Historical fiction

I’ve read a couple of books recently that fall into the category of historical fiction. While they have been great stories, I must admit that they are not my thing. 

The first was ‘Quo Vadis’ by Henryk Sienkiewicz, the winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 1905, which tells the tale of the rise of Christianity during the time of Emperor Nero in Ancient Rome. The second was ‘Alexander: Child of a Dream’, the first part of Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s trilogy, telling of his birth, through the death of his father and his eventual start on his quest to conquer Asia. It was my son in law who lent me the book and once I have a book I have to read it sometime.

Both books were a bit long, though the Alexander book was very easy to read and I got through it in a couple of days.  I did enjoy them both but there are things about the genre which trouble me and I find hard to explain fully. 

One is that the story drives the characters rather than the characters driving the story. In effect you know how things are going to unfold already or at least parts of it. It’s a bit like painting by numbers, the plot is already there and it needs to be coloured in. The authors are very talented story tellers though and they colour in the plot well, yet there are things they add to the story that they could not possibly know. The authors assign feelings and thoughts to the characters that are pure invention.

Of course this is true of all fiction yet the reader is in danger of believing that the things in the book are actually true. All writing contains bias and even factual documentaries have an element of invention and licence.

The second difficulty  is that the protagonists are always a bit too heroic. Even their flaws are portrayed as character building. Yes, the story is about them and they have to be bigged up but nobody is that good. 

I need to get over myself and just enjoy the books. After all, historical fiction is just that, fiction.