George Garrett and the Historical Novel
Monroe K. Spears
George Garrett's Death of the Fox (1971) and The Succession (1983) are such remarkable historical novels that they may be considered either fulfillments of the genre or repudiations of it. The term "historical novel" will not stand up under much examination. All narratives are historical in the sense that they must be placed in time and—even experiments in using the stream of consciousness and the historical present—must be retrospective. But a narrative concerned primarily with historical fact—with what actually happened—is not a novel, and poetry is closer to philosophy than to history, as Aristotle said. So what useful meaning can the term have? The question would seem to be one of degree or emphasis: historical fiction is fiction in which history is important, in which the author lays claim to historical as well as poetic truth and the reader is kept aware of the historical aspect, conscious that the time of the action is distant from his own.
Of historicalfiction thus simply defined we may distinguish two kinds. The first is that extremely popular form of entertainment in which the historical aspect is superficial, mainly picturesque and amusing or titillating. The costume romance places fictional characters against a backdrop of historical events and historical personages; but the central characters, insofar as they are real, are modern, and their doings bear at most a peripheral relation to the important events of the time. While this kind of fiction can be very attractive and sometimes informative, it rises no higher because the historical aspect has no meaning other than to
