Many years ago I was lucky to meet the late Nigel Tranter, a beloved and prolific Scottish author whose work remains known to relatively few readers in the United States. That’s a pity, because the man knew how to hook a reader and keep that reader turning the pages. It was Nigel who made me aware of the two types of historical fiction. His type was to write about actual historical figures and actual historical events. He invented dialogue and incidental details of daily life, but the casts of his books really lived, even if not with the precise thoughts and words that Nigel attributed to them. We might call Nigel’s form historical fiction, with the emphasis on the adjective; his characters and plots were true to history. The second type was of the sort practiced by his friend Dorothy Dunnett, who created fictional protagonists and dropped them into selected historical eras. Let’s call her type historical fiction, with the emphasis on the noun. She imagined characters and used literary photoshopping to place them into actual events. I’m not planning to engage in a debate over which type is better artistically or more difficult to pull off successfully. I’m simply amazed that so many people manage to deliver so many superb novels set in eras before they were born. I don’t know how they do it.
Take, for example, Rachel Kadish’s The Weight of Ink, which I mentioned in last month’s posting but never discussed. Kadish presents two interlocking tales. The first is of Ester Velasquez, a Portuguese Jew who arrives in London in the mid-17th Century and, through unusual circumstances, becomes a scribe for a blind rabbi. Ester is literate, curious, and ferociously intelligent, and she uses the rabbi’s generosity and blindness to advance her education and literary output. The second plot involves Helen Watt, an aging English scholar also of ferocious intelligence, and Aaron Levy, a cocky young American graduate student who initially dislikes but comes to love Helen as his partner in researching the manuscripts left behind by Ester. Theater fans may sense a parallel with Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, which for my money is the finest play written in English in the 20th Century—okay, okay, we can argue about that—wherein modern-day scholars try to solve the mystery of events at a stately English home two centuries earlier. We in the audience get to see the actual events in the past, and then we watch the modern-day characters misinterpret the documents left behind. Stoppard’s play is the only one I know that is simultaneously a comedy and a tragedy, the only one daring enough to examine the poetry of Lord Byron next to a discussion of fractal geometry and chaos theory, the only one to invite a debate over the claims of classicism and romanticism. Kadish’s novel, while not as antic or comic as Stoppard’s play in skewering academic politics, nevertheless also successfully and deftly marries intellectual intensity to emotional punch. This book allowed me to eavesdrop on conversations among people much smarter than I, and it turned out to be an enriching experience, one simultaneously intellectual and emotional.
Likewise I also experienced that enlargement of perspective in a very different historical novel, James Kestrel’s Five Decembers, which I chose to read because it recently won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Novel of 2021. The jacket of this novel evokes tawdry pulp paperbacks from the 1940’s: a naked woman sitting on a bed covers herself with a sheet while a naked man holding a gun looks out the window at a sky full of warplanes. Yikes! Not my kind of thing! Except that the novel inside the jacket grabbed me by my lapels and refused to let go until I eagerly consumed every word. Kestrel’s historical novel, like Kadish’s, is of the Dorothy Dunnett type, with fictional characters dropped among actual historical events. His protagonist, Joe McGrady, is a young detective in Hawaii asked to investigate a homicide in the late fall of 1941, just a few days before December 7. Here Kestrel employs a favorite device of the historical novelist: creating tension by starting a story on the eve of a cataclysmic event unforeseen by the characters but already known to the reader. (Robert Harris uses this trick to great effect in his fine novel Pompeii, which opens two days before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.) McGrady in many ways checks all the boxes for the hardboiled detective in 1940’s noir. He’s tough, smart, flawed, principled, and dogged. Kestrel writes with the terseness of Hemingway or James M. Cain, but this novel is no pastiche. In Kestrel’s talented hands we readers time-travel to World War II, to Hawaii and to Asia, to a murder mystery and a romance, to a series of violent episodes and interludes of reflection and heartbreak. Mr. Kestrel—whose name is a nom de plume—deserves his award. And I say that as one who also admired one of the other nominees for the prize, S. A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears, which I discussed in an earlier posting. (In a different context, I also talk about Five Decembers on the “Something is Going to Happen” blog managed by Janet Hutchings.)
I am no poet, and so I admire the work of poets with awe. I am no historian, nor am I a patient researcher, and so I also admire the work of historical novelists with gratitude for their willingness to spend the time and the energy to bring us the past with such intense emotional pleasure. Am I going to try it myself one day? I’m urging myself to say yes.