Which historical fiction books . . .

. . . do you enjoy more?

those featuring stories about real-life people or those featuring
characters conjured up in the minds of the authors?

I enjoy the books featuring real-life people more than the other type.

My preference is fictional main characters, with authentic supporting characters. If a real person is the main character, the author often is compelled to take liberties or make wild speculations for the sake of the plotline or reader sensibilities. This really irritates me.

My preference is to have all of the characters be fictional, as the author can then concentrate on storytelling and setting without having to be constrained by the actual facts of an historical figures life. On the other hand, I do love Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir series in which detective Bernie Gunther comes into frequent contact with actual figures in the Nazi hierarchy. But all in all, I find that sort of thing distracting. To each his/her own!

I like the real history kind. Especially well researched ones. It is kind of like history lite, since you know some but not most of things are made up.

I think I agree with >2 tealadytoo:. I like fictional leads, with the occasional guest appearance by an actual historical figure.

I prefer fictional characters affected by their real-life contemporaries. Brother Cadfael has been a longstanding favorite of mine.

>2 tealadytoo: I like this as well. I just finished Lamentation by CJ Samsom which is a mystery set in the times of Henry VIII. The King and his last queen, Catherine Parr, are major characters in the story... about a document that she supposedly wrote in secret from the King "The Lamentation of a Sinner". This document in the story was stolen and if published could result in the execution of the Queen and Shardlake is tasked by the Queen to find the document.

The document existed and was published after Henry's death. The novel has exquisite detail of the operation of the English court of the times as well as London in general.

"Historical Fiction"

"Historical" a time in the past on Earth.
"Fiction" not a true story

Otherwise, I don't care who's in it and when, as long as it's well written.

Lonesome Dove has all-fictional characters except for a cameo by Charles Goodnight. I think it's probably The Great American Novel.

Shakespeare's history plays all revolve around actual people and events, but the words are made up by him. Minor and supporting characters are his own inventions, but for all we know, may be modeled on actual people that he knew in his lifetime. I love all his history plays best of all his plays.

Dorothy Dunnett wrote several Renaissance series revolving around characters that she made up, but they often interact with actual historical figures. And she wrote a novel about Macbeth. Like Shakespeare, she put the words in his mouth. Of all historical fiction writers, she is, IMO, the nonpareil.

How can I choose from among them which I like best? I can't!

I really loathe the use of real people as the main characters in a historical novel.

If there is enough known about them to portray them accurately, and they are genuinely interesting people, then I would prefer to read a well-researched biography.

I loathe and despise the type of journalism that considers it acceptable to make up, "conjecture" or imagine actions and motives, in order to turn people - who are often, in reality, boring , or whose real motives are complicated and opaque - into a "good story", and who justify it by appealing to "the public interest", in the sense that "the public interest" means "the (supposed) desire of the public to hear lurid and titillating details about the rich and powerful".

And I do not feel that the same behaviour becomes more acceptable because the subject is dead - even long dead. (If they are the close family members of those still alive, it makes it worse, of course.)

So, for a well-known historical person - straight biography, please.

If you need to imagine, or make "exciting" stuff up about them - please don't.

I strongly prefer my historical fiction to have imaginary protagonists.

Having them interact with real historical figures, in ways that those people would have probablly reacted, is the best approach, in my opinion.

I enjoyed Conn Iggulden's Wolf of the Plains immensely, when I thought that he was using the historical record, and combining with an understanding of 12th century cultural values, to portray the childhood of Genghis Khan. Once I learned that Iggulden had arbitrarily removed known siblings and changed who did what, in order to tell a bet a story, it destroyed it for me and I realised that I should have looked for a history/biography. At least Iggulden was honest enough to admit what he had done.

>8 Limelite: Macbeth is considered to be an "unlucky' play precisely because it is a character assassination of a long-reigning (10 years), legitimate (Scotland used tanist succession, until Malcolm used the backing of a foreign army to impose use of primogeniture, after the English fashion) and generally successful monarch (Macbeth).

It was written as a deliberate piece of political propaganda to flatter and legitimate the descendant (King James VI & I) of the usurper who rebelled against him (Malcolm).

It is great drama. But it is also a deliberate, cynical falsification of history for political ends. And because it was written by a genius, it has succeeded.

