9 - Transgression and Experimentation

Summary

It could be argued that the British historical novel is the most important, influential and enduring literary genre of the last thirty-five years. A brief sketch of those books considered to be key since 1980 might consist solely of novels engaged in meditations upon the past and its relationship to the present: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981); Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984); Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion (1987); Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day (1989); Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (1991–95); Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood (1997); Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet (1998); Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001); Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist (2002); David Peace’s GB84 (2004); Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004); Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009); and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2011). A number of other novels could be added as historical-esque, insofar as they have significant moments of flashback, pastiche or recollected narrative: A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990); Gordon Burn’s Alma Cogan (1991); Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991); Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up (1994); Jackie Kaye’s Trumpet (1998); David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004); Nicola Barker’s Darkmans (2007); Doris Lessing’s The Cleft (2007); and Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (2014). Indeed, from a relatively marginal position in the early 1980s, the literary historical form has become increasingly ‘respectable’ and decidedly popular. The critical and popular importance of the form was institutionalised in 2010 with the inauguration of the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, one of the most valuable awards in the United Kingdom. It is increasingly institutionally supported, as Creative Writing courses include modules on historical writing, societies of authors form and prizes multiply.