Edward Rutherfurd and History

Posted by Ed

Today's New York Times features a profile of Edward Rutherfurd, the English historical novelist who's just published a new book spanning 1,100 years of Irish history.

Here's Rutherfurd's take on history:

Mr. Rutherfurd, who is 56, acknowledges Michener as the inventor of the form, a kind of docu-genre. "It's an odd sort of hybrid," he said during a recent visit to New York from his home in Dublin, "a curious region between fiction and nonfiction." Major events and historical characters are real; other characters are imaginary.

Mr. Rutherfurd is scrupulous about accuracy and about avoiding anachronisms. His books are heavily researched and, chapter by chapter, he says, he checks his facts with historians, although by now he could have some claim to that role.

He is candid about his craft: "I think I'm a popularizer of history, a commercial novelist, and I don't think anything is wrong with that." But, he said, he feels an "ethical responsibility not to mislead" the reader.

"I won't cheat on history," he said.

...

For all his emphasis on research, he retains a certain skepticism about history. He recalled an incident from his school days. Two teachers suddenly began fighting in a classroom as 22 boys looked on "in absolute horror." Then the fighting stopped and one of the teachers asked the class to write down what had happened.

"There were 22 conflicting stories," he said. "The moral is, historical truth doesn't exist." Facing historical uncertainty, he will have two fictional characters disagree about events and offer alternative views. Through his fiction Mr. Rutherfurd can arrive at an imaginative approximation of the truth.

I'm always a little wary of arguments that writers like Rutherfurd "have some claim" to the role of historian, though it's hard for a historian or a historian-in-training to develop this argument without sounding jealous of a successful writer. I've never read one of Rutherfurd's books in its entirety, but my sense is that he tells kind of entertaining stories that bring up various interesting historical facts, without giving a very convincing sense of what it was really like to live in the past. (His books, like Michener's, tend to describe the same family over hundreds of years of history, and there are times when every family member sounds suspiciously the same--even when they're separated in time by several hundred years.)

It's great that Rutherfurd has been able to tell his readers about the past, and some of the lessons he offers seem fascinating and potentially important. The profile discusses the preponderance of slavery in early Ireland, the high frequency of divorce, and the common notion of trial marriages, for example. ("Puritanical Irish society is really a 19th-century phenomenon," Rutherfurd says--an important lesson for readers.) But Rutherfurd also says that he was surprised to learn that St. Patrick didn't really rid Ireland of snakes. Was he really this naive before beginning his research, or was this just the sort of silly claim you make to get a reporter to shut up?

Posted by Ed at April 28, 2004 10:48 AM