Amanda Craig recently rebuked her fellow novelists for evading the contemporary scene and setting their novels in the past. We should be more like the Victorians, she said, and have the courage to write about our own times. If the novel is to be relevant to readers, it should address today’s issues. Why, she asked, is Hilary Mantel publishing a novel about Henry VIII’s henchman, Thomas Cromwell, rather than . . . Well, I don’t recall if she actually suggested an alternative subject, but her point is clear. Writing historical novels is an evasion of the novelist’s duty.
Of course Hilary Mantel has written novels set in the here and now, and very good ones. If she chooses to diversify and write one set in the 16th century, that’s her business, and I should be surprised if her readers don’t approve. Nevertheless Amanda Craig’s charge is worth considering, even if her assertion seemed just a bit sweeping.
Comic novels, one should say, are almost always contemporary, because the foibles of one’s own time are matter for the comic spirit. This has always been the case, from Fielding and Austen, by way of Waugh and Powell, to Amis, father and son. Likewise novels of domestic life tend to be set in or near the immediate present.
It’s when you are dealing with a public theme that difficulties arise. Set such a novel in the first decade of this century, and you are quite likely to end up with journalism, fictional journalism certainly, good journalism perhaps, but a work that is subject to the fate of almost all journalism, which is to be out of date very soon. In the last couple of years I have read half a dozen novels in which the events of 9/11 play a part, and none has been convincing. This is not due to lack of talent on the author’s part; it’s simply because 9/11 is too close in time to enable us to see it in perspective. It hasn’t settled in the imagination; it hasn’t yet been digested.
Novelists need time. Novels are made in part from recollection. This was as true of the Victorians as of writers today. Certainly Dickens was prepared to write about contemporary social conditions and abuses in, for example, Hard Times, not to my mind one of his best novels, though F. R. Leavis thought it was. But, though Dickens was living in the Railway Age, his characters usually travel by stagecoach. It is the world of his youth, even the world of his childhood, that he portrays most vividly. His rival Thackeray was a fine journalist, alert to changing fashions in manners and morals, but Vanity Fair, published in 1847, is set in and around 1815, the year of Waterloo. Middlemarch (1871) is one of the greatest of Victorian novels, but, in setting, it is pre-Victorian, treating of the agitation of society in the run-up to the Great Reform Bill of 1832. Only a couple of Scott’s novels (The Antiquary and St Ronan’s Well) are set in his own time; the half-dozen best of the Waverley novels deal with the Scotland of the century before he was born, while his greatest commercial success, Ivanhoe, goes back to the Middle Ages.
There are reasons why authors may choose to turn to the historical novel. The first is commercial. A good historical novel may sell better than a good contemporary one, and it may stay in print much longer. It is also perhaps more likely to be reprinted, simply because it doesn’t date. A novel about Thomas Cromwell will probably be as interesting in 20 years as it is today. This isn’t necessarily the case with a novel treating of what is immediately interesting in 2009.
Then novelists are always in danger of running out of material. Your own experience and your observation of the world around you may yield matter for perhaps only half a dozen novels. The more you write, the thinner the matter may be, and the more hours you spend at your desk, the fewer you spend out there in the world where material is to be gathered. But there is no dearth of matter in history. Reading will give you the stuff from which innumerable novels may be made. Your eye may not be as keen as when you were young, your ear not as alert, your receptiveness to new experience may have become dulled, but history offers you a rich choice of subjects.
Finally it gives you what all novelists seek — and often despair of finding: the outline of a plot. You still have to devise incident and dialogue, to flesh out characters and work up descriptions, but at least you know the road you are travelling. There are signposts along the way. You know you have to get Caesar to the theatre of Pompey on the Ides of March 44 BC. You know your destination. What a relief!
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