ABSTRACT
History is other, and the present familiar. The historian’s job is often to explain the transition from other to familiar. The historical novelist similarly explores the dissonance between then and now, making the past both recognisable but simultaneously unfamiliar. Historical novelists concentrate on the gaps between known factual history and that which is lived to a variety of purposes. The spaces scholars have no idea about – the gaps between verifiable fact – are the territory for the writer of fictional history. As Lukács pointed out, the historical novel is a form that deploys ‘necessary anachronism’ – it is innately false, and continuously draws attention to its otherness. While generally using the realist style – despite key examples which interrogate such authority, like John Fowles’ (1969) The French Lieutenant’s Woman – the historical novel is a self-conscious and self-reflexive form that implicitly communicates to the reader its illegitimacy and inauthenticity. A key site for this articulation is the material historical framework – the author’s note, introduction or explanatory section appended to all historical fiction since Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814). This self-consciousness can be demonstrated in a consideration of Mark Lawson’s ‘Afterword’ to his Enough is Enough:
While this novel was based on a large number of factual sources (detailed below), the warning of the Author’s Note preceding it should be repeated here: it is a work of fiction and the characters, even when recognizable from an external context, are behaving fictionally … My general aim has been to avoid giving to any character dialogue or actions which the historical record indicates would have been impossible or unlikely. However, the dialogue, though trying to capture the cadence of their conversation as it is recorded in reality, is frequently invented … As a general principle, when a detail seems weird or ridiculously convenient … it can be guaranteed to be true or, at least, documented … The multi-viewpoint structure of the book is intended to reflect the conflicts that arise between different witnesses to history.1
