Experiencing the Past

I’ve written about Edward Rutherfurd’s multi-generational novels a few times before. They can’t be considered classics or Great Books with a capital G and a capital B. But they get me thinking about history and large themes, and so, on the whole, I’ve enjoyed reading them and rereading them. The first of his books that I read was Sarum, which centers on the U.K. area around Stonehenge and the town of Salisbury. I’m rereading it now and don’t like it quite as much this time, and I’m not sure why. I reread London a couple of years ago and loved it. Perhaps my problem lies in the fact that I’m listening to all 50 hours of Sarum in the car, an experience which has taken months. Perhaps it’s simply a consequence of it being Rutherfurd’s first book, before he learned how not to lose the character trees in the historical forest.

But I liked Sarum enough the first time to read several of his other offerings, and I do remember what tickled my fancy so much fifteen or twenty years ago: I’m a sucker for novels that give a sense of a sweep of history, with characters having to deal with, in this case, Saxon invaders, the Plague, the reign of Bloody Mary, and other people and events I’ve read about in histories. C. S. Lewis tells us that what he calls a myth is the only way of getting the reader inside a world so as to feel what it’s like to see things, do things, and believe things beyond our ability to experience. Think about the difference between reading a clinical description of love and the experience of being in love. Huge, right? The shelves are full of descriptions of historical settings, but, without time machines, how can we experience any of those times with an intensity the lover feels? Through stories we can. I can read a history of the Wars of the Roses, but what was it like to live at the time, with neighbors and family taking different sides? Through Rutherfurd’s fictional account of the Wilsons and Shockleys of Salisbury, I can get a taste.

I also enjoy little mentions of things like the source of the name Charing Cross or Shakespeare visiting the town with a group of players. But herein lies the problem. Sometimes in Sarum there are too many mere mentions and not enough storytelling. And sometime the storytelling takes the form of dry narrative exposition rather than that of an interaction of characters. Take the chapter I’m in now, which covers the eighteenth century. We’re told at the beginning that Samuel Shockley lost all of his money in the South Sea Bubble, but then the details of the investments and the crash are all given in past-perfect narrative; we learn practically nothing about Samuel and don’t get inside the story of the ruin by seeing how it affected an individual. (When a novel presents me with more than a couple of sentences in a row in past-perfect tense, I start to get bored. Why is the book telling me about a previous event from the outside instead of placing me in the middle of it?) A little later in the chapter we learn (in the past perfect again) that Thomas Arne has written “Rule, Britannia”; but what was it like to sing that anthem? We learn narratively that the characters read Pope and Johnson and Voltaire, but we don’t experience a scene in which characters talk about this contemporary literature. Did they like it? Agree with it? Understand it? Without the experience, the mention of these authors just seems like name dropping.

OK. So much for me trying to change The Way Novels Are Written. Even if Sarum might have too much exposition, the parts that tell stories about characters do exactly what I want historical fiction to do. The chapter on the first century, for instance, gets me a sense of the experience, like no other book I remember, of what it felt like to live in a Roman outpost town. The chapter about the fifth century sets me down in the middle of a civilization that has a Roman legacy but that has largely accepted Christianity, although the Roman-British Christians in question debate the legitimacy of the theology of Pelagius. And debate it they do. Here Rutherfurd doesn’t just inform us that Pelagius had ideas and Augustine had other ideas; he gives us believable conversations between characters that show how diverging doctrine affected relationships. So maybe the novel isn’t a Great Book with a capital G and a capital B. But experiencing the life of a fifth-century citizen of Roman Britannia is kind of lower-case great.