I’ve been thinking a bit about historical fiction, lately. This is because I’ve been thinking about writing a historical novel. Or maybe not. 1/

I published "The Black Prince" a couple of years ago. What tempted me out of SF into historical fiction was my love for Anthony Burgess, and one of his unfinished projects, to write a novel about Edward the Black Prince but in the style of Dos Passos. 2/

It’s a brilliant idea, because it foregrounds the integral anachronism of any historical novel—the novel as a form is a bourgeois post-18th-C mode after all; any ‘novel’ about the 14th-C is predicated on that mismatch (this is true a fortiori of movies of course). 3/

By front-loading the disjunction, treating medieval matter as accurately as possible but in an early 20th-C Modernist experimental manner, the book becomes about history as well as a narrative of history ... 4/

... ; becomes about how we relate to history, and how we our lives and society are informed both by ‘actual’ history and by our anachronistic versions of history. 5/

So "The Black Prince" is about mobility, the coming of credit economies, the way the machinic emerges thro the middle ages & so about representation & reportage, at the same time as giving readers an account of who Edward was, vivid battle scenes and court politics, all that. 6/

But what occurs to me is that this kind of thing simply mismatches where historical fiction is today. There’s a necessary (a salutary I would say, though you might disagree) artifice about writing a 14th-C story using Dos Passos' textual strategies. 7/

But the big historical novels of the last few years—I’m thinking of Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy & also O'Farrell amazing “Hamnet”—opt instead for a finely-worked upholstered prose rich with intimate description and poetic moments, giving the reader the illusion of verisimilitude 8/

... as if we’ve opened a window and are looking directly on (say) Agnes Hathaway quarrelling with her step-mother in a muddy Warwickshire farmyard and so on. 9/

Don’t get me wrong, both Mantel and O’Farrell are ridiculously talented writers, and their novels are immersive and beautiful and deserve all the praise that has been heaped upon them. 10/

But I wonder if such skilful cod-verisimilitude does a kind of violence to history as such. It’s a gorgeous illusion, but I suppose I don’t see illusoriness a place where the novel should rest content. 11/

Mantel’s Cromwell is as superbly observational and insightful and wise as Mantel herself; O’Farrell renders grief as a universal. 12/

This is, maybe, where the Historical Novel is now (plus a host of lesser writers giving us satin-and-lace Tudor ladies fantasy & dashing/handsome Napoleonic officers etc). Nor is this is a new thing, of course: Banville’s Copernicus trilogy does something similar. 13/

I don’t know if I fancy writing one of those, though. Back to the eloquent artifice of SF I guess. 14/