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Adding to the dilemma that Mike points out we
have other circumstances.
Captain Frederick Marryat wrote a series of
novels about Nelson's Navy and he served with Nelson. They're all quite
readable and enjoyable. So when a contemporary writes novels for his
time they may be our historical novels. Hugo's Hunchback, Crane's Red
Badge of Courage, Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days, Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle's Holmes and Watson all give one an opportunity to escape into another
time and place. Any book has three components: Character (meeting
interesting people), Plot (being attracted to their story), and local color
(the sight, smell, taste, and sound of everything around the people and their
story). I can enjoy a story with one interesting character and lots of
local color.
Patrick O'Brian offers the story of friendship
between two dissimilar men aboard a small sailing ship in 1800 confined for
months with many other characters. POB's skill is to sketch deeply
all these people and their relationships. BTW, today, 5 NOV, Neal
Conan will interview the director Peter Weir about his POB movie, Master and
Command: the far side of the world at 1PM CENTRAL time on NPR. Though POB
wanted to be a "serious" novelist, he stumbled into his success and discovered
the genre of "historical novel" held in contempt. In one interview he said
that he visited Border's and was delighted to find his books in the "literature"
section.
Thus, a historical novel is any that would place
me so deeply into a time and introduce me to the people of that time even if I
had only met them before in a history class.
John Berg
bookseller
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