The Problem with Historical Novels

...Yes, he was a self-dramatist...

...The entire country was like an espionage trade fair," notes Wright...

...It is 1915, and the war correspondent H. W. Nevinson observes the Gallipoli disaster, reminiscent of Ladysmith but much worse, organized by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, who also endured the Boer War battle...

...I remember him on the long trek to Ladysmith all those years ago...

...But while Wild is a known historical figure, he is not well-known...

...A recent work that achieved this ideal, or nearly did, was Giles Foden's 1999 novel about Idi Amin, The Last King of Scotland...

...Most of Ladysmith is painfully slow, and the descriptive powers Foden demonstrated in The Last King of Scotland seem curiously blunted...

...Hundreds of books on the Crusades, the Civil War, the Puritans, appear to have made no particular change in the way we conduct our political and mental lives...

...Did he actually keep a cache of pin-filled voodoo dolls that included effigies of his former CIA paymaster George Bush...

...The fictional version, meanwhile, will almost by definition be less interesting than the real story...

...That is a problem Lawrence Wright has vainly struggled with in God's Favorite (Simon & Schuster, 353 pp., $24.00), an imagined account of General Manuel Noriega and his four-year reign as Panama's uncrowned king...

...Wright has no trouble showing us Noriega's various grotesqueries...

...In the end, though, one has to draw one's own conclusions about what Wright did, and did not, make up...

...He might just as well be bare assed and wearing a handkerchief over his penis like his [boyhood] friend, the village cacique...

...It is 1901, and Mrs...

...With sly humor, though, he makes them not the romantics of conventional history but the highly unsympathetic people an astute reader might suspect them to have actually been...

...Another problem is that only a reader steeped in Panamanian affairs will be able to distinguish true details from Wright's inventions...

...The significance of that War for the century just ended is by now all too clear, and Foden never loses sight of it...

...The ending, too, is jarring, since it changes the novel's tone from relatively lighthearted to fairly grim...

...The action is set in London...

...policy way back in the 1950s and served his paymasters well for three decades...

...Nineteen-year-old Bella, a 20th century "new woman" in embryo, longs for something larger and better than smalltown colonial society...

...stock-trading, government issues and lotteries are all new concepts that are in the process of radically altering not only the economy but society itself...

...Where an author plans to use a familiar character, he had better provide a new twist...

...There are also a few stagey and rather silly incidents in which Winston Churchill, as a brash young war correspondent, and Mohandas Gandhi, who organized and served in an Indian ambulance corps, appear and recite their respective set pieces...

...that he became a Zen Buddhist...

...Both Liss and Foden have chosen material with a very obvious significance for the way we live now...

...Liss was not served well, though, by his editor...

...25.00), goes for a livelier approach...

...Now 28 and retired from the ring, he provides a service that London, with no police force as yet, desperately needs...

...So one can assume that Noriega did indeed keep signed photographs of John Wayne and Mother Teresa on his desk...

...If a more daring novelist tries to give such a character a life of his own, the inevitable divergence between the fictional and the real person can only be distracting...

...In terse segments several of the novel's characters pull us from the last stages of the Boer War far into the 20th century it anticipates...

...He does have one: Jonathan Wild, Britain's first modern crime lord...

...For instance, did the dictator really receive fetal-tissue injections that gave him "a more or less continual erection...

...Kieman, starved out of his small Irish farm as a boy by rapacious landlords, his parents killed before his eyes, is a one-time Republican terrorist who has covered all traces of his political affiliations and become a hotel proprietor in the South African town of Ladysmith...

...Liss, a doctoral student at Columbia focusing on the 18th-century novel and how it reflects the emergence of modem ideas about finance, is steeped in the period...

...Spadafora's assassination is an apt place to start: "With Hugo's death, people sensed that some final barrier of civility had been crossed, and that they were rapidly hurtling toward barbarity...

...For one like myself," he reflects, "the siege has never really ended...

...A Conspiracy of Paper is a high-spirited historical thriller, written in impeccable 18th-century style but with distinct, if anachronistic, whiffs of Alfred Hitchcock and Agatha Christie...

...Divine fate had singled him out...

...Not wanting to blunt the surprise, I won't give away the plot...

...And finally, of course, the Boer War was a significant defeat for Britain, the first intimation since the days of Napoleon that the Empire had cracks and fault lines...

...But the strange phenomenon of the 20th-century petty dictator who commands both his own country's resources and the deep pockets of whatever larger power is willing to back him, and can avail himself of the most sophisticated technology of death and torture, is too mysterious and frightening to be treated superficially—whether the subject has buffoonish qualities, like Noriega and Amin, or is purely sinister, like Nicolae Ceaçescu or Sukarno...

