Earlier this week, I finished reading Colleen McCullough’s The First Man in Rome, which is a fiction novel about the Roman Republic. If you’re into Ancient Rome at
all, I definitely recommend reading it. But sadly, telling you how awesome it
is is not the purpose of this post, so onward.
The book covers the political and military careers of Gaius
Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla, two of my favourite Ancient Romans. So I was reading along, and these two main characters were besties, and things were going
along swimmingly. But there was a problem (and yes, spoilers lie ahead) –
having studied the history of the Roman Republic, I knew that eventually they
fall out and end up at the heads of opposing sides of a civil war. And that
Sulla goes really evil and massacres thousands of people. And the closer I got
to the end of the book, the less I enjoyed it, because I knew what was coming,
and I didn’t want it to happen. And
even when I got to the final pages, and discovered that it doesn’t actually
happen (presumably until the next book in the series) I still felt
discontented, because although McCullough had written what seems like a happy ending, I knew that
really it wasn’t. And that after the two main characters walk off arm-in-arm
into the sunset (and yes, this is genuinely what happens in the closing scene)
one of them turns around a backstabs the other, and it all goes downhill from
there.
So essentially, my spoiler alert, which lies several lines up, is not a
spoiler for the book at all, but a spoiler for history. And herein lies the problem. Is
this just an inevitable thing you have to face, if you want to write historical
fiction – that people can be spoiled for your book without having even heard of it? This seems like a very sad
state of affairs, but if you’re writing historically about real people, it’s an
inescapable fact. And sure, you can do it incredibly well – as McCullough does –
but it still niggles at the back of the reader’s mind that they know what’s coming.
Of course, this is a greater problem in some historical
stories than others. Marius and Sulla don’t have a nice story: they start
out as friends, and then they destabilise the Roman Republic through civil war, and then Marius dies and Sulla becomes dictator and kills everyone (or something to that effect, but far less horribly simplified).
And it makes for a terrible story, if you're after anything remotely resembling a happy ending. So
perhaps McCullough just chose poorly (or I shouldn’t have chosen to read about
those characters, if I wanted things to end well). But I feel like it probably
goes the other way, too – if you know that life turns out well for your
historical figure of choice, doesn’t it detract something from the tension of
the novel? It’s like you’ve already flipped to the last page before you even
start.
 |
| Every single time. |
I’m not sure exactly where these thoughts are going, because
I enjoy reading historical fiction, and it has never stuck me as a huge
problem before, even when reading novels about, say, Marie-Antoinette, who always gets guillotined at the end. But as it is, I’m apprehensive about reading the
sequel to The First Man in Rome,
because McCullough created her characters too well, and so the last thing I
want to see is their inevitable downfall. So maybe the problem iinherent in
historical fiction, but only really well-written historical fiction. But if
well-written is the problem, then I
don’t know what we do. How do you
pull off a good novel, when everyone knows the ending? Have you read any
historical novels where you think it’s been done well? Or done really badly? I've now made myself rather confused about the whole historical fiction lark, so thoughts are
appreciated.
