this is a drastically secularized account of the English Reformation: the major players
in this fiction are not motivated by the religious beliefs which, in records of the
period, they profess. The exception is Sir Thomas More, beheaded for being unwill-
ing to swear that the King was the Supreme Head of the Church. More, who died ‘the
King’s good servant, but God’s first’, is regarded by Thomas Cromwell, his successor
as Chancellor, as weak and deluded, a fanatic, and a hypocrite. Hilary Mantel agrees
with Cromwell. To discredit religious motive is to misunderstand the history of this
period, as historians have increasingly accepted. Fictional plausibility and historical
responsibility, the twin criteria for judging historical fiction, can pull apart. Among
the literary prizes won by Wolf Hallwas the Walter Scott prize for historical fiction.
An analogy might be a historical novel which presented Adolf Hitler as a much-
misunderstood man. Such a novel would probably be more severely judged if
published a hundred years after Hitler’s death than it might three hundred years later.
Historical fiction
More generally, the adoption of documentary and historical material, a source of
fiction since at least the time of Defoe, recurs in well-researched historical novels
about slavery, or the lives of men at the Front in the First World War, or scenes from
colonial life. The injection of modern concerns into an historically authentic scene
is often found unobjectionable.
Patrick O’Brian
A genuinely literary triumph at the lighter end of the ‘historical’ spectrum is the
series of Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O’Brian(1914–1999). O’Brian was a
skilled writer of short stories, who during the war changed his identity, his wife and
his surname.He later lived by translating best-sellers from French, and wrote what
Sir Kenneth Clark thought the best life of Picasso.The Golden Ocean, a fictional
exploration of the round-the-world voyage of George Anson, led, late in O’Brian’s
life,to an immensely successful series of novels based on the adventures of the
English Captain Aubrey and the Irish-Catalan ship’s surgeon Dr Maturin, who is
also a British spy. These originated in a commission from an American editor to
co ntinue the naval romances of the late C. S. Forester. Perhaps the best in the series
is the first,Master and Commander(1970).The series builds on Forester’s formula
but rises far above pastiche to a plausible blend of social history and naval science in
the period of Nelson and Admiral Cochrane. O’Brian wrote excellent English as well
as good period English. The appeal of his fiction is part period charm and nostalgia
for naval heroics, part enjoyment of the geo-political games of international intelli-
gence. The author was skilled in misinformation. But they are chiefly a triumph of
style. O’Brian’s finest fictional achievement was his Honorary Doctorate of Letters,
awarded to him in real life by Trinity College, Dublin, in the belief that O’Brian was
Irish. He was English, if of German extraction, and his knowledge of Ireland, as of
sailing, was gained almost entirely from books. He did not write out of his own
experience.
Genre has to come into any view of contemporary fiction, since what might be
called the literary novel, the art novel, the experimental novel, even the well-made or
well-written novel, now operate closer to a middlebrow norm. Such a norm has
historically been the waveband of the novel, a form which arose as the middle classes
rose and which has always had more Gaskells and Trollopes than Sternes, Merediths,
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