The first festival of historical fiction could mean that the 'problematic' historical novel will soon be a thing of the past
The genre-defying historical novel can come in the form of a crime novel, a romance, a political thriller, a biography or a literary novel. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
This weekend, the Summerhall arts venue in Edinburgh is hosting the first ever literary festival devoted to historical fiction. It's the brainchild of Iain Gale, the art critic and author of several works of military historical fiction in the vein of Bernard Cornwell and Patrick O'Brien, and Allan Massie. Massie tends to be slightly overlooked in discussions of contemporary Scottish literature; the peril, I presume, of being an intelligent Conservative. His work shows how peculiarly elastic the historical novel is – he has written historical crime (the ongoing Bordeaux series featuring Superintendent Lannes, trying to uphold justice in Vichy France), historical romances (Arthur the King, Charlemagne and Roland), historical political thrillers (his series on the Roman emperors, which led Gore Vidal to call him "the master of the long-ago historical novel", historical biographical novels (The Ragged Lion, about Sir Walter Scott) and historical literary novels (The Death of Men, loosely based on the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, is a masterpiece, and A Question of Loyalties, his subtle and mildly postmodernist novel about how one copes with losing a war, ought to have been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize).
The "historical novel" isn't really a genre – since every genre can be made historical. Steampunk is really just historical SF; and Adam Roberts has written superb works, such as Yellow Blue Tibia, featuring science fiction tropes in a historical setting. And steampunk begat flintlock fantasy: I'm rather fond of Naomi Novik's Temeraire series (Napoleonic sagas with dragons). Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series gives us historical horror. I have so far been unable, much to my chagrin, to obtain a copy of Peter H Cannon's 1994 intersection of PG Wodehouse and HP Lovecraft, Scream for Jeeves.
Even within literary fiction, the idea of the "historical novel" is problematic. I doubt it's just the "Mantel bounce" that has led to novelists as different and distinctive as Jim Crace, AN Wilson, Kate Atkinson, Lawrence Norfolk, Naomi Alderman, Rupert Thomson and Andrea Levy all recently producing broadly historical fictions. What's more interesting is how different they are from each other, in terms of technique, purpose and detail. It's worth remembering that when Mantel first won the Man Booker, all the shortlisted novels were historical (AS Byatt's The Children's Book, The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds, Simon Mawer's The Glass Room and The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, and JM Coetzee's Summertime – which, being set in the 1970s, would contravene the Walter Scott prize's injunction that, for their purposes, a historical novel has to be set at least 60 years in the past: as Alan Bennett put it in The History Boys, there is no period so remote as the recent past).
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The "historical novel" isn't really a genre – since every genre can be made historical. Steampunk is really just historical SF; and Adam Roberts has written superb works, such as Yellow Blue Tibia, featuring science fiction tropes in a historical setting. And steampunk begat flintlock fantasy: I'm rather fond of Naomi Novik's Temeraire series (Napoleonic sagas with dragons). Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series gives us historical horror. I have so far been unable, much to my chagrin, to obtain a copy of Peter H Cannon's 1994 intersection of PG Wodehouse and HP Lovecraft, Scream for Jeeves.
Even within literary fiction, the idea of the "historical novel" is problematic. I doubt it's just the "Mantel bounce" that has led to novelists as different and distinctive as Jim Crace, AN Wilson, Kate Atkinson, Lawrence Norfolk, Naomi Alderman, Rupert Thomson and Andrea Levy all recently producing broadly historical fictions. What's more interesting is how different they are from each other, in terms of technique, purpose and detail. It's worth remembering that when Mantel first won the Man Booker, all the shortlisted novels were historical (AS Byatt's The Children's Book, The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds, Simon Mawer's The Glass Room and The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, and JM Coetzee's Summertime – which, being set in the 1970s, would contravene the Walter Scott prize's injunction that, for their purposes, a historical novel has to be set at least 60 years in the past: as Alan Bennett put it in The History Boys, there is no period so remote as the recent past).
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