The Booker prize's historical novels aren’t living in the past

Being made to read 132 novels in four months may be some people’s idea of a cruel and unusual punishment, but it does enable one to cast a sweeping eye over the literary landscape. I would estimate that, of the books submitted (and at present lined up against my sitting room wall), at least half could be described as historical.

A few dissenters have niggled because this year’s shortlist is dominated by historical fiction. We judges, it is alleged, must be a reactionary, backward-looking bunch to have picked one novel set in the 16th century, two in the 19th and three in the 20th. But this says less about the jury than it does about an identifiable shift in literary taste.

Novelists have been time-travelling — whether to 11th-century China or 18th-century Australia, revolutionary Russia or Victorian London, or the era of the Second World War and its aftermath. Many are not merely set in the past, but feature historical figures: Rupert Brooke, the Romanovs, the Princes in the Tower, to name a few from titles not on the shortlist.

It isn’t just a British phenomenon, as writers from Ireland, Canada, Australia, Sri Lanka and the Caribbean seem equally interested in the past. It may be that the present is so turbulent and uncertain that writers don’t feel ready to stand back and make sense of it all. (Certainly, none who attempted state-of-the- nation novels this year achieved the depth and sophistication of the shortlist.) Are hard times prompting a retreat into artistic conservatism? Are novelists playing safe?

In the case of the premier division, the answer is a resounding no. In the hands of the best writers, historical fiction has always offered scope for originality. Those who regard it as a retrograde niche inhabited only by Georgette Heyer should read Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, George Eliot’s Middlemarch (written in 1871-72, but set half a century earlier) or Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

They should also read the six titles on this year’s Man Booker shortlist, which transmute the past into fiction in radically different, and innovative, ways — from Hilary Mantel’s fly-on- the-wall realism to A. S. Byatt’s palimpsest of literary and biographical allusion; from Adam Fould’s fractured lyricism (his novel about poets in a Victorian madhouse is almost a prose poem) to Simon Mawer’s story in which a real house effectively becomes the subject of a biography; from Sarah Waters’s ghost story, itself a metaphor for the way history haunts us, to J. M. Coetzee’s fictionalised memoir, which asks profound questions about how biographers reconstruct past lives.

Looking at the 19th century, the vast popularity of Walter Scott’s historical novels after the Napoleonic Wars coincided with an era of economic insecurity and political cynicism. Scott’s successors, the early Victorians, invented the “condition of England” novel, and with it the idea that novelists have a moral duty to be relevant. They were successful partly because they felt so sure of their own values. In our post-ideological age, few are so confident of their convictions.

However, literary fashions — and the literary marketplace — have their own momentum. In 1990 when Byatt’s Possession won the Booker, it signalled a shift away from the magical realism and postmodernist tricksiness then in vogue. This expressed itself during the 1990s in nonfiction memoir, such as Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father?, and in life-writing, such as Richard Holmes’s brilliant biography-of-a-biography, Dr Johnson and Mr Savage.

There has been a polarisation since. Commercially, biography is now associated with bargain-basement misery memoirs. “Serious” biography has been increasingly corralled into universities as a subject to be taught (just as fiction was, a generation earlier, with the advent of creative writing courses). Looking at this year’s entries, it seems as if literary fiction, newly confident, is attempting to colonise the space between. Biographers beware: novelists seem determined to steal your thunder — and your material.

Indeed, some of the strongest historical and biographical writing at the moment is being done by novelists. Some nonfiction authors are even contemplating turning to fiction (the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore used his knowledge of Stalin’s Russia in a novel last year). But what holds good for premier division novelists is not necessarily true across the board. The common feature of the six shortlisted authors is a powerful individual “voice”.

In such a stunning year, there were more than six books good enough for the shortlist, and we had to say a tearful goodbye to some, including superb novels from William Trevor and Colm Tóibín. Reading 132 novels on the trot teaches you how rare that is. This is especially so in the genre of historical fiction, where a writer can hide behind his or her research.

The average historical fiction may be easier to pull off than the average novel, simply because you don’t have to invent so much. But the best transcend genre, adding something that a nonfiction treatment could not. I have no idea who will win on Tuesday — I haven’t learnt enough Machiavellianism from Mantel’s Tudor courtiers to be confident of swaying the jury to my choice — but whichever of the six it is, I know that, though set in the past, it will be anything but moribund.

Lucasta Miller, a judge of the Man Booker prize.