Five Best Books: Historical Fiction
Rebecca Stott says these novels are historical fiction of the first rank


By REBECCA STOTT

1 The Rings of Saturn
By W.G. Sebald
New Directions, 1998

In "Rings of Saturn," the *German author W.G. Sebald weaves fact and
fiction into a book that is part memoir, part travel narrative, part
meditative essay and part history. The story twists and turns and
shuttles back and forth through time and along England's desolate East
Anglian coastline. As the unnamed narrator makes his way south on a
walking tour through sand dunes and villages, he describes the
relentless erosion of the coast, and as he does, stories wash uplike the
workings of memorywherever he goes. A postcard here, a newspaper cutting
elsewhere, the remains of a mulberry tree, a photographthese lost
objects lead him to discussions of Chateaubriand, Swinburne and Conrad,
mackerel fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms. For Sebald, history and
memory is like a storeroom in a derelict mansionfull of dusty, nearly
forgotten things, each of which, in the author's hands, yields its own
haunting tale.

2 Orlando
By Virginia Woolf
Harcourt, Brace, 1928

Virginia Woolf described this fantastical biography as her holiday from
serious fiction and based it on the life story and family history of her
friend Vita Sackville-West. Orlando, born a nobleman in the 16th
century, lives and writes through four centuries while aging little at
all, changing from a man to a woman, ending up as a female writer in the
early 20th century, encountering scores of historical and literary
figures along the way. People are "a rag-bag of odds and ends," Woolf
writes, "lightly stitched together by a single thread. Memory is the
seamstress, and a capricious one at that." Following her cross-dressing,
sex-changing protagonist through time, Woolf challenges what we take for
granted about history, time and identity. Along the way, she pays homage
to 18th-century novels like Daniel Defoe's "Moll Flanders" and Laurence
Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" in a tale that is funny, fast and
iconoclastic.

3 Shame
By Salman Rushdie
Knopf, 1983

Often overshadowed by "Midnight's Children" and "The Satanic Verses,"
Salman Rushdie's "Shame" is a virtuoso piece of history writing, a
magical-realist, alternative portrait of Pakistan. Rushdie isn't
interested in verisimilitude; he is concerned with the violent effects
of sexual and familial shame in Pakistan and the ways in which they play
out over time. The novel is both beautiful and inventive in its
audacious mix of political satire and fairy tale. It opens with the
birth of Omar Khayyam Shakil to "the three mothers," hermetic sisters
who have become indistinguishable in their closeness and who vow never
to reveal who actually bore him. They resolve to raise the fatherless
boy with no sense of shame. Omar's story gradually shades into those of
Iskander Harappa and Raza Hyder, characters based on Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto, Pakistan's prime minister in the 1970s, and Gen. Mohammad Zia
ul-Haq, who assumed power after a 1977 coup and ordered Bhutto's
execution. As the family stories intertwine, shame erupts with
increasing violence until it threatens to engulf everything.

4 Waverley
By Walter Scott
1814

"Waverley" is said to be the very first historical novel. Given how
well-established and varied the genre is these days, it is easy to
overlook how inventive Walter Scott's work was. Its hero is a
wonderfully flawed character, an idealistic young English soldier,
Edward Waverley, who wavers constantly in his political and romantic
allegiances as he travels though England and Scotland during the turmoil
of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. This is history as anthropology and
travel writing. As Waverley makes his way, coming of age and falling in
love, he is swayed by a succession of fascinating men and women he
encounters, among them the politically moderate Baron Bradwardine and
his pretty daughter, Rose, and then the passionate and uncompromising
Jacobite Flora MacIcvor and her mercurial brother, who want to restore
the Stuart dynasty and put Bonnie Prince Charlie on the throne. Don't be
put off by the first meandering, context-setting 60 pages. Once you're
in, you'll be swept away by the color and the drama of it all, by the
smell of heather and the sound of bagpipes.

5 One Hundred Years of Solitude
By Gabriel García Márquez
Avon, 1970

My breath is still taken away by the audacity and power of this story
about the many generations of a family in the fictional Colombian town
of Macondo. It is a tale, as well, of Colombia itself a mix of romance,
fantasy and history. Shipwrecked Spanish galleons turn up in the middle
of the jungle; a pious woman disappears into the sky like an angel; a
pair of star-crossed lovers are shadowed constantly by a cloud of yellow
butterflies. Magic erupts into the mundane. Gabriel García Márquez meant
this novel, first published in Spanish in 1967, to show the workings of
time, how it stops and starts, relapses, circles and changes speed. But
"One Hundred Years of Solitude" is intended to show, above all, how much
more than the mere recording of fact is required to fathom the past.
Having lived under a series of Colombian dictators who revised history
as they pleased, Márquez has an understandable passion for distrusting
received wisdom and delving for deeper truths.
Ms. Stott is the author most recently of "The Coral Thief," a novel set
in France after Napoleon's fall.