...even then, as time was fashioning him for the struggles ahead, he was the consummate showman...

...The speaker, Benjamin Weaver (né Lienzo), comes from a well-to-do family of Portuguese Jews, traders in London for three decades...

...To live through a siege is a grim and tedious business, an experience that Foden reflects just a little too faithfully in his writing...

...Moving "along the borders of what it meant to be both a Hebrew and a Briton," he is free to observe the two cultures dispassionately, and the knowledge that he is fated never to fit into either one enriches this often breezy narrative with a layer of melancholy...

...invasion of Panama in December 1989, when the dictator was captured and brought to Miami to face prosecution on narcotics charges...

...Muhle, the father, is a prisoner of war under the besieging Boers while his wife Nandi and son Wellington are trapped in Ladysmith with the British...

...Weaver, reluctant to involve himself once again in his cast-off family, gingerly agrees...

...Why has God chosen him...

...This visitor makes the disturbing suggestion that Weaver's father Samuel Lienzo, who had been run over by a carriage a couple of months previously, and his own father, an apparent suicide, were in fact murdered...

...Sterkx, a Boer prisoner, languishes in one of Kitchener's concentration camps...

...Militarily, the three-year conflict set the stage for the brutal guerrilla warfare that continues to plague the globe, and for the long, destructive battles of attrition between entrenched lines of infantry that would characterize World War I. Morally, with the conscription of African troops to fight a white man's war and the new idea of interning prisoners in concentration camps (a British, not a German, innovation), it cast a shadow on what once seemed the glory of Empire...

...cheesy sensationalism at worst...

...He ought to be compared, he thinks, with King David: "He murdered women and children, he took hundreds of wives and concubines, he even cursed God, but God still loved him above all others...

...Suffice it to say that it contains a beautiful, mysterious lady as well as generous portions of financial skulduggery (for as everyone knows the South Sea Company blew into a bubble, precipitating the world's first stock market crash in 1720...

...These works continue to carry a whiff of the not-quite-respectable—of dishonesty at best...

...He then took the bit fatefully between his own teeth...

...The book is annoyingly repetitive...

...It is 1931, and Churchill excoriates his fellow siege alumnus, Gandhi, as "a seditious Middle Temple lawyer...

...Liss indicates that he knows this and say's nothing about it...

...Foden only partly delivers on the promise of the previous book in his new historical novel, Ladysmith (Knopf, 291 pp., $25.00), inspired by letters he found in the attic of his family house...

...At first she's attracted to Tom Barnes, a fresh-faced British trooper stationed in the town, but eventually comes to dislike his "silliness, his clumsy bravado and casual Empire spirit...

...Jesse Helms, who was leading the narcotics investigations in the U.S...

...Moreover, unlike most academic specialists, he has a real gift for storytelling and light humor...

...Three new historical novels demonstrate both the colorful attractions and the almost insurmountable weaknesses of the genre...

...She then rums to one of the town's few exotics, a Portuguese barber named Antonio Torres...

...My character, Tony Noriega, is a creature of my imagination...

...Furthermore, Liss does not insult our intelligence by insisting upon the parallels between past and present...

...For American spies, too, who were inevitably followed by spies of othernations: Japan, Taiwan, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Israel, Russia, even South Africa...

...At the center of the action are Leo Kiernan and his two daughters, Bella and Jane...

...Men who did not know I was the son of a stock-jobber," Weaver observes, "frequently felt free to compliment me for having nothing to do with finance or Jewish customs, which were often imagined to be one and the same...

...The failure of his more common approach suggests that historical fiction—despite its sometimes tawdry reputation—is hard to write, and that a light touch like Liss' or Thackeray's seems to work best...

...This war is different, isn't it...

...There is the romantic imperialist, the crude racist and the beautiful, restless heroine...

...The insertion of actual historical figures, as Thackeray pointed out, is a delicate operation...

...The clearly corruptible general had been recruited as a tool of U.S...

...The ideal of farcical tragedy to which Wright aspires is so delicate and elusive that only the most talented artists can put it across...

...Wright, a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of five books of nonfiction, has proved himself an excellent journalist, but for this first foray into fiction he has set himself an imaginative task he is not skillful enough to execute...

...All this inference mixes awkwardly with the novel's public, and largely true, events...

...It is 1945, and the cameraman once attached to Sir Redvers Buller's relief expedition reflects on Churchill's ouster: "History's impresario...

...While foden chooses to present the links between past and present on a somber note, first-time novelist David Liss in A Conspiracy of Paper (Random, 435 pp...

...Hugo Spadafora...

...Foden can't resist using his more eloquent characters as mouthpieces to philosophize and press the point...

...Without bands and flags and all that glitter and circumstance, it's just plain killing...

