Two weeks ago, spring break was upon us at last: time to visit family, take a well-deserved break… and squeeze in as much reading as is humanly possible.
Feeling rebellious, and drawn by my own long-neglected bookshelves, I decided that I would also take time over these sixteen days to read something that I wanted to read, without purpose, whose pages I wouldn’t be tempted to pepper with post-it notes. Something entirely unrelated to any of my modules, something fiction, maybe even something I had already read before. The point, I had decided, was to read just for the sheer enjoyment of it.
I skimmed my options, knowing them well enough not to need the bookshop connoisseur’s characteristic right-angled squint. Things that I had studied in English Literature I quickly skipped over, knowing that these would not help me on my mission to go post-it-free for a book or three. I narrowed it down a little further and arrived at this list.
- The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
- Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn
- The Secret River, Kate Grenville
- A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
- The Testament of Mary, Colm Tóibín
- Life of Pi, Yann Martel
- The Book of Dust, vol I: La Belle Sauvage, Philip Pullman
- On Beauty, Zadie Smith
- The Witchfinder’s Sister, Beth Underdown
- The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
Exactly half of them I had read before. Three of them I had only read the blurb or first few pages in the five or ten minutes it had taken me to form an attachment in a charity shop. Two of them I had actively tracked across the Book Depository for several weeks. In any case, I knew enough about each of them that reading down that list came with a realisation that my task was going to be harder than I thought…
Because the interesting thing is, all but one of the titles I had chosen could be treated, in some way, as historical fiction. And, if the writers of fiction were as concerned with categories as we historians, then all but two or three could arguably fall into the category of transnational historical fiction.
From the story of early nineteenth-century London convict sentenced to transportation to New South Wales to a ‘transatlantic comic saga’ exploring the convictions and uncertainties possessed by a mixed-race British-American family living in the twenty-first century United States; from the story of an African slave who, like so many real individuals, chanced a dangerous escape from her situation in Georgia by way of the ‘Underground Railroad’, in this novel curiously represented in physical form, to an equally imaginative retelling of the diverse lives, cultures, and journeys of the Biblical wives and daughter of Jacob and their migration with his sons from Canaan to Egypt.
Yet even in the most dubious in the ‘transnational’ category, Beth Underdown’s unsettling take on the life and work of the notorious Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, in mid-seventeenth century Essex (which touches sinisterly though rather briefly on the transatlantic legacy of the Essex witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts) I realised that there was going to be no easy escape from historical thinking. For despite Underdown’s chosen perspective, a fictional sister who, like the community around her, too late begins to realise the terrifying nature of her brother’s work, hers is the most staunchly historical of the lot: fronting each chapter with genuine records kept by Hopkins and his associates, touching upon a number of real trials and characters, and closing her book with an explicit statement on exactly what in the novel is known to be fact, what historians, like herself, have speculated (for example, about Hopkins’ psychology), and what she, as an author, invented for the purposes of the story.
Suffice to say, in the end, I abandoned my quest and accepted that it was probably a good thing to realise that my personal interests align so closely with my academic ones this year. But it did bring me back to a question that I remember from our second-year historiography module on the relationship between microhistory and historical fiction. Is one simply a poor imitation of the other? What makes a good work in either genre? Should we ever allow for the lines to be blurred in ways that are not made explicit, unlike the careful separation in Underdown’s novel?
I recall a tutorial on hagiography in Late Antiquity from a mediaeval history module in first year, and I am personally inclined to say that we should avoid a revival of feigned authenticity, especially since our age seems less and less able to distinguish between truth and invention.
But then again, are we merely unused to doing that footwork? Or, perhaps, are we only unused to doing it for certain media? I should think that most people, when they pick up a book, will be more aware— or at least more wary —of whether it is fiction, non-fiction, or some genre that lies in between (historical fiction, speculative fiction, theory, political forecasting etc.) than when they open an article shared on Facebook, simply because we are used to trusting and distrusting books selectively.
Whether it is the reader’s or the writer’s task to disentangle fact and fiction is, of course, a debate for the ages. Naturally, historians are required to be more careful when it comes to imagination, and more explicit in their navigations between the known and the uncertain or the speculative. But rather than eschew the great unknown in favour of histories told in charts and databases, I believe that process starts with remembering the importance of imagination within our discipline.
History, it might even be argued, can only be an imaginative way of seeing the past, since our points of access are otherwise confined to a finite pool of sources which often produce many and variable meanings anyway. Hence, rather than deride microhistories as works of whimsical insignificance as was implied by that old question from HI2001, I would argue that we should instead congratulate them, for the recognition that, often, it is through small things, unique experiences, and ordinary eyes that we can best imagine a world.