Interesting essay that is in the latest issue of the NZ Book Council's excellent Booknotes (see information below)
Historical fiction: Jenny Pattrick (pic right) recommends some of the great novels that look back at times past
There’s a kind of historical fiction that looks back at the past as if through a rose-tinted window – or even through highly coloured stained glass. But what I love reading are historical novels that look back sternly through clear glass, with curiosity and warmth, and also tell a good story.
So what constitutes historical fiction? Books by Dickens or Jane Austen, though set in our past were written in the authors’ present. Neither author would have dreamed of writing about the old days. Theirs is not historical fiction. If I write about the 1970s and 1980s, I feel as if I’m writing more or less in the present, as I was an adult in those years. But a young author might have a very different feeling about that time, and write with different ‘historical’ eyes.
There are so many! Favourite settings for authors are times of change – of social upheaval and altered circumstance. The arrival of Europeans in the ‘new world’, and the hardships and opportunities that this change involved, has inspired many great novels. I’ll start with some of these.
Try Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief. This wonderful novel is set in Canada and involves Scottish immigrants – his own stern and hardy ancestors – coming to Nova Scotia in 1779. An early novel from our own Fiona Kidman, The Book of Secrets, explores the arrival to New Zealand of a religious faction, split from those same Nova Scotia Scots.
Gil Adamson is another Canadian writer who came to the New Zealand Post Writers and Readers Week earlier this year. The Outlander is a great adventure of a novel – a widow, chased through the outback by her murdered husband’s twin brothers. The theme of the hardship of women in pioneering (and not so pioneering) days can be a seductive topic for historical fiction writers. I used that theme in the Denniston novels. Australian Alex Miller’s Conditions of Faith uses it too. The central character of that beautiful novel, set in the early twentieth century, moves between Australia – where her engineer husband dreams of putting a bridge over Sydney harbour – and France, where she tries desperately to make a career of her own. Anything of Alex Miller’s is great. His Journey to the Stone Country has fascinating flashbacks to early clashes between Aboriginal tribes and white settlers. Do novels with flashbacks constitute historical fiction? Who cares? I am not one for straitjackets when it comes to books.
Australian Patrick White is someone I read voraciously when I was younger and still greatly respect. I loved his A Fringe of Leaves which tells, in fictional form, the true story of a white woman shipwrecked on Fraser Island in 1830, then rescued by an Aboriginal tribe. Her experiences living with them, and later with a rough escaped convict, make it almost impossible for her to fit back into ‘civilised’ society. White’s The Tree of Man is a wonderful epic story of early settler life in Australia. The Secret River by another Australian, Kate Grenville, follows a pair of convicts from London to Sydney and then to the Hawkesbury River. Their struggle to survive, and their difficulty in understanding Aboriginal resentment, is very well researched and a good read.
In terms of English writers, Rose Tremaine’s Music and Silence is a favourite, set in the Danish court of King Christian IV. And Hilary Mantel’s entertaining The Giant, O’Brien about a real Irish giant who toured England in the nineteenth century, earning side-show money. If you like that one, try Mantel’s very long but brilliantly written Wolf Hall, about Thomas Cromwell and King Henry VII.
At the moment I’m reading Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel The Lacuna. It’s a sort of fictional memoir set in Mexico in the chaotic household of Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo in the 1930s and 1940s when they are harbouring the exiled revolutionist, Leon Trotsky. The novel moves to America during that dreadful hysteria in the 1950s when innocent people were prosecuted for ‘anti-American activity’. It’s funny and terrifying – very readable and illuminating. Another American writer from the south is Tim Gautreaux. I’d never heard of him until last year when I stumbled on his novel The Clearing. Wow! This is one powerful book – violent, sinister, wonderful characters – set in the swamps of Louisiana just after the First World War.
And then the New Zealanders. Vincent O’Sullivan gives a great picture of 1930s and 1940s New Zealand in Let the River Stand. Patricia Grace uses the Second World War to show us not only the war but rural and city life for a Māori family in Tu. Can I call C K Stead’s cheeky and very readable My Name Was Judas historical fiction? Why not? It’s set in biblical times and it’s (probably) fiction. And if you haven’t read Maurice Gee’s Plumb, give it a go. Well, I’ve only scratched the surface. All of these authors write contemporary novels as well as historical fiction. They’re not writing to a genre formula but out of interest in the topic or theme. To me, that’s what makes historical fiction work.
About the author:
Jenny Pattrick is a writer known best for her historical novels. Two of these, Denniston Rose and its sequel Heart of Coal, are among New Zealand’s bestselling books.
Booknotes:
Booknotes is now published in a new easy-to-use online edition alongside the print version; the Book Council is making available a free online copy of the Spring issue to all its e-newsletter followers (visit www.bookcouncil.org.nz/newsletter to sign up for the monthly e-newsletter and the free Booknotes digital edition).
Readers can subscribe to Booknotes by joining the Book Council at www.bookcouncil.org/join for just $29 a year. As well as receiving Booknotes print and online editions, members are also helping the Book Council promote books and reading in New Zealand.
Note: the digital edition of the last issue of Booknotes is posted on the Book Council website for free access at publication of each new issue. To read the Winter 2010 issue, follow the link to the Book Council’s Booknotes page.
