Historical Fiction Pre-Spoiled by History
What happens when every reader knows half of your ending?
The thing about history is that you already know - well, not how it ends, but at least how it comes to a middle: you're living in it.
Similarly, most people know how some of the plot arcs end, like how the Roman Empire fell and how the World Wars ended up.
This can have consequences for historical fiction. In effect, you come to the book pre-spoiled. One time when I was a teenager, my dad was reading some historical novel - I forget what - set just before the fall of the Roman Republic, when he looked up and asked me whether I knew what happened to Pompey the Great. I didn't. My dad said he was glad; Pompey was a major character in the novel and this way he had no idea what would happen to him.
That works with some times and people where readers don't know much about them. But even then, it fails for some readers - say, now I know what happened with Pompey.
And with other times and places, you don't even have that. Just about everyone, say, knows how Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at the end of the Civil War. So if you're writing a book about Lincoln, your readers are going to know what happens to him.
Frederick Forsyth's famous The Day of the Jackal almost got sunk because of this problem. Publishers refused to accept a novel about an assassination attempt against Charles de Gaulle, because de Gaulle was still alive at the time - so readers would already be spoiled on the ending! They'd know he hadn't been assassinated!
But, Forsyth explained - and eventually convinced one publisher - that his book wasn't about the assassination; it was about the hunt for the (fictional) assassin. I haven't read the book, but that makes sense to me. Evidently, it made sense to myriads of readers too. That's one way out of the problem: set your novel in history, but don't make it be about history. That way, your readers won't be spoiled on things that're important to the book.
Or, another popular way to escape this problem is to write for kids, who don't know a lot of history. That way, you can also position your story as educational and use it to teach them the history. That's good in its own right, and as a kid I absolutely enjoyed the results. Some of those books I still like, like Frances Mary Hendry's haunting YA novel Quest for a Maid. But I think historical fiction can set its sights higher than that.
A good author can do still more. They can use history, and their reader's knowledge of history, to make the story even richer.
It's a maxim among Tolkien fans that, on every reread of Lord of the Rings, you notice more. I've heard (and seen myself) the same thing about a lot of other novels too. This's because people come to their rereads knowing what happens, and able to detect so many more tie-rods and foreshadowing and dramatic irony. A book worth reading is worth reading twice.
In historical fiction, an author can write for people who know from the first scene who his characters are and what's going to happen. In short, they can write the sort of book that's not ruined by spoilers and in fact made better by them.
I'm remembering one kids' story from my childhood about kids on the early-1800's frontier. One of them was a bookish boy named "Bram" - and we only learn at the end that Bram's full name is Abraham Lincoln. That recontextualizes the story. It stood by itself as a story about anonymous kids, but then it became richer as a story about young Abraham Lincoln.
So many of Rosemary Sutcliff's historical novels about late-Roman and post-Roman Britain bear this out in a deeper way. She writes about the growing disaster that's first the withdrawal of Rome, and then the struggle of the post-Roman culture to hold back the invading tide of Saxons. It feels like inevitable disaster, and inside the novel, the characters recognize that and fight to hold back the inevitable anyway. From history, we know their cause was lost - which only accentuates the beauty they're aware of, and that Sutcliff is bringing out. That’s one of her greatest strengths as an author.
We don't even see the full loss in most of Sutcliff's books. Sometimes it isn't there at all, just anticipated (like in Mark of the Horse Lord or Eagle of the Ninth); other times we see one defeat but not the full disaster (like in Frontier Wolf or Shining Company). If she'd set her stories in a fictional world, it'd be totally unclear what happened afterwards, and readers would be unsure about the pessimistic feeling. But because she put them in real history, we do know what happened, and the books are enriched.
Or from a different angle, I'm remembering Ian Tregallis's Bitter Seeds, a historical fantasy novel set in World War II. I don't recommend the book, but there's one haunting moment that I still remember. We see the Nazis are bombing some new-built towers on the British coast. The book doesn't say what they are. For most readers, I imagine, that would've been ominous but nothing more. But I instantly recognized them as the British secret radar network, which let them track and intercept Nazis planes. In real history, the Nazis had no idea it even existed. In that book, their destroying it instantly told me so much and raised the tension.
Or you don't have to follow actual history. There's one video game set in Rome which kills off Julius Caesar early on, long before his actual assassination, to show players that the game doesn't tie you to the rails of history. This can be powerful. I read one alternate-history book about the War of 1812 without even realizing it wasn't following actual history... until, in the middle of the chaos around the burning of Washington, our protagonist started rallying defenders and changed history.
Of course, this means you aren't setting your story in real history anymore; you lose that veneer of plausibility and open yourself to criticism about the events. Flint himself was criticized about some implausible choices people made near the end of his book.
But there's a middle course: secret history. Quest for a Maid takes this, by having Margaret Maid of Norway, who drowned in real history, survive in disguise while everyone thinks she drowned. It could've happened - I can't say it didn't. But this brings a huge surprise to readers who know the history, and a positive surprise too.
When I first read the book, knowing the history, I had even more catharsis than I would've if it'd been a fully fictional world. In a fictional world, I might've grinned that this sympathetic character narrowly escaped death. But knowing history, I was sure she had to die - except, impossibly, she didn't. That interplay is almost impossible outside historical fiction where the reader knows history.
Readers come to historical fiction pre-spoiled. But, knowing that, authors can use it to make their books richer. I've enjoyed so many great historical novels that couldn't have been done anywhere near as well without readers who know history.
In a way, this's because historical fiction is in conversation with the fractally-deep real story of history. Authors who use that well can make their own stories so much deeper.
Interesting comments. The idea of a historical novel always seemed like a contradiction in terms to me. But you've given some real possibilities for this form.