>10 -pilgrim-:

And because it is excellent drama. It's considered a "cursed" play not for political reasons but for Scottish king, James VI's (later James I of England), obsession with demonism, witchcraft, and power of spells. He had many superstitions of sorcery since his mom's execution and his own near-drowning experience. Also, the play was written in the era of witch-hunts in Scotland (if not its neighbor to the south). Probably Shakespeare knew he could make a good house by playing on the fears of his audience. The devil and his henchwomen were BIG then and there. Think what "Jaws" did for movie audiences.

Did you read Lincoln in the Bardo? Another suggestion, The Moor's Account.

>10 -pilgrim-: "a long-reigning (10 years), legitimate (Scotland used tanist succession, until Malcolm used the backing of a foreign army to impose use of primogeniture, after the English fashion) and generally successful monarch (Macbeth). . . . "

Not exactly the stuff of fierce drama, though, is it? :) I think the version Shakespeare wrote is probably a little snappier than the above plot might have turned out. I can hear the conversation now between Shakespeare and his literary agent as played by Bob Newhart. "Willie, how many times do I have to tell you . . . "

I got curious and dialed up the wikipedia entry on Macbeth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macbeth). Here's what that site has to say about the "cursed" aspect:

Superstition and "The Scottish Play"
Main article: The Scottish Play

While many today would say that any misfortune surrounding a production is mere coincidence, actors and others in the theatre industry often consider it bad luck to mention Macbeth by name while inside a theatre, and sometimes refer to it indirectly, for example as "The Scottish Play", or "MacBee", or when referring to the character and not the play, "Mr. and Mrs. M", or "The Scottish King".

This is because Shakespeare (or the play's revisers) are said to have used the spells of real witches in his text, purportedly angering the witches and causing them to curse the play. Thus, to say the name of the play inside a theatre is believed to doom the production to failure, and perhaps cause physical injury or death to cast members. There are stories of accidents, misfortunes and even deaths taking place during runs of Macbeth.

According to the actor Sir Donald Sinden, in his Sky Arts TV series Great West End Theatres,

"contrary to popular myth, Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth is not the unluckiest play as superstition likes to portray it. Exactly the opposite! The origin of the unfortunate moniker dates back to repertory theatre days when each town and village had at least one theatre to entertain the public. If a play was not doing well, it would invariably get 'pulled' and replaced with a sure-fire audience pleaser – Macbeth guaranteed full-houses. So when the weekly theatre newspaper, The Stage was published, listing what was on in each theatre in the country, it was instantly noticed what shows had not worked the previous week, as they had been replaced by a definite crowd-pleaser. More actors have died during performances of Hamlet than in the "Scottish play" as the profession still calls it. It is forbidden to quote from it backstage as this could cause the current play to collapse and have to be replaced, causing possible unemployment."

The Royal Shakespeare Company website agrees about those unhappy witches:
https://www.rsc.org.uk/macbeth/about-the-play/the-scottish-play

"James became King James I of England in 1603, and his new subjects were keen to appease him and his views on the demonic. Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus was published in 1604, and its shocking portrayal of witchcraft and association with the devil intensified England’s fear of sorcery.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth followed in 1606 with direct references to James’ earlier misfortune at sea: ‘Though his bark cannot be lost, Yet is shall be tempest-tost’. Shakespeare was also said to have researched the weird sisters in depth; their chants in Macbeth, and ingredients of fenny snake, eye of newt and toe of frog, are supposedly real spells. According to folklore, Macbeth was cursed from the beginning. A coven of witches objected to Shakespeare using real incantations, so they put a curse on the play."

____________________

Still another wikipedia entry says, "One hypothesis for the origin of this superstition is that Macbeth, being a popular play, was commonly put on by theatres in financial trouble, or that the high production costs of Macbeth put theatres in financial trouble, and hence an association was made between a production of Macbeth and theatres going out of business." The quote is from The Language of Theatre by Martin Harrison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scottish_Play

Anyway, wow, fascinating subject! I never had any idea such a legend existed around the play! As you can see, there are many theories as to the advent of that superstition about Macbeth. I assume that Shakespeare's slandering of the real life Macbeth in his play provides us another such "origin story" but simply one that I did not turn up in my far from thorough research. Cheers!

>12 rocketjk: That is rather my point. Telling the truth about people tends to be boring, compared to making up lurid lies about them.

