10 great historical novels

The Observer’s William Skidelsky has taken it upon himself to list ‘The 10 best historical novels’. The usual suspects are present: War and Peace, The Leopard, I Claudius and The Blue Flower. There are a couple of surprising inclusions, too: Eliot’s Romola, for instance. And, of course, there are some glaring omissions — of which, more later.

Above all, though, Skidelsky’s subjective list suggests that historical writing is fashionable. He picks Wolf Hall at number 2 — a demanding book that may prove too demanding for future readers. And he also says a word for Andrew Miller’s Costa prize winning Pure — a slight book that may prove not demanding enough for future readers.

And so to the omissions. Here, for the little it’s worth, is a list of the 10 best historical novels I’ve read. It is Anglo-centric and predictable, but that’s because I’m a predictable Englishman.

1). The Empire Trilogy — J.G. Farrell. Three cutting satires on British Imperialism without being savage or nasty, Farrell teases the certainties of Victorians, the awkwardness between the English and Irish, and the sleaze of Singapore. The jokes come thick and fast, but without obscuring the serious issues at the heart of the trilogy. The books’ chief delight is Farrell’s voice. There is no comparison between his deft touch and Hilary Mantel’s verbosity.

2). The Raj Quartet — Paul Scott. The Winds of Change were blowing long before 1960. Paul Scott charts the last years of the Raj through a handful of very forceful characters, each with a conflicted view of why and whether the British should be in India. This examination of the moral complexity of imperialism is polluted somewhat by Scott’s obsession with the villain of the piece, Ronald Merrick. But it’s impossible not to obsess over Merrick.

3). A Tale of Two Cities — Charles Dickens. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ And, ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done. It is a far, far better place that I go to than I have ever known.’ I don’t think ‘The Inimitable’ bettered those three sentences or the character of Sidney Carton.

4). Sword of Honour — Evelyn Waugh. A typical Wauvian farce that grows into a dark and troubling book about (among many other things) Britain’s betrayal of the noble causes it first espoused when fighting the Second World War. Waugh’s grim predictions about the future of Yugoslavia proved tragically prescient. Waugh’s Catholicism often seems to be tacked on to his novels, as if he were competing with Graham Greene in the ‘I’m a more tortured convert than you’ stakes. But here, it is front, centre and captivating.

5). Master and Commander — Patrick O’Brien. Napoleonic naval fiction is not to everyone taste, but the popular theme of friendship tested through war is at the helm of Patrick O’Brien’s well regarded books. And, if you like Napoleonic naval fiction, then there is none better than this — better even than Hornblower. It’s always been a mystery to me why the Aubrey – Maturin series has not been filmed more often than is the case.

6). I Claudius — Robert Graves. Graves allegedly wrote this most elegant of pot-boilers to raise some much needed cash, and I can well believe it. It is the most accessible book on my list: with the best plot, the cleanest prose and the most intriguing and sympathetic central character. Robert Graves is one of the fathers of the genre, right up there with Walter Scott.

7). Disgrace — J.M. Coetzee. Critics of Skidelsky’s list complained that it was too Anglo-centric. Where, they asked, are the books by the great ‘African novelists Chinua Achebe, Paul Hazoume, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and (more recently) Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’. Indeed. And where is J.M. Coetzee’s controversial account of post-Apartheid South Africa? It’s uncomfortable reading, despite Coetzee’s comfortable prose. And that, for my money, is what puts it the category of great fiction.

8). A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — Alexander Solzhenitsyn. A historical novel or a historical source? Both, I’d suggest. It is still one of the most disgusted books about Stalin’s crimes, and is certain to remain so. Perhaps the most important historical novel I’ve ever read.

9). Regeneration — Pat Barker. Skidelsky picks the whole trilogy, but I’m a heretic who believes that Pat Barker went off the boil and won the Booker Prize for the wrong book. Regeneration, the first in the series of the same name, is streaks and yards ahead of the two later books. Barker puts blood into some of the greatest of Great War poets — Sassoon, Graves and Owen — who had been, up to that point, powdered by a century’s worth of classroom chalk dust. She surrounds them with a cast of diverse fictional characters, each of whom is consumed by the horrors they witnessed in France and the prejudices they’ve encountered at home. But Barker’s crowning achievement is her portrayal of the consultant psychiatrist, Dr. William Rivers. What follows is an examination of human suffering and empathy that extends far beyond the costs of war.

10). The Leopard — Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The Leopard always appears on these lists, and many simply ask: why? What’s so great about it? The key, I think, is that nothing happens to the central characters — the aristocratic Lampedusas and their patriarch, Prince Fabrizio, the ‘leopard’ himself. All of the action takes place beyond the sensuous world of Prince Fabrizio, as the Risorgimento spreads across Sicily and then into Italy. It is a perfect miniature of the end of a way of life, and Lampedusa’s description of time and place is beguiling.             

Then there are: Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth, a superb children’s book. Mary Renault’s series of novels about Alexander the Great deserve a special mention. Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man, all of which give a marvellous and remarkably consistent account of pre-war Europe. Larry McMurty’s Lonesome Dove sneaks a peak at a moment in American cultural history that has been monopolised by John Wayne. Both Vanity Fair and Les Miserables use the Battle of Waterloo as a major plot device. Not to forget Walter Scott, Stendhal, Marguerite Yourcenar, George Elliot, Amitav Ghosh, Joseph Heller, Alexander Dumas … choosing just 10 is bloody difficult.