Historical Fiction
In 2021, Polygon published the first in its Darkland Tales series, a set of fictional retellings of historical episodes or mythological stories. Denise Mina’s Rizzio kicked the series off, with stories by Scottish powerhouse authors Alan Warner and Jenni Fagan slated for 2022. One clear aim for the series was to reclaim Scottish history for a modern audience, an exciting creative concept and one with mileage, I think, in the classroom.
Rizzio (as the title makes clear) explores a well-known moment in Scottish history – the murder of David Rizzio, a close friend and advisor to Mary, Queen of Scots. The murder of her confidante is made even more devastating for the Queen by the fact that it has been sanctioned by her own craven husband, Darnley, who wants the man murdered in front of his heavily pregnant wife. Mina gives voice (or at least thoughts) to a range of characters – the majority power-hungry men. By casting an eye backwards to the past, Mina shines a light on institutional misogyny in the present. At only 118 pages, this story of encroaching assassins and a queen suffocated by duplicity, disloyalty and subterfuge is a claustrophobic read and not one we would suggest studying with a class as an essay text. But it can and should be used.
An epigraph from Jorge Luis Borges’ A Universal History of Infamy (1935) prefaces Rizzio:
‘The exercises in narrative prose that makes up this book… overly exploit certain tricks: random enumerations, sudden shift of continuity, and the pairing down of a whole man’s life to two or three scenes…They are not, they do not try to be, psychological.’
It describes well the effect that Mina has achieved in the book but also suggests a really stimulating writing exercise, one that is particularly good for those pupils struggling to come up with an idea for a Broadly Creative Folio subject. By asking pupils to alight on a moment in history they find thought-provoking or a historical figure they find intriguing or admirable, and to tell the story from a certain perspective, learners have ready-made settings and characters to use, with only a plot and theme to develop. Pupils might reduce a life or event into three dramatic scenes, or generate a short story that includes key incident, turning point, and climax. A resource pack for pupils, that includes extracts from Rizzio (‘In a Room Full of Razor Blades’ is a good chapter to start with) and texts such as Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet or Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, would support this type of exercise.
Another example of Scottish historical fiction based on real figures from our past comes in the form of the criminally under-studied James Plays by Rona Munro. With their focus on three fascinating kings of Scotland, each play in the trilogy is worthy of study in its entirety. Each is character-rich, plot-heavy, and historically interesting. If we had money to buy in texts to use as a Higher Critical Essay drama text, we would spend it on a class set of the The James Plays. What Munro does especially well in The James Plays is world-build: like Denise Mina, Munro takes readers on an imaginative journey to the heart of a Scottish royal court, something our learners might find difficult to conceptualise in 2021. First performed at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2014 – the year of the Scottish Independence referendum – Munro’s plays of the past speak directly to the politics of the present.
Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall (like Rizzio) is a diminutive novella that uses history in a fascinating way. It is a story that would work well as a Senior Phase text. Silvie, the novella’s protagonist, has been coerced by her parents into joining them on a camping expedition to rural Northumberland, a trip run by Professor Slade as part of an experiential anthropology class. As Silvie’s immersion in this Iron Age live action role play continues, past and present become indistinguishable. The novella’s climax (although somewhat inevitable from the start) is nevertheless chilling when it arrives, as Silvie. Core thematic strands to tease out with Senior Phase learners are violence and brutality and women’s place in society, themes that will resonate powerfully with our teenagers.
Writing historical fiction also affords pupils the chance to reimagine, reinterpret or reinvent the past. Susanna Clarke’s alternative history novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (published in 2014 and adapted in seven parts for the BBC in 2015) is a great example of what can be done creatively with historical fact. The world of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is nineteenth century Regency London, but it is also a gothic world, the world of magic and the realm of the supernatural. In this respect, it is both a historical novel and fantasy fiction. It is too big to deal with in a classroom, but snippets would be perfect to demonstrate to pupils the sheer versatility of the historical novel. Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) works in the same way: this book reimagines the outcome of World War Two, creating a counterfactual history of what might have happened between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan (if they had been the victors). The politics of The Man in the High Castle (adapted for Amazon Prime) might require some explaining, but again, looking at snapshots from the text will allow learners to get a quick feel for how to build alternative worlds like Philip K. Dick.
What other ways could we teach historical fiction in our English classrooms? What is the one text piece of historical fiction you would recommend all English teachers read? Join in the discussion on Twitter.