NOT THE END OF THE STORY

Niall Ferguson says that, after years of

unreadable historians, readable ones are back

AS ALL history undergraduates know, before Macaulay began his History of Eng- land he declared that he would 'not be sat- isfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fash- ionable novel on the tables of the young ladies'.

It has been a very long time indeed since academic historians shared that aspiration to write readable, popular history. Indeed, until recently it would have been true to say that the late A.J.P. Taylor was the last to do so; otherwise the field was left pretty much clear for non-academic writers like Paul Johnson and Antonia Fraser. Howev- er, the immense critical and commercial success of Orlando Figes's book A People's Tragedy — a superbly crafted history of the Russian revolution — suggests that a younger generation of dons once again has its sights on the young ladies' tables.

Figes's pedigree could not be more aca- demically respectable. Now a Fellow of Trinity, Cambridge, he had a starry under- graduate career at Caius, learnt Russian and spent long years in the notoriously inaccessible Russian archives, grappling with the seriously difficult subject of peas- ants during the civil war period. But his second book, with its elegant mix of sweeping narrative and telling detail, is at once scholarly and a literary delight. A People's Tragedy has just won the presti- gious W.H. Smith award — a tidy £10,000 — beating such modish fiction writers as Graham Swift and Roddy Doyle. It is even tipped by some for the NCR prize.

Nor is Figes the only academic historian to be snapping up prizes more usually won by novelists. Earlier this year, Oxford's Diarmaid MacCulloch won no fewer than three awards for his Thomas Cranmer. Norman Davies's massive Europe: A Histo- ry is also on the NCR shortlist. What these books have in common is not only their erudition but the quality of their narrative structures. This is history with the empha- sis on story.

To grasp what a revolution this is, you only need to go back a few years. When I applied to Magdalen as a spotty Glaswe- gian wannabe in the early 1980s, I was under the mistaken impression that Taylor was still a Fellow at the college. I recall being astonished to discover that my hero had some time before left Oxford under a cloud of bien pensant disapproval, and was now to be found in a corner of the Beaver- brook archives, churning out why-oh-why pieces for the papers.

Like Macaulay, Taylor was the master narrator, a man who painstakingly dis- cerned complex chains of events in the chaos of documents (mainly published documents), then realised them on the page with captivating rhetorical skill. But the historians of the next generation especially those who had come of age in the 1960s and 1970s — contemptuously repudiated 'the history of events'. Whether they had imbibed it directly from Marx or indirectly from the French Annales school, they believed passionately that history should be about structures.

There were always, it is true, dissenters. It remained possible to escape from E.P. Thompson by studying the high politics of the 19th and 20th centuries, where biogra- phy continued to hold sway. But aside from biography (which is the easiest kind of narrative history to write), there were precious few historians — Maurice Cowl- ing in Peterhouse was a heroic exception — who bothered with events. It was all `economy', 'social stratification' and `asso- ciational life'.

Matters were not much improved by the discovery of anthropology, a discipline which enabled those averse to number- crunching to construct elaborate models intended to explain 'popular culture' (for 'I believe Ann Widdecombe put it there.' example, why menstruating women in mediaeval Cracow had to abstain from eat- ing cauliflower).

In this arid climate, practically the only relief was provided by the pupils of Sir John Plumb. Quentin Skinner preserved political thought as a discipline (it quietly died in Oxford). David Cannadine made social history faintly amusing by studying the aristocracy. And Simon Schama made lavish illustration respectable. But it was only really when Schama produced his Citi- zens — a witty and irreverent history of the French revolution — that the tide showed any sign of turning.

Of course, academics would never have been able to return to narrative history without a pretentious theoretical justifica- tion for doing so. This was provided by the American Hayden White and Natalie Zemon Davies, whose Return of Martin Guerre is often cited as the start of the 'nar- rative revival'. Certainly it would be hard to think of a better example of the new histo- ry as literature (not to mention film and musical). Nevertheless, it was only when historians like Schama and Figes started taking on big subjects that the narrative revival really began.

Naturally, the old guard grinds its teeth at the sight of colleagues in the bestseller list. Both Figes and Norman Davies have been on the receiving end of truly ven- omous reviews — both in American publi- cations. Of course, if you write a big, ambitious book, you are bound to make more slips than the author of Pigeon-fancy- ing in Prestwick, 1823-7. And anyone who writes a narrative of the Russian revolution is likely to echo previous narratives — after all, there are only so many ways of saying that Lenin died in 1924. Authors of fiction do not have to worry about this sort of flak when they win prizes; for successful histori- ans it is the main occupational hazard.

There is only one problem with the nar- rative revival, and it is the perennial one of applying literary forms to history. Literary genres are to some extent predictable, indeed that is part of their appeal. Even if a story is unknown to us — and there is no dust-jacket blurb to give us the gist of the story — the fiction writer writes with the ending in mind and frequently hints at it to the reader for the sake of irony, or some other effect. (Martin Amis clearly exposed the dangers of this approach in his Time's Arrow.) To write history according to the conventions of a novel is therefore to impose a new kind of determinism on the past, the teleology of the traditional narra- tive form.

Yet the past is not so coherent; and to impose a narrative form on it is to obscure the fundamentally chaotic quality of contem- porary experience. As I argue in my own small contribution to the new, readable his- tory (Virtual History: Alternatives and Coun- terfactuals, Picador, £20), there is a danger in taking Macaulay as a model; for, as Herbert Butterfield long ago pointed out, that way lies a new version of 'Whig history'.

The truly great historical narrative never loses sight of the fact that events often have more than one possible outcome. The great strength of A People's Tragedy is that it is written with that in mind; its only weakness is that the possible alternatives to Lenin and co. are too little explored hence the praise heaped on the book by that incorrigible Marxist Eric Hobsbawm.

The author is fellow and tutor in Modern History at Jesus College, Oxford.