Shakespeare is here pandering to the same instincts that make tabloid journalism more profitable than the broadsheets.

his new subjects were keen to appease him and his views on the demonic.
"Apparent views" is probably a better phrase here. James was a canny wee sod - he had to be, to survive to his majority with the regents that he had! - and his use of witchcraft charges as a means of disposing of his political enemies was masterful. (Most notably, he used it successfully against his stepfather, the murderer of his father, the Earl of Bothwell.)

Witchcraft as a legal offence is an excellent political tool for those wishing to eliminate political enemies. The "perpetrator" can have committed the crime whilst alone in their own home, without ever having approached the "victim". And when torture is accepted as a valid method of investigation, "evidence" to corroborate the charge is not hard to obtain.

It is fascinating to see how many subsequent, as well as contemporary, readers of James' infamous treatise on Daemonologie assume that he believed what he wrote, whilst ignoring the effective use that he made of these convenient "beliefs".

>11 Limelite: I see you also believe James' own propaganda. (He was ruthless, certainly, but I confess a sneaking admiration for the man, who was willing to portray himself as a fool for political expediency.)

I have not read Lincoln in the Bardo because I presume that it plays on the mythic stature that Lincoln has in American culture. Although I am aware of the basic facts of the man's life, I am not steeped in that ethos. It seems to me that a novel that works by experimenting with and subverting tropes with which I am not fully familiar, is unlikely to something that I would experience as the author intended.

It is my experience that American authors tend to assume an American audience for their work. Their consequent expectations regarding the cultural baggage that their reader will bring to their work makes it frequently less capable of resonating with anyone who does not share that heritage.

If this is, as I suspect, primarily a meditation on loss, it would work better for me if not framed around a historical figure who I know less well than the author anticipates.

What would you suggest that I would get from The Moor's Account that would add to my experience of reading autobiographical accounts of the experience of slavery, from Africa, Europe and the Americas, and from the sixteenth to the twentieth century (and indeed earlier)? Many articulate and intelligent people (of all races) have been enslaved, and have described their experiences. In what way can a modern novelist speak better for them than their own, authentic voices?

>13 -pilgrim-: "That is rather my point. Telling the truth about people tends to be boring, compared to making up lurid lies about them.

Shakespeare is here pandering to the same instincts that make tabloid journalism more profitable than the broadsheets."

Seems a false equivalency to me. Tabloid journalism is a perversion of journalism. The point of journalism is to illuminate the truth, and we despise tabloid journalism expressly for its perversion and/or trivialization of that goal. Also, quality, truthful journalism is often quite fascinating. Shakespeare's job was to write a tragic play. By definition, his job was to tell a good story and, expressly, to not be boring. Though he surely was telling the truth about human nature and the dangers of unhinged ambition.

So the question to me is not whether Shakespeare should have written a play "telling the truth" about the real Macbeth, but what his reason was for making Macbeth the evil, tragic central character of the play he did write. My guess would be not that he was pandering to his audience (a la tabloid journalism), who probably would have received the play in the same way if he'd picked some other names for his characters, but that as you've already said, he was trying to please the king.

This short article was helpful to me on that point: https://macbethandkingjames1.weebly.com/connections.html

It seems to me that any criticism we might want to level at Shakespeare on this point might be tempered by how important that royal approval would have been to Shakespeare and his ability to stage his plays (and make his living).

On the other hand, the wikipedia entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macbeth,_King_of_Scotland) on the real Macbeth tells us this:
He became Mormaer of Moray – a semi-autonomous lordship – in 1032, and was probably responsible for the death of the previous mormaer, Gille Coemgáin. He subsequently married Gille Coemgáin's widow, Gruoch, although they had no children together.

Maybe not so entirely benign, then!

As James really was a ruthless and vindictive king, perhaps Shakespeare's keener viewers might have seen a touch of James in the Macbeth character, (the article I linked to above conjectures that Shakespeare might have been trying to send James a warning about the dangers of paranoia) whatever their knowledge might or might not have been of the historical Macbeth. Whether any great number of Shakespeare's audience members, of any class, knew enough about a Scottish king from 550 years previous to know that Shakespeare was taking dramatic license with Macbeth's character is a matter for conjecture also, I suppose.

"....his new subjects were keen to appease him and his views on the demonic."
"Apparent views" is probably a better phrase here. . . .

