History is an odd thing. It is variously described as being written by the victors, and as bunk, as we all know. It also rolls on, often over the numerous bodies of the dead. Few in Britain are now familiar with the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, and if they do know anything at all it will be that it was large, and that Napoleon was decisively defeated at it, which makes it oddly sound like Waterloo just under two years later.
History is all too often a matter of names and dates, but the names are those of the famous, and the dates have gaps like missing teeth, between one notable event and another. We tend to learn the history that concerns what is regarded as our nation: few in Europe or elsewhere care very much about 1066, but in England it is one of the best-known historical dates. The battle of Leipzig was huge, lasted four days, involved anything up to half a million combatants, and led to the defeat of the French armies and the abdication of Napoleon. But it did not involve the British, and so we never hear about it.
It might seem that history would be very difficult to turn into fiction, and yet the massive expansion in contemporary historical novels demonstrates all kinds of agility in doing just that. There are novels that are so thick with history that they might almost seem to be sources themselves, since they gather so many together, some of great obscurity, while others borrow dress and a compote of manners to create a very modern fantasy with historical flavouring. Some choose to place a fictional hero in the midst of thoroughly historical events, which is perhaps a relatively common approach for military novels; and it is certainly true that a fictional hero can fly a Spitfire and use its controls much as the real heroes did. But it is not all about battles. There are industrial, colonial, rural, class and ethnic histories which command their own narratives, and histories of colour which get closer to harsh realities by reimagining a fictional character in penetrating ways, as with Percival Everett’s James, a subtle way of turning fiction back on itself.
As far as I am concerned, a fiction offers certain opportunities, which can become more apparent over a longer spread. Sagas through their greater length do carry threads which can explore and evoke larger qualities of historical sympathy or understanding – demonstrably acknowledged by Lev Tolstoy in War and Peace – which might be difficult to express in a short compass. Drama is somehow exempt from that problem. Anton Chekhov in The Cherry Orchard took four acts and a matter of hours to deliver a decisive narrative of the change of an era, to the extent that the audience was left in no doubt about the failure of this iconic landed estate. This is a brilliant form of compression, and a facility that drama had recognised long ago as one of its remarkable characteristics by no lesser figure than the philosopher Aristotle.
When I say ‘opportunities’, I would appear to be insistent on not being programmatic in an historical novel, or saga: it is very likely that the fiction will not tolerate that. In fact, an author may best become aware of what a novel offers historically after some time, because time is at work through the characters, and does not make them dance to its historical tune. Thackeray in Vanity Fair undoubtedly has George Osborne predestined to die at Waterloo; but others in his novel are not swept away similarly, and – as in Victor Hugo’s extraordinary picture of the battle in Les Misérables – death, victory and defeat in war are not what primarily engages the author.
The historical opportunities I have in mind which come through the narrative of the four books in my saga are diverse, and are in each case part of a swell that is far longer than the timespan of the novels. The rural resistance to the new French Republic was bloody, vicious and extended. Its roots in religious convictions are most obvious in the novels in the adherence of the Breton characters to the religious services, perhaps most notably that of marriage, held in the woods in Brittany by displaced priests. That much may be a tribute to indigenous feeling, as the determination of the Republican captain is to his belief in the new world order. Yet the largest of the swells must surely be the massive change to the ownership of land and property, and with it to the power of the church and the landed aristocracy, typified by the rise of the bourgeois entrepreneur who seems to carry all before him. Modern France lies in his actions, just as modern industrial England is figured in the premonitions of the Devonian baron, his growing understanding of ‘history-at-work’ fed by his experience in America and thoughts about France.
There is more: a thread which is once again complex, and very long indeed. The events of just two years in the saga touch upon the revolt in Saint-Domingue, and the exodus from that turmoil of two figures to France itself. In England, some little of the history of the anti-abolitionist movement is encountered in the subscription of some characters to local chapters in the west country, notably Plymouth. What the revolution offers here, in my narrative, is a story of mixed-race inheritance, and of early location in the new Republic for those who, though free, could have been re-enslaved. In England, the frustration of a seemingly endless campaign against vested interests surfaces in some abolitionists, alongside the determination to hold their ground. That determination is historical, but its full extent lies well beyond the saga.
Perhaps the greatest historical opportunity in the four novels is that of the mix of voices, all of whom in one way or another are wrestling with movement in the tectonic plates, at one of the momentous periods in European history when freedom shouted for the right to enter its name in the book under very different hands.
For details of the four novels in my saga, go to the page on this website Books
Graham Ley 