Historical Fiction You Can Taste
Non-Epics of the Good, the Bad, and the Ordinary
Alfred Duggan and Cecelia Holland give history lessons that are relatively brief and down-to-earth, but never dull.
Aficionados of historical fiction can choose from an ever widening menu that ranges from Hugo and Tolstoy great to bodice-ripping schloch. One can concentrate on a given period by immersion in the Regency novels of a fine writer like Georgette Heyer, or get massive doses of an earlier time and place from Colleen McCullough. Still another option is books that are relatively brief and prosaic yet subtly informative and intriguing. The works of the late Alfred Duggan and still-flourishing Cecelia Holland stand out in this sector.
Duggan, a respected author of scholarly history, also produced a series of novels, written primarily in the 1950's. More than half were about Dark Ages and medieval England, but he made occasional forays into ancient Rome and the Crusades. His trademark was accurate depiction of historical events, objective portrayals of actual historic personages, and unadorned, dispassionate description of daily life.
Not for him the flowing banners, blaring trumpets, glittering pageants, and eloquent oratory of Shakespeare and Hollywood. Duggan's kings and nobles fret and conspire in dimly lit, drafty castles and fortresses, often barely able to maintain their households, much less dispose of the destinies of nations. The material and nervous strains of the court of King John that pervade "Leopards and Lilies" make it easy to understand how that much unloved successor to the glamorous Richard the Lionhearted was forced to grant the Magna Carta and thus unwittingly allow the history of the world to be altered.
So, too, "Count Bohemond" chronicles the genuine heroics of one of the authentic champions of the First Crusade without sparing his human weaknesses and misjudgements. Meanwhile, the unglorious side of a desert campaign and the less-than-noble motivations of many of the Crusaders suggest why the Western adventure in the Holy Land went downhill from there.
Duggan's point seems to be that historical advances are hard-won and fragile, and that they are gained by essentially ordinary people rising to extraordinary achievement, sometimes through inspiration and sometimes in pursuit of the most basic goals.
Cecilia Holland, writing since the 1960's, has covered a broader range than Duggan. While she treads some of his medieval and Crusades ground, she also deals with King Tut, the Mongols, the Byzantines, the Renaissance Florentines, and the Irish, as well as 19th century California, her home state. She, too, is able to tell a substantive historical tale in 300 pages or so.
"Jerusalem" depicts the failure to maintain the spiritual and military heights of the First Crusade conquest. The Latin Kingdom is torn by jealousy, intrigue, and plain loss of interest by most of the original victorious "coalition of the willing". Holland's description of a hot, thirsty Crusader force on its way to repulse an assault on the Holy City is vivid enough to foreshadow the crushing defeat awaiting them at the Horns of Hattin. Along the way, she milks the irony of an earlier embarrassing near-capture of Saladin, the eventual superhero on the Saracen side, and of the mean-spirited backbiting of some of the defenders of God's kingdom on earth.
In "The Angel and the Sword," Holland "normalizes" (well almost) an epic about a princess who disguised herself as a man and helped save France from 9th century Viking invaders. While the underlying plot has been a winner for ages, the most memorable passages in this book describe the daily scrounging for food in a besieged city and the vulnerability of what passed for a medieval kingdom.
Search engines and on-line book purveyors are facilitating the location of the works of these two authors, many of which are being reprinted after decades.