Well, sure. OK. But whether Shakespeare did or didn't think that James' views about witchcraft were sincere or a ruse borne out of political expediency, it seems to me it would be the case either way that he (and Marlowe) would think James would welcome a play that put witches in a bad light, which was the point of the RSC quote.

As Limelight has mentioned, witchcraft was a hot topic in early 1600s England. But past that opening scene, the play's not really about witchcraft. The witches never cast a spell on Macbeth, they don't compel his actions. Rather, they provide him with a prophecy that he will be king. It is his own ambition, and his wife's, that leads him to use that prophecy as rationalization for his actions rather than to ignore it.

OK, I'm up way too late, now. This has been fun and informative for me. Cheers!

>14 -pilgrim-:

Gee, I dunno.

Possibly for the same relationship reason that Shakespeare's Macbeth has to historical real Macbeth?

You know, in the way it is more enlightening to be willing to look at a problem from more than one angle.

I mean, why go to the opera when you could just read the book or play it's based on? I suppose some people out there just can't abide the added drama, color, and imaginative scope of all that music and staging when they can just read the libretto without all that unnecessary embellishment.

I doubt Shakespeare's play casts any light on the real Macbeth - although it is quite illuminating regarding the political tensions of his own day.

If I were to write a play in which Lincoln is portrayed as secretly an agent of the Tsar, who encouraged the secession of the Confederacy in order to further a secret plan to sell all Yankees as serfs to Russia, I doubt a reader 400 years hence would learn any "new perspective" about Lincoln from it - though they might pick up some hints about the preoccupations of our own era.

A deliberate falsification of history teaches us nothing (except perhaps about the author).

Your analogy is inapt. A libretto is never intended to be consumed without its concomitant staging, so to consume it thus is to treat the work otherwise to how the author intended. (Although the converse - the subtraction of the staging from the music IS frequently done.)

But to imply that because someone has written the truth of their own experience it must necessarily be dry or unengaging material is patronising in the extreme.

Would you argue that Miguel de Cervantès, despite being Spain's best known novelist, requires his stories to be retold, since, as a former slave, his works - in your view - therefore "must" lack colour, style etc.?

For me, the joy of historical fiction is its ability to give voice to the people who have left no record. It is frequently flawed by the author's imperfect understanding of the culture whereof they write. And that is when they write in good faith, and not peddling a deliberate distortion for political purposes. But it can sometimes take us places where we could not otherwise go.

If an author has no interest in the real people whose names or circumstances they are appropriating, I would prefer that they were honest with themselves and their readers, and label their work as fantasy (a genre I also enjoy), rather than "historical".

To go back to my original question: Leila Lalami consciously chose to replicate the style of writers of the period that she is describing, so the "fresh perspective" that you refer to cannot be that of voice, style, and language. Your implications to that effect are a dead end.

So what is it that you think a 20th century author adds? Do you think she knows more about the experience than those who experienced it? How?

I think fiction is fiction and history is history and historical fiction introduces imagination to create a world where reality is unknown in order to make it knowable. My appreciation of historical fiction derives from the ability of some writers of to create character out of both whole cloth and out of worn out cloth, or to highlight certain dynamics of character that an historical subject probably had, but for sake of shame, or false pride, or sincere modesty that subject did not let those characteristics "out" in public whether in the forum or in letters.

The astute historical fiction writer invents scenes and dialogue that expose these hidden or buried qualities or faults. Even nonfiction biographers who variously write books about the same well known personage -- say, Abraham Lincoln -- don't write the same book. Facts of historical peoples' lives exist for biographers' to interpret according to how they "read" their subject.

History is no longer a discipline devoted to the documentation of events. At least, not since Freud. Motivations seldom are revealed in fiats, treaties, or even speeches but they are what drive today's readers to continue to read new biographies and histories of persons and eras, in spite of all the old ones and first sources available. New perspectives are teased out of the sum of a life or even a single telling moment -- a watershed, depending of a fiction or nonfiction writer's purpose. It's the humanizing human interest of historical people, their ambitions, their jealousies, their insights, their misapprehensions, their loves, and their enmities that make history worth reading.

It's uncovering what people want that is what makes us interested enough to read about them and their deeds.

Historical fiction emphasizes the aspect of human emotional states driving human behavior, that produces human events, which, in turn, become history in the form of a war won, a peace cobbled, a family reigning, a society "upheaved."