...And while the historical novel has had its fair share of serious practitioners, including Tolstoy, Flaubert and Thackeray himself, as well as modem writers like Susan Sontag and John Updike, the charge still holds...

...For anybody who takes the slightest interest in history, such parallels are always evident...

...Other characters include four English journalists (actual historical figures) and a Zulu family...

...Medallin cartel security chief Pablo Escobar...

...The characters are not people so much as familiar abstractions...

...Other details would have been easily verifiable...

...It ends with the U.S...

...To begin with, he has avoided the use of real people as characters...

...It simply becomes clear to the reader that the England of 1719 has more than a little in common with our own era...

...Finally it is 1960 and an elderly Wellington is a political prisoner—along with many of his brothers in the African National Congress—for publicly burning his passbook...

...Jews and finance were perceived at the time as synonymous...

...Weaver's Uncle Miguel observes that the world of finance "is new to the English, and many see it as very dangerous, a replacement of the glory of the past with a new and honorless greed...

...Usually, they are mere cutout characters who parrot the positions and ideas they memorably expressed when alive...

...But in a 20-page coda entitled "The Monologues of the Dead," Foden redeems himself and turns a mediocre book into a good one...

...Liss' decision to make his hero a Jew was a wise one...

...Where he runs amok is in trying to depict—or invent— the tyrant's softer side: the man who believes he is possessed of God's favor and castigates himself for not loving God enough...

...But for what...

...All this might seem irrelevant to the experience of reading what is described, right on the cover, as a novel, but in this case the fact that so much of the material is true prompts one to question everything...

...Senate...

...Foden has constructed a story that takes all this historical import heavy-handedly into account at the expense of his characters, who remain lifeless...

...There's no redemption in it...

...He is a freelance "protector, guardian, bailiff, constable-for-hire, and thief-taker"—a sort of 18th century Sam Spade...

...The British national debt is rising ominously...

...On Fiction The Problem with Historical Novels By Brooke Allen Historical fiction was already considered a slightly degraded genre a century and a half ago, when William Makepeace Thackeray poked fun at trashy romances that featured historical figures more as scenery than as characters...

...They were from his great-grandfather, a British trooper who survived the 1899 siege of Ladysmith during the early stages of the Boer War...

...During his years as a U.S...

...Both Lienzo and the elder Balfour were brokers, or "stock-jobbers," and the investigation takes Weaver into the thick of the new money culture, dominated by the Bank of England and the glittering, all-promising South Sea Company...

...It is a case, perhaps, of what the Catholic Church calls "unmerited grace...

...and even of his own formidable wife Felicidad...

...In an Afterword, Wright explains his creative method...

...The exposition is plodding, the language latinate and opaque...

...probably 75 pages could easily have been shaved off without losing a thing...

...In The History of Henry Esmond, for example, Thackeray introduces the Duke of Marlborough and the Old Pretender, the would-be James III...

...Wright's efforts come across as impotent gropings...

...She is possessed by "the dissatisfactions of her existence, the knowledge that her life—in that town, in that era—was set to be one of narrow, miserable renunciation...

...Noriega's rule was indeed barbaric, but so too were the forces of international greed that engendered it...

...the Hanoverian monarchy has been established for only four years, and Jacobite rebellions and plots continue to cast an air of uncertainty over throne and government...

...Not that anyone seems to draw much of a lesson from them...

...This era," comments the author's narrator and hero, "was one of exuberance as well as turmoil, doom and possibility...

...The problem is that the real Noriega was such a baroque figure, it would take a Nabokov to do him artistic justice...

...Although his actions are structured upon the facts of General Noriega's life, as I understand them, my goal in this book is to create a personality who lives plausibly within these pages...

...How did Liss nevertheless keep his material fresh and avoid the corniness that Wright and Foden, and in fact most writers of historical fiction, fall into...

...The rebellious son of a restrictive father, he severed ties from his family and his culture—the insular world of Jewish trade and finance—and, changing his name to Weaver, became first a housebreaker, later a famous pugilist known as "The Lion of Judah...

...that the late President François Mitterrand awarded him the Legion of Honor as payola for his offer of asylum to six Basque terrorists France had on its hands...

...God's Favorite begins with the 1985 murder (generally credited to Noriega's thugs) of the famous dissident Dr...

...It is 1719...

...It was a fine time for a man whose livelihood depended on crime and confusion...

...But no one else could have done what he did...

...Some would say it was the British Vietnam...

...Weaver is visited one day by a foppish young man named William Balfour...

...Despite his distaste for being compelled to deal with a ruffian and a Jew, Balfour hires Weaver to investigate the case...

...says one of Foden's characters...

...vassal he had made Panama City a haven for American capital, American troops and American money laundering...