Hilary Mantel, in her own words, likes to “use real people in real situations.” Her Man Booker Prize-winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies evoke Tudor England so vividly that most readers accept her portrait of Thomas Cromwell as historically accurate. According to one critic, because of her books “millions think of Thomas Cromwell as a much-maligned, misunderstood pragmatist from the school of hard knocks who got precious little thanks for doing Henry VIII’s dirty work.” In fact, argues this critic, he was “a detestably self-serving, bullying monster who perfected state terror in England, cooked the evidence, and extracted confessions by torture”. Where is the truth? What is the responsibility of an author of historical fiction to accurately depict the relevant history?
Some of historical fiction’s popularity stems from reader interest in past events, different from today’s world around them. Setting a novel in a different era lends it a certain exotic air, taking the reader to another time and place. And there’s no denying the past is filled with great stories to stoke the imagination of authors. This richness of settings and characters has led to several types of historical fiction.
One type has famous persons as main characters. The stories can range from epic to personal. Mantel’s books span Reformation England and feature Cromwell, King Henry VIII, and Cardinal Woolsey. At a different scale, Lincoln in the Bardo happens in a single night, describing Abraham Lincoln’s grief over the death of his son. In between, Hamilton is a musical portrait of the American Revolution. While not a novel, it is certainly historical fiction, with the same accuracy responsibilities.
A second type, alternative histories, is a fascinating sub-genre that mostly sidesteps the accuracy question by forking off on a different, imagined historical track. Well-written examples include The Plot Against America by Philip Roth, about what happens when Charles Lindbergh is elected President of the United States in 1940 and collaborates with Nazi Germany; The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, describing what the world was like after the Axis powers, Germany and Japan, won WWII; and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, in which the path to freedom included a literal, physical transport system as well as safe houses and secret routes. What does consciously rewriting history bring to the reader?
Which brings us to the most popular type of historical fiction, where authors set invented characters on the stage of real-life events. Classic examples include Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell; Ken Follet’s Pillars of Earth, a story about the intrigue surrounding the building of a cathedral in 12th century England; War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy; and A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris during the French Revolution. I could go on and on here, for this type of historical fiction includes some of my favorite novels.
My own historical novel, Once We Were Strangers, falls in this category. Four siblings, displaced from their Ukrainian home by poverty and pogroms, immigrate to North America. Each has their life altered by their participation in one of the great events of the period: the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the internment of Ukrainians by Canada, the invasion of North Russia by the United States, and the Russian Revolution. While the characters are my invention, the world events are not and I’ve put great effort into describing those events as accurately as I can.
Why is that important to me and to my readers? Primarily because my characters are shaped by these events. I’m interested in the interaction between my characters and the world around them. If the world and surrounding events are inaccurately portrayed, I would expect my characters to turn out differently. Maybe that would make a better novel, maybe not. But there are lessons to be learned from and feelings exposed by my story. Distorted history would lead to different lessons and false feelings.
So I’ll avoid alternative histories and do my best to describe what really happened when Canada threw naturalized citizens from Ukraine into forced labor camps in the Rockies; when avaricious factory owners put children to work in dangerous conditions on New York’s Lower East Side; when Woodrow Wilson ordered the US Army to invade Russia at Archangel after the end of WWI to fight against the Communists in the Russian Civil War; or when the Comintern suppressed the rebellion of the sailors at Kronstadt Naval Base. My novel revolves around these events.
Still, I’m not an historian. I write historical fiction, not historical fact. My invented character Leonid’s escape from Castle Mountain Internment Camp and subsequent flight with his family to North Dakota becomes more thrilling when set against the accurately described horrors of his imprisonment. The reunion of Karl and Max next to Trotsky’s armored train deep in the taiga north of St. Petersburg becomes more emotional because the brothers are fighting for opposing armies. My readers shouldn’t need something like an imaginary Wolf Hall or a false view of the Reformation to create setting and motivation for the novel. They are better served by the truth.