Historical fiction: Jenny Pattrick (pic right) recommends some of the great novels that look back at times past So what constitutes historical fiction? Books by Dickens or Jane Austen, though set in our past were written in the authors’ present. Neither author would have dreamed of writing about the old days. Theirs is not historical fiction. If I write about the 1970s and 1980s, I feel as if I’m writing more or less in the present, as I was an adult in those years. But a young author might have a very different feeling about that time, and write with different ‘historical’ eyes.
There are so many! Favourite settings for authors are times of change – of social upheaval and altered circumstance. The arrival of Europeans in the ‘new world’, and the hardships and opportunities that this change involved, has inspired many great novels. I’ll start with some of these.
Try Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief. This wonderful novel is set in Canada and involves Scottish immigrants – his own stern and hardy ancestors – coming to Nova Scotia in 1779. An early novel from our own Fiona Kidman, The Book of Secrets, explores the arrival to New Zealand of a religious faction, split from those same Nova Scotia Scots.
Gil Adamson is another Canadian writer who came to the New Zealand Post Writers and Readers Week earlier this year. The Outlander is a great adventure of a novel – a widow, chased through the outback by her murdered husband’s twin brothers. The theme of the hardship of women in pioneering (and not so pioneering) days can be a seductive topic for historical fiction writers. I used that theme in the Denniston novels. Australian Alex Miller’s Conditions of Faith uses it too. The central character of that beautiful novel, set in the early twentieth century, moves between Australia – where her engineer husband dreams of putting a bridge over Sydney harbour – and France, where she tries desperately to make a career of her own. Anything of Alex Miller’s is great. His Journey to the Stone Country has fascinating flashbacks to early clashes between Aboriginal tribes and white settlers. Do novels with flashbacks constitute historical fiction? Who cares? I am not one for straitjackets when it comes to books.
Australian Patrick White is someone I read voraciously when I was younger and still greatly respect. I loved his A Fringe of Leaves which tells, in fictional form, the true story of a white woman shipwrecked on Fraser Island in 1830, then rescued by an Aboriginal tribe. Her experiences living with them, and later with a rough escaped convict, make it almost impossible for her to fit back into ‘civilised’ society. White’s The Tree of Man is a wonderful epic story of early settler life in Australia. The Secret River by another Australian, Kate Grenville, follows a pair of convicts from London to Sydney and then to the Hawkesbury River. Their struggle to survive, and their difficulty in understanding Aboriginal resentment, is very well researched and a good read.
In terms of English writers, Rose Tremaine’s Music and Silence is a favourite, set in the Danish court of King Christian IV. And Hilary Mantel’s entertaining The Giant, O’Brien about a real Irish giant who toured England in the nineteenth century, earning side-show money. If you like that one, try Mantel’s very long but brilliantly written Wolf Hall, about Thomas Cromwell and King Henry VII.
At the moment I’m reading Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel The Lacuna. It’s a sort of fictional memoir set in Mexico in the chaotic household of Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo in the 1930s and 1940s when they are harbouring the exiled revolutionist, Leon Trotsky. The novel moves to America during that dreadful hysteria in the 1950s when innocent people were prosecuted for ‘anti-American activity’. It’s funny and terrifying – very readable and illuminating. Another American writer from the south is Tim Gautreaux. I’d never heard of him until last year when I stumbled on his novel The Clearing. Wow! This is one powerful book – violent, sinister, wonderful characters – set in the swamps of Louisiana just after the First World War.
And then the New Zealanders. Vincent O’Sullivan gives a great picture of 1930s and 1940s New Zealand in Let the River Stand. Patricia Grace uses the Second World War to show us not only the war but rural and city life for a Māori family in Tu. Can I call C K Stead’s cheeky and very readable My Name Was Judas historical fiction? Why not? It’s set in biblical times and it’s (probably) fiction. And if you haven’t read Maurice Gee’s Plumb, give it a go. Well, I’ve only scratched the surface. All of these authors write contemporary novels as well as historical fiction. They’re not writing to a genre formula but out of interest in the topic or theme. To me, that’s what makes historical fiction work.
About the author:
Jenny Pattrick is a writer known best for her historical novels. Two of these, Denniston Rose and its sequel Heart of Coal, are among New Zealand’s bestselling books.
Booknotes:
Booknotes is now published in a new easy-to-use online edition alongside the print version; the Book Council is making available a free online copy of the Spring issue to all its e-newsletter followers (visit www.bookcouncil.org.nz/newsletter to sign up for the monthly e-newsletter and the free Booknotes digital edition).
Readers can subscribe to Booknotes by joining the Book Council at www.bookcouncil.org/join for just $29 a year. As well as receiving Booknotes print and online editions, members are also helping the Book Council promote books and reading in New Zealand.
Note: the digital edition of the last issue of Booknotes is posted on the Book Council website for free access at publication of each new issue. To read the Winter 2010 issue, follow the link to the Book Council’s Booknotes page.
and is reproduced here with the Council's permission.
1 comment:
Just a note about Dickens - in fact he was himself a historical novelist, writing for the most part (usually critically, but also, often, with a sense of nostalgia) about a somewhat earlier period than his own.
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