History Lives... ish

Much like other things in my life - *cough* lady business *cough* - my reading is on a cycle. CanLit followed by a contemporary novel, then a classic, and finally some non-fiction before we're right back to Canadian again. My dedication to this system is irrational, and limiting, but I can't abandon it. I am, however, open to manipulating it. Books can be from both categories, which comes in handy if there's another I would really like to get on with.

Recently, I tried being strict about the categories, which meant I read Esi Edugyan's Half Blood Blues (Canadian) and Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies (Contemporary) close together. They're both historical novels with pedigrees. Blues won the Giller, and Bodies is the sequel to the Booker-winning Wolf Hall. It would have been hard not to compare them while reading - objectively. Or to avoid finding the comparison more flattering to one than the other - subjectively.

Because, in spite of this powerful one-two punch of historical fiction, it's a genre I typically avoid. Why? A writerly tic I call the research dump. Here's an example:  

"It was the beginning of the western offensive. The Krauts hurtled through Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg. Every hour the lines of the map was changing. Day after the Coup, Lilah reported to us that the British ain't got a government, that some damn joker named Churchill taken over. Then the Frogs sent their armies north, and the Limeys opened up a front against the Krauts." (Half Blood Blues)

I suspect writers do it either because they want to get back to their characters and out of historical context, or they just want to show that all that time with the microfiche really meant something. Whatever the cause, it tends to make the narrative hurtle off its path (and into Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg.) But there is another way, as Mantel shows in Bodies:

"8 January: the news arrives at court. It filters out from the king's rooms then runs riot up staircases to the rooms where the queen's maids are dressing, and through the cubby holes where kitchen boys huddle to doze, and along lanes and passages through the breweries and the cold rooms for keeping fish, and up again through the gardens to the galleries and bounces up to the carpeted chambers where Anne Boleyn sinks to her knees and says, 'At last God, not before time!' The musicians tune up for the celebrations."

It takes Mantel at least 30% more words to give less than 0% of the hard facts Edugyan provides. The point of this passage -  that Henry VIII's first wife has finally died - is not even explicitly stated. But it says plenty about the social makeup of Tudor England, and the crooked path of its gossip, as well as how Catherine's death will be something less than mourned. This is all more interesting than the data of her death. That difference is why we pick up an historical novel, and not an encyclopedia. And why I'll probably return to one of these books, before the other.