The history girl

Ronald Knox, found awake aged four by a nanny, was asked what he was thinking about, and he replied ‘the past’. I thought of this when reading Hunters in the Snow, since the author is so young, and the time-scale of the book so long. This is a truly dazzling first novel. Every paragraph bristles with cleverness and yet it is a warm-hearted book, at times overpoweringly moving.

Its theme is nothing less than the past, and how we view it, and how it affects us. The framework of the story is the young narrator’s relationship with a reclusive, unhappily married grandfather, who is a professional historian. The substance of it, however, is the way that every event in the past has in some way led up to the present. ‘Actual events,’ said Carlyle, ‘are nowise so simply related to each other as parent and offspring are, and every single event is the offspring not of one, but of all other events.’

The grandfather’s rigour in his recovery of the past has a simple and personal aim: he wants to allow the men and women of the past to return to us. The woman telling the story connects with these links with the past, as she revisits them through her grand-father’s historical notes, and through the memories of his taking her on expeditions: to the battlefield of Towton (1471), where as many were slain as on the first day of the Somme (with 28,000 casualties, it was the bloodiest battle ever fought in Britain); or to York Minster, where, atheist as he was, her grandfather worked as a volunteer guide.

There are some good meditations on the minster being struck by lightning after the consecration there of Bishop David Jenkins. For Jenkins — a heretic in the eyes of many — had made searching and pertinent observations about the way in which we view history, and about whether the Bible can be viewed as historical.