Historical Fiction

I tend to alternate between worrying whether I am not focused enough on music in this blog and whether I am too focused on some music in particular! It does say in the frontispiece that the topics include "popular culture ... and whatever else catches my fancy..." So this will be a post with almost no music in it.

For much of my life I have been an avid reader of historical fiction, by which I mean fiction, usually though not always light fiction, that is set in historical times and involves recreating long-lost worlds and characters. Incidentally, music too can be a gateway into the atmosphere and character of times long ago. Take the organum of Léonin and Pérotin for example:

One of the first historical novelists I discovered was Mary Renault whose book The Mask of Apollo was assigned reading in some course or another:

This book is set in Ancient Greece and is written from the point of view of an actor so we get a lot of interesting details about Greek tragedy (not comedy if you are wearing the mask of Apollo). One of the people befriended by the actor was Plato. Renault also wrote a number of other books set in classical times including a trilogy about Alexander as well as a couple of books about Theseus and one with the poet Simonides as the focus. Good stuff, if a tad romanticized.

Another writer I encountered early on was C. S. Forester who wrote an extensive series of books about a Royal Navy captain during the Napoleonic Wars named Horatio Hornblower. Also good stuff, but again a tad romanticized. Later on another writer, Patrick O'Brian, covered the same ground but much more authentically in his series of novels with Jack Aubrey, RN captain and Stephen Maturin, surgeon and spy. No romanticizing here, and an incredible wealth of historic detail. There was a wonderful film by Peter Weir based on these novels. The film ends with a great musical scene. Both Maturin and Aubrey are amateur musicians, playing the violin and cello, and in fact they met at a quartet concert. Music is a recurring theme in the books.

A more serious book by French writer Marguerite Yourcenar moves from light fiction, no matter how well done, to more serious fiction. One sentence from the English translation (she wrote in French) has stayed with me ever since I read the book some forty years ago: "I begin to discern the profile of my death." Hadrian actually wrote an autobiography which was lost to history so Yourcenar tried to re-create it.

Another writer of serious historical fiction was Robert Graves (even though he didn't regard it as serious). His two books on the emperor Claudius, I, Claudius and Claudius the God were also attempts to recreate Claudius' own memoirs, also lost.

It is distressing how much we have lost of ancient literature. Did you know that we have seven plays (roughly) by each of the great Athenian tragedians simply because the Byzantine copyists decided that that was how much they should preserve? The BBC did a quite successful television series based on the Graves books with Derek Jacobi in the eponymous role. Graves also wrote a number of other historical novels from Homeric times to the 17th century, but I have not read them. It doesn't count as historic fiction, but his memoir of his own experiences as an officer in the trenches in WWI, Goodbye to All That, is a very powerful book indeed. In one of my favorite passages, Graves, who had T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) as roommate at Oxford after the war, introduces him to Ezra Pound, who was passing through: "Lawrence, this is Pound. You won't like one another."

One of my very favorite historical novels is Imperial Governor by George Shipway which is a memoir of Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, governor of the Roman province of Britain at the time of the rebellion of Boudicca. It is a brilliant evocation of the atmosphere and logistics of the time down to the exact range of ballistas and legion battle tactics.

I just discovered that he wrote other historical novels and right now I am reading the first book of a two book series focused on Agamemnon and Mycenaean Greece. He also wrote another set in Medieval France. Be prepared for a lot of historic vocabulary!

So there you go, a whole bunch of books that you will either love or that will bore you to tears depending on your personal preferences.

For our envoi, here is that ending scene from the Peter Weir film of Master and Commander:

Clip updated.