Fictional Life

[sartorias]

In writing up a short review for Gillian Polack's enjoyable, and well-researched time travel novel I was thinking more about historical novels, and the many layers that appeal to readers

Comments

[whswhs]

I have moderately different priorities for historical fiction, though I certainly share your appreciation for Austen. I'm willing to have the dark aspects of the past appear in a story, as a basis for showing the protagonist facing them with courage and integrity; I think the ability to do that is an admirable human trait, and I'd like a story to give me a character I can admire. (I just reread Stranger in a Strange Land, and while I have complex mixed feelings about it, I was still moved by Jubal Harshaw's discussion of Rodin's fallen caryatid.)

I have to say that your comment about historical fiction you loathe is a painfully close fit to how I felt about Taylor's Just One Damned Thing after Another. The PoV character's hostility toward Christianity seemed so intense that I could not imagine how anyone could have chosen her to spend time in a past society. And you know, I myself am not Christian, and find many aspects of Christianity's history repugnant (particularly the long centuries when I would have been tortured to death for what I believe); but I just could not endure spending any more time in Taylor's character's head.

(Having read your review) Artemisia Wormwood? Really? Her parents must have had an arcane sense of humor. . . .

[sartorias]

Yeah: I find any kind of one note bigotry like that irritating.

I can deal with dark things but like you, I want to see them faced with courage and integrity, that is nicely said. (I also don't want a stone depressing ending. That I can get reading history.)

[whswhs]

As James Joyce put it, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken." Fifty years ago I had hopes that we might do so.