I admire Hilary Mantel's novel Wolf Hall immensely. I'm less admiring of some recent claims of hers that seem to suggest it is both a novel and something other than a novel.Historians have previously expressed concern that the books are seen as fact by some of their students.
It is not a worry Mantel has much time for. “I stick as closely as I can to the historical record. You won’t go far wrong if you want to know about Thomas Cromwell by reading those books.
“It is not a locked box to which only historians have the key. ...Historians, Mantel suggested, had done a poor job until Diarmaid MacCulloch’s “great biography came along as a sort of complement to the work I’ve done in fiction.”
The