How perceptive of you to realize that I am not a fan of Don Quixote. I much prefer Baudolino when the theme is "the quest for the impossible dream." Frederick the Great became an entirely different historical figure in my mind once Eco breathed life into him in that novel.

Who's to say that Eco's fiction when it includes a real figure of history isn't an accurate portrait of the man? There's no one alive now who can tell us, "I knew Fred. Fred was my friend. You're no portrayer of Fred." "But what," you may ask me, "of Prester John?" And I might ask you, "What of King Arthur? Is he not a "real" historical figure whose motivations, words, and deeds of yore inform England and the English as much -- more, even -- than Henry VIII or Disraeli?

So it is with historians and first sources, they provide portrayals. Again, who's to say they are actually giving us "true" portraits of the actors, or even the events? One thing, though, is universal and true. People lie. (Ex.primo the orange shit-gibbon currently in the WH). Forgeries regularly fool experts for generations, whether pressed under glass or preserved in museums. And winners get to write history according to their point of view.

If I want to understand the Brit and Brit-Colonialist POW experience in WW II while constructing the Thailand-Burma-China RR, I'll read The Bridge over the River Kwai written by a Frenchman who was never a prisoner of the Japanese, Pierre Boulle and The Narrow Road to the Deep North by a man born 20 years after Pearl Harbor, Richard Flannagan.

In writing, no matter if fiction or nonfiction, p.o.v. and the suspension of disbelief are the two elements that make what is the signature of the best we have to read. But it is what we come to understand about the human condition that the very best of historical fiction and 20th C. non-fictional history offer us that crowns our reading experience and truly enlightens us.

>18 Limelite: Here, here!

Three or four years back, there was a similar discussion in the Non-Fiction Readers group. To that conversation, I contributed a few posts, including this one . . .

Here is some interesting commentary regarding the complimentary, rather than mutually exclusive, relationship between fiction and non-fiction. The noted historian David Halberstam spent two years (1962-1964) in Vietnam during the early stages of the American involvement in the Vietnamese War as a correspondent for the New York Times. He returned and, in addition to all the reporting he'd done, wrote a nonfiction book on the subject, The Making of a Quagmire. Then he wrote a novel, One Very Hot Day, published in 1968. The book was republished in 1985, at which time Halberstam included an afterword, which included the following:

. . . after I left in 1964, I wrote a non fiction book, The Making of a Quagmire. That was, as they say, a lot of words on Vietnam. But even so there was a part of me which wanted to tell something more, what, for lack of a better description, the war felt like on a given day. I wanted to portray the frustrations, and the emptiness, of this war. It was after all a smaller and, I think, less tidy war than Americans were accustomed to, and almost nothing that happened in it fit the preconceptions of Westerners. So, starting in 1966, I sat down and wrote One Very Hot Day.

>19 rocketjk:

Exactly. Facts are only the weaker fraction of the full historical story. The impact on persons of what become facts and later the impact of those facts on other people are the stories that make the greater stronger fraction of what we call historical truth.

It's the second look at his facts that gave Halberstam the real picture of the early war years in Vietnam when he translated his new insight into story.

We use story to give meaning to the human experience, and the human experience to give meaning to facts.

>20 Limelite: You are setting up s straw man.

You still have not explained why you think a novelist, writing several hundred years later, who can, at best, hypothesise about an experience, can describe what it FELT like better than people who actually lived through and FELT those things.

I have never had a broken bone. The question is not whether the experience is better described by looking at an X-ray of a fracture, but whether you would be better asking mewhat the pain feels like, or consulting someone who has actually experienced a broken bone.

I read On the Trail of the Real Macbeth by Cameron Taylor and Alistair Murray a few years ago. It was informative, and I enjoyed it.

Hello everyone

Searching for a historical romance novel that starts with a scene like this...a man and a woman is about to get it on (could be a duke/rake - not sure), when there is a knock on the door, the butler i think opens the door to find a frail and wet girl seeking shelter. Apparently she ran away from where she was staying....

Th hero is arrogant but falls for the this girl...

>23 Marshalee_Matthews: Welcome to LibraryThing! You may have better luck in our Name That Book Group. Be sure to read the tips for posting first. Good luck!

The group "Romance - from historical to contemporary" also has a search thread that might be helpful.
https://www.librarything.com/topic/157138