Heightened history
Tony Palmer
The Lion of England Margaret Butler (Mac' millan £2.75).
The Salamander Morris West (Heinemann £2.25).
Lent Term Elizabeth Sutherland (Constable £2.20).
Ah! The historical novel. To my left the brilliant and fascinating King Henry II of England and parts of France, the first of the brilliant Plantagenets and Hank to his mates, To my right, the conscience-torn Thomas Becket or Thomas a Becket, a beautifulb' drawn character of colossal and brilliant energy. And in the centre the beautiful (and brilliant) Eleanor of Aquitaine, stolen fres.' the wicked King Louis also of parts of France and now causing havoc in the domestic life of the afore-mentioned beautiful and brilliant King Henry.
But who is this who enters, furtively, left? 'Tis King Henry's low-born (inevitably — thts, was the Middle Ages) mistress, the beautiful Hikenai. " Have you kept fresh urine?" ill' quires a midwife of Dame Hernengild. " Soon I must dose her [Hikenai] when the pains waS stronger." "Aye," replies Hemengild, " in yon little pipkin ..."
Mrs Butler gaily admits that such conversa. tions are fictional although she claims that the people who speak them were in fact real •
enough. Yes, there was an historical character called Hikenai who gave birth to Henry's illegitimate son, Geoffrey. Yes, there was an Eleanor of Aquitaine and, although we possess neither tape-recordings of her voice nor Photographs of her face, it is reasonable to surmise what kind of person she was from her deeds and from the reactions to her by those whom she affected in so far as these are known, Mrs Butler tells us. The book is very long. It heaps historical tit-bit upon historical tit-bit. Details about London's squalor in the twelfth century, details of a Lammas fair in Rouen, details of childbirth, of diet, of the stabling of horses, details of costume, headdress and footwear. All of this I have no doubt is accurate, culled as it is from the Work of scholars and researchers whose interests were more prosaic than those of Mrs Butler. But do they add up to a convincing Picture?
First, there is the problem of language. e Mrs Butler avoids falling down the "um of ' thee ' and 'thou.' But her style is cluttered with cliches, too numerous to list here. Presumably, she sought refuge in this Particular literary device to avoid the cruder banalities of mock-Chaucerian. Second, there is the worrying cross-fertilisation between fact and fiction. After all, the advantage of fiction from a writer's point of view is that no 9ne can question its assumptions. The writer 13 always in charge, ascribing to his or her characters whatsoever opinions and emotions he or she chooses, killing them off where ;necessary or allowing them to escape from oPeless situations and against impossible Odds.
Mrs Butler, on the other hand, has no such Possibilities. Her characters are locked within the facts she has been given. Her room for rlanoeuvre, therefore, is severely restricted. onsequently, she gets herself into the most terrible muddles. For example, although the book does not primarily concern the quarrel between Henry and Becket (that, we are Promised, is to come in Volume 2), she fails acqnpletely to understand what it was about Decket that caused Henry to elevate an ob re and impoverished ex-sheriff to be Lord ,ancellor of England. Or if she understands ,En at fatal fascination, she never mentions it. It
other words, it's not enough to spell the natne right or even to have cross-checked most of your references with the most impeccable sources. A vast leap of the imagination is still required to breathe life into those whom legend and history have obscured. Essentially, the art of writing history is often little different from the art of writing fiction in this respect. Both involve selection and interpretation. Both involve cheating a bit to revitalise what is dead. All that finally matters in historical biography is whether the character leaps off the page with something approaching recognisable verisimilitude.
Morris West's The Salamander is also a work of historical fiction, although of the more recent past. It is fact-fiction after the manner of Frederick Forsyth and utterly convincing for that. Set in present day Italy, the story tells of a rich industrialist who fears that the tottering democracy of the West may soon disintegrate, dragging down with it everything that the industrialist has come to admire and need. Or will it? Will that which replaces democracy whether it be a total itarianism of the left or right necessarily en tail a less good life? This, a classic dilemma of political philosophy and central to all quasi political argument since at least the time of Plato, is explored thoroughly and dramatically. A neo-fascist general is assassinated. His death is investigated by a senior official from the Service of Defence Information. What he discovers causes him to question many as' sumptions, not only about the nature of political government but about his own in volvement in it and thus about the many compromises he has been forced to accept both public and private to make the system, his system, work at all. Conceived as a thriller, The Salamander neatly echoes many current political phobias. The present growth of neo-fascism in Italy, moreover, only adds to the plausibility of Mr West's yarn. The Italian social movement, for example, which has twenty-six senators and fifty-six deputies in the Italian parliament, was recently implicated in various bombings and murders in Milan. I have no means of knowing how many of the characters in this book are real.'
I suspect a lot. In which case, assuming Mr West has reported them accurately, I shall not be setting up shop in Rome for the next decade.
Briefly, Mrs Sutherland's novel, Lent Term. It has already won the Constable Fiction Tro phy, which is not that surprising considering it is published by Constable. A neat little tale of sexual frustration and/or repression, it spins along with the flippancy characteristic of its middle-class origins. Adultery comes and goes, causing a little unhappiness here and there, disguising itself as ' understandable lust' and leaving all concerned with the conclusion that maybe they, we, should try a little harder next time — at marriage, that is. Alas, it's all just a bit more complicated than that,
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