Historical Fiction

On his sixteenth birthday, Peter Hithersay discovers that his father is not his father. His mother’s husband, Rodney, has wanted to dispel this misunderstanding for a long time, but it has taken years for Henrietta to say what has needed to be said.

In 1960 Henrietta was sent as a substitute to compete in a Bach festival in Leipzig, one of the most musical cities in the world. Bach lived there for twenty-seven years; Wagner was born there; other musical notables, such as Grieg and Schumann, have been associated with the city. But Leipzig, two hours from Berlin, spent forty years last century at the heart of the GDR, the police state of East Germany. Leipzig was the hub of one of the most unmusical régimes imaginable, and became a stronghold for the notorious secret police, the Stasi.

At once extravagant and tightly wrapped, this novel reinforces the view that historical fiction says as much about the present and the future as it does about the past. At the level of history proper, Anouar Benmalek’s vision unites three continents that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, are subject to the depredations of European colonialism and domestic tyranny. At the human level, his fiction is preoccupied with the bodily functions and basic needs of survival: things that never change. The broad, impersonal sweep of world history is made up of the infinitesimally small transactions of the primal scene: copulating, defecating, vomiting, bleeding, all driven by the elemental forces of fear and desire, violence and conscience.

Early Sydney has beguiled many writers, and the latest to succumb is Kristin Williamson. She has combined an interest in the Rocks area with a self-confessed ‘obsession with our feisty female forebears’, and has produced an historical novel involving several real people.

Tom Gilling’s first novel, The Sooterkin, was an engaging and self-conscious oddity. Set in early nineteenth-century Tasmania, it had at its centre the striking conceit of the Sooterkin itself, a child born to a former convict and who is, to all intents and purposes, a seal. The Sooterkin was a critical success, inviting comparison to Peter Carey for its Dickensian energy and its playful engagement with the slippery rudiments of the Australian imagination.

This is a drum I’ve been beating for some time, but it’s worth thumping it again here: now is a good time, if you want vigorous intellectual debate, to eschew highbrow literature and dive into popular fiction.

The Sunken Road is an ambitious novel which sets the crisscrossing lives of families in the northern highlands of South Australia against a temporal panorama of a century and a half and forces that extend far beyond state and continent. It is a compassionate but never sentimental account of a collective experience full of hope, pain, exploitation and double standards. At its centre is a strongly rendered character called Anna Antonia Ison Tolley.

For the untutored Western reader this exuberant and clever novel about the histrionics of twentieth-century Indian politics invites comparison with Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. But this is a mistake. Tharoor covers similar territory to Rushdie, and gives voice to the same virulent distaste for the late Mrs Gandhi, but his book couldn’t be more different.

Reviewing Signals of Distress in the 11 Sept Guardian Weekly, Philip Hensher accuses Jim Crace of writing a ‘boy’s book’ in the meretricious style of a Golding feigning Conrad, and ending up all at sea.

Set in New South Wales during the turbulent years of 1916–19, Graeme Harper’s Black Cat, Green Field evokes the period with particularity and jaggedness. The first of the novel’s five parts introduces the central character: Sidney Nelson, recently wounded in Gallipoli, and now living in Sydney. A former art student, he is yearningly aware he could instead have been in the Paris of Picasso and Gris. He is also a ‘black cat’, a supporter of the radical industrial Workers of the World and when, in the closing months of 1916, the ‘Twelve’ I.W.W. members are sent to prison and police harassment intensifies, the organization goes underground and Nelson loses friends and contacts. Feeling jaded and devoid of artistic inspiration, he decides to leave Sydney and, after a false start, moves up to the north coast of NSW to stay near his sister May. The ‘black cat’ is going to paint the ‘green field’.