A couple of weeks ago I was talking to a friend, both of us bemoaning the fact the historical novel has changed little since the days of Sir Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth, the pioneers of the form.
Read Guy Mannering, followed by Wolf Hall or The Boleyn Girl, and the only noticeable difference, across 200 years, is that today's writers know they are pandering to shorter attention spans, smaller vocabularies, plot junkies and those less well drilled in the basic facts of the country's history. They realise too that a novel that does not offer a liberal sprinkling of sex is like sausages without mash.
Putting aside the changing perspectives and preoccupations fashionable in each age, in essence the historical novel is like a woolly mammoth found in a peat bog: virtually unchanged since it first roamed the earth, though a little bedraggled and limp.
You can imagine, then, how excited I was to find a book which can claim to be a truly original take on the historical novel. The Wake, by Paul Kingsnorth (Unbound, £16.99), is an account of the rebellion among the English peasantry that followed the Norman Conquest of 1066. Few people know anything about the revolt that erupted in the three years after William the Conqueror's arrival, when a band of guerrilla fighters tried to restore the old order.
Kingsnorth's aim, however, is much more ambitious than to remind readers of a long forgotten uprising. Emulating James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, he has also written his book in an idiosyncratic, partially made-up language, in his case a version of Old English, made intelligible to modern readers. As he explains: "To achieve the sound and look I wanted on the page I have combined Old English words with modern vocabulary, mutated and hammered the shape of OE words and word endings to suit my purpose, and been wanton in combining the Wessex dialect with that of Mercia, Anglia and Northumberland - and dropping in a smattering of Old Norse when it seemed to work."
Justifying his decision to take this challenging step, Kingsnorth writes: "I simply don't get on with historical novels written in contemporary language. The way we speak is specific to our time and place. Our assumptions, our politics, our worldview, our attitudes - all are implicit in our words, and what we do with them. To put 21st-century sentences into the mouths of 11th-century characters would be the equivalent of giving them iPads and cappuccinos: just wrong."
In theory, I would agree. Almost every word a fictional character from the past speaks is an anachronism - as is the very act of historical fiction itself. And if characters are based on real people, then one can add impertinence to the sins the novelist commits.
Language is the biggest hurdle any historical novelist faces, as they try to steer between cod-period vocabulary and jarring modernity in the way their characters speak. But to compose the entire book in the language of its long-gone characters is exhilarating, a brave attempt to illuminate the chasm between us and those from an era when people thought and behaved very differently.
I plunged into The Wake, and soon found theory is one thing, practice another. The first chapter begins: "see i had cnawan yfel was cuman when i seen this fugol glidan ofer a great blaec fugol it was not of these lands..."
Twenty pages later I was reading at the same doleful pace. But I have not given up. The idea is too fascinating, the experiment too bold not to give it a chance. On first approach, however, Kingsnorth's medieval characters are not just from another age, but have been slowed to a crawl. Rendering their thoughts in such restricted vocabulary risks making them seem far more primitive and limited than they were. That too is surely a misrepresentation, like all the rest.
Rosemary Goring will be discussing historical fiction at Aye Write! with Allan Massie, Robyn Young and Elisabeth Gifford on April 5.
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