War and Peace and Nostalgia: New Historical Fiction

Historical fiction—our most inclusive of literary genres—is, by definition, fiction set in the past, typically a bygone era with which we and the writer likely have no lived familiarity. Fascinating period details abound and sometimes notable figures show up, too, but what fundamentally resonates with us is the evocation of a distant world at once alien and similar to our own. At its core, historical fiction appeals to our nostalgic sensibilities. If we are drawn to an idyllic past, we are drawn as well to profundity, for that which is meaningful and deeply felt, even painfully consequential. Which is why, in our nostalgia (at least as readers), it's often the tragic that we romanticize most intensely, that most satisfies our cathartic urge.

Hence, the backdrop of war in so much historical fiction. War is the ideal dramatic framework: life and death, heroism and villainy, pleasure and pain, all on a national or global scale, providing a deeper context for our characters' private dramas. It is realism at its most heightened, and no era captivates the Western literary imagination as much as World War II. At the center of its myriad theaters of conflict is history's most horrific horror; at the center of that, history's most villainous villain. That larger narrative of the war exemplifies what the English critic Christopher Booker calls an "Overcoming the Monster" plot, where the hero sets out to defeat a threatening, often evil force and, after setbacks and much loss, vanquishes this threat and restores order to the realm. The last part is crucial. World War II fiction, even when it doesn't directly involve the war or any clear heroes or monsters, is still framed by the promise of our eventual triumph over Hitler and the Nazis. That promise provides a safe space, if you will, for the romance of that era in Western literature.

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One wonders if this romance has driven Kate Atkinson's imagination of late. Turning from the detective plots of her popular Jackson Brodie novels, she has immersed her last three books in the sweeping tragedies of twentieth-century world war. In 2013's ingenious Life After Life, her heroine, Ursula Todd, dies on the second page, then proceeds to die again and again throughout the novel as Atkinson continually rewrites her life for the reader, including one where she befriends Eva Braun, shoots Hitler in the heart, and is herself shot. Atkinson's equally ambitious companion novel from 2015, A God In Ruins, tackles this notion of multiple lives more subtly and arguably with more pathos. The protagonist now is Ursula's younger brother, Teddy, and while we've lost the high-wire storytelling of Life After Life, we are again crisscrossing through time and all the stages of Teddy's long life, at the center of which are his harrowing days as an RAF bomber pilot during World War II. These exhilarating passages replay throughout the novel and reinforce its central irony: In surviving the most extraordinary experience of his life, Teddy is doomed to live in its shadow, his heroic past depriving him of all the other lives he could have lived. While Life After Life revels in rebirth and endless possibilities, A God In Ruins contends with the immutability of the past and the certainty of decay. Both novels, however, derive their power fundamentally from the framing of this era as a moral and emotional apotheosis of their protagonists' lives, no matter how many lives they each have.

World War II casts an overwhelming shadow again in Atkinson's new novel, Transcription, which opens with its heroine hit by a car and lying on the pavement. Juliet Armstrong is a former M15 agent who's just returned home to England after a long exile. It's 1981. Princess Diana is about to be married. As death approaches, Juliet thinks of the war: of the Russians who'd been England's enemies, then allies, then enemies...