^ LOL. Yeah, that often seems to be an author's main motivation.
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Originally Posted by Neapolitan
Talk about long ( winded) novels. Have you ever read Sarum? (aka Sarum: The Novel of England by Edward Rutherford) I was wondering if you did then what were your thoughts on it. Perhaps it's in the same category as Foucault's Pendulum. It's a book my friend brings up from time to time, and I was curious how good/bad it is.
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Sorry, Neapolitan, I've never heard of this book, but based solely on the comment on the cover, I would probably leave it on the shelf if I saw it in a bookshop.
Novels about the old days are almost impossible to get right, imo. I'd much sooner read a genuine researched history or biography to help me imagine, or to give me an insight into, a period of the past.
Novels almost always have chunks of conversation in them, and in historical novels, this is the Achilles heel that shows what a stretch the whole historical re-creation is. Writers usually betray themselves by commiting one of two errors:-
i) they forget about the vocabulary of the period. For example Isabel Allende, who wrote a book set in the Victorian era. To her credit, she didn't have her characters saying, "Wow, that's cool", but she transplanted plenty of modern diction into her book.
ii) conversely, writers try so heard to sound "old-timey" that all their characters speak in a similar mock-biblical tone. Watch out, for instance , for the pregnant woman, who, in a historical novel, will announce, "I am with child." In a modern novel, there are so many ways to say this, which can reflect humour, despair, class, education, etc, but the novelist who has made the mistake of writing a historical novel just has the one clunky expression to work with.
Bottom Line : don't read historical novels. Make the effort and read something less artificial.