If you want to know what's going on here and now, ask a historian

[sheenaghpugh]

If there's one generalisation about genre writers that really annoys me, it's the one that says "people who write historical fiction are escapists, not facing up to problems in the contemporary world". In fact they are frequently addressing the contemporary a lot more adroitly than those who actually set their novels there and have less distance from their material. Hilary Mantel's "A Place of Greater Safety" was published in 1992, quite a while before a post-9/11 world started getting twitchy about whether the ordinary forms of law were appropriate for fighting "terrorism". Here's Danton and Robespierre discussing the matter:

Danton: How do you tell a conspirator?
Robespierre: Put them on trial.
Danton: What if you know they’re conspirators, but you haven’t enough evidence to convict them? What if you as a patriot just know?
Robespierre: You ought to be able to make it stand up in court.
Danton: Suppose you can’t? You might not be able to use your strongest evidence. It might be state secrets.
Robespierre: You’d have to let them go, in that case. But it would be unfortunate.
Danton: It would, wouldn’t it? If the Austrians were at the gates? And you were delivering the city over to them out of respect for the judicial process?
Robespierre: Well, I suppose you’d…you’d have to alter the standard of proof in court. Or widen the definition of conspiracy.
Danton: You would, would you?
Robespierre: Would that be an example of a lesser evil averting a greater one? I am not usually taken in by this simple, very comforting very infantile notion—but I know that a successful conspiracy against the French people could lead to genocide.
Danton: Perverting justice is a very great evil in itself. It leaves no hope of amendment.
Robespierre: Look, Danton, I don’t know, I’m not a theorist.

Comments

History as social comment

[sally-oreilly.livejournal.com]

I agree with this completely. It really irritates me when historical fiction is written off in this way. Of course, people do write and read escapist historical fiction, but it is just one sub-genre of the whole. And writers as diverse as Umberto Eco, Anthony Burgess, Matthew Kneale, Emma Donaghue and Rose Tremain have written challenging and intriguing historical fiction which breaks conventions and presents a new perspective on 21st century life - the frustrated and ambitious protagonist of Donaghoe's 'Slammerkin' seems almost contemporary in her contempt for social hierarchy and her misguided materialism, for example,and Kneale's 'English Passengers' puts racism under the spotlight as effectively as any modern novel I have read.