - with its contradictions, silences, inconsistencies, doubts and unfinished thoughts - into the raw material for fiction.
Journey in Blue, by Stig Dalager, was published in Denmark ahead of the bicentenary of Hans Christian Andersen’s birth. Many writers tried to cash in on the 2005 commemoration but few equalled Dalager in his subtle evocation of the fabulist’s angst-ridden life.
Morphine-addled on his deathbed, Dalager’s Andersen recalls his initiation into writing, his perceived failure as a playwright, the ostracism he suffered in Denmark. His economic woes weigh heavily on him. He loathes, but is dependent on, moneyed patrons. His clothes are never fine enough.
Dalager exposes the streaks of madness in Andersen’s family, and the thoughts of suicide that plague him. He hints at Andersen’s homosexuality. He reveals that the key to Andersen’s art was not in his public persona, but in his unguarded moments of fleeting happiness and ever-growing melancholy. “But who can cure despair in someone who exists so little here and now and who swings between heavy despondence and highly charged weightlessness? In someone who searches for his mother’s grave in the shadows of the night, in the ragged mists of dreams? In someone who does not know his own face and finds his reflection in the faces of his many passing friends, the many passers-by? In someone who has lent his Self to the Artist and has been given loneliness in return?”
Journey in Blue achieves that rare alchemy by which the turmoil of a contemplative life is transformed into a work of illuminating beauty. Here is a specimen of historically based fiction that stands with “one foot in scholarship, the other in magic arts”, as that other outstanding practitioner of the genre, Marguerite Yourcenar, once prescribed. Here is a novel that would have proven Henry James wrong - or would have persuaded him to change his mind.
NAPOLEON: The Immortal of St Helena
by Max Gallo
translated by William Hobson
Macmillan £10.99, 319 pages
FOUR DAYS IN JUNE
by Iain Gale
HarperCollins £17.99, 367 pages
JESUS: A Novel
by Walter Wangerin
Lion £14.99, 368 pages
PLEASE, MR EINSTEIN
by Jean-Claude Carriere
translated by John Brownjohn
Harvill Secker £12.99, 186 pages
VAN RIJN
by Sarah Emily Miano
Picador £12.99, 477 pages
JOURNEY IN BLUE: A Novel About Hans Christian Andersen
by Stig Dalager
translated by John Mason
Peter Owen £13.50, 320 pages