Beyond Mantel: the historical novels everyone must read

Readers of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies can be in no doubt about where The Mirror & the Light, the concluding volume of Hilary Mantel’s historical trilogy (reviewed on page 12), will take them. On 28 July 1540, Thomas Cromwell will be beheaded at Tower Hill. But while we know where Cromwell is going, he does not. Mantel has brilliantly exploited the predestination of historical fiction. It comes alive in the gap between the reader’s knowledge and her protagonist’s uncertainty. Her special achievement is to restore provisionality – luck, accident, surprise – to history. In Mantel’s extraordinary present-tense narration, history is unfolding before us. Cromwell, the novelist’s surrogate, is a piercing analyst of human beings, but can never be sure of what they will do next.

This is where historical fiction began. When Walter Scott in effect invented the genre with Waverley in 1814, his eponymous hero was a young idealist drawn into the 1745 Jacobite rebellion against George II. (The reader knew that the rebellion was to fail.) In the 19th century, in Scott’s wake, the historical novel had high status. Works that are now little read – Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond Esq, George Eliot’s Romola, Hardy’s The Trumpet Major – were once thought their authors’ highest achievements.

By the next century, historical fiction had sunk. Modernism made history look like escapism and novelists avoided it. As the mid-20th century approached, historical fiction was commercially successful but distinctly populist. The big names were authors such as Georgette Heyer and Jean Plaidy (the nom de plume of the prolific Eleanor Hibbert). They loved their History. Heyer, in particular, was exacting in her research, her Regency novels sometimes clotted with period detail. The most successful and prolific historical novelist of today, Philippa Gregory, equally prides herself on accuracy. You can say the same for Bernard Cornwell, with his Sharpe series, or Patrick O’Brian, with his Napoleonic nautical novels.

Yet sometimes a historical setting means not an accumulation of period detail, but the very opposite. Some novelists go to the past to lose the distractions of the modern world. The model here is William Golding, in both his 1964 novel The Spire and To the Ends of the Earth, his trilogy of novels from the 1980s set on a ship taking British migrants to Australia in the early 19th century. Golding used the imagined past to distil essential human appetites and conflicts. In The Spire, the building of an English cathedral spire in the middle ages is the Christian mission of Jocelin, the dean, but he and those who work for him are possessed by dark spirits of lust or fear.

A more recent book such as Jim Crace’s dark antipastoral Harvest, set in a remote English village at a time of forced enclosures of land (the date is uncertain), belongs to the same category of historical fiction. The past is where social order hardly protects people from some Hobbesian state of nature. A comparable example is Samantha Harvey’s 2018 novel The Western Wind, which takes us to an isolated Somerset village in the 15th century. Narrated by an intelligent, weary parish priest, it asks us to imagine what religious belief might be like in an age of faith. (This is an interest of much recent historical fiction.) The action takes place over four days, in reverse chronological order, as if time is pulling us backwards. There is a mystery plot – the wealthiest and cleverest man in the village has disappeared, perhaps drowned – but to find the solution we return to what the narrator has always known. The history that it reveals is one of communal violence. Oddly, the setting and the protagonist have something in common with Robert Harris’s 2019 neo-historical novel The Second Sleep. Although this begins by declaring that its events take place in 1468, we soon find that we are in a Dark Age of the distant future, where history has been remade after some catastrophe. It is also a novel that turns on the murderous violence with which one small group can turn on another.

A novel set centuries ago has a freedom denied to fiction that goes back only decades, to times for which we still have records or even memories. Some contemporary novelists clearly find historical distance a liberation. Andrew Miller’s Now We Shall Be Entirely Free (2018) is set in 1809 and narrates the return from the Peninsular war of a traumatised army officer, who flees the horrors of war but is pursued by a vengeful villain. Essential to the novel’s pleasure is the estranging period detail – we explore a Regency gunshop, visit a textile mill, or flinch from the work of a surgeon of the time. (Miller has always been fascinated by the incomplete medical and scientific knowledge of earlier ages ). Yet the sentences are only lightly touched by archaism.

For Miller, as for some other contemporary novelists, history has become an escape into the wonderful. The challenge is language: how do you make your characters’ sentences belong to another age? Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake took the archaising principle to an unmatchable extreme. His novel, set in 11th‑century Lincolnshire, is narrated in an invented neo-Old English, full of words and syntactic patterns taken from Anglo-Saxon, comprehensible to the modern reader. Among recent historical novels, James Meek’s To Calais, in Ordinary Time is rare in making its vocabulary and occasionally syntax sound old. The novel is set in 1348. The “ordinary time” of its title names a period in the religious calendar between major festivals, but also refers ironically to the extraordinary time of the Black Death, impending as the novel begins. It centres on three characters of different social groups and fashions different languages for each of them: a dialect culled from Chaucer, a diction learned from French romance and an elaborately Latinate English. There is a delight about this, but also a price to pay. We notice the characters less than the author’s amusement as he fabricates his antique idiolects from magpie visits to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Playfulness and pastiche have crept in to historical fiction in recent years. A cunning example is Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill, set in New York in the 1740s, and itself an imitation of an 18th-century novel. Spufford offers his book as “a colonial counterpart to Joseph Andrews or David Simple”, bestselling novels of the 1740s by brother and sister Henry and Sarah Fielding, respectively. Both employ guileless heroes, set loose in a guileful world. Golden Hill’s hero, who has arrived from London in this dangerous town, appears to be an innocent, yet turns out to be anything but.

Spufford entertains us with 18th-century setpieces: a card game, a rioting mob, confinement in prison, a duel, a play (you will find all these in the novels of the Fieldings). Golden Hill is full of parodic flourishes and incongruously replanted lines from famous English novels, from Tristram Shandy to Middlemarch. It also has the kind of postmodern twist not unfamiliar in recent fiction, where we discover near the novel’s end an unexpected truth about the narrative that we have been reading. The mock 18th-century book provides its own account of how it got made. Such generic playfulness has been permitted to historical fiction since John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. You find it in the neo-Victorian fiction of Sarah Waters – Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith – or in Charles Palliser. Writing about the distant past means rewriting the novels of the period that you are revisiting.

Mantel has hardly been alone in bringing new literary complexity to historical fiction. Yet she has done something singular. She gives us not just circumstantial accuracy (the clothes, the food, the manners) but fastidious narrative exactitude. Almost every named character is someone that we know existed, exactly in that time and place. Every episode fits the historical record. Academic historians may not like her take on Sir Thomas More – a cold fanatic in Wolf Hall – but they dispute with her as with a fellow expert. She has freed the historical novel from any condescension, but she has also set a stern precedent. It seems an impossible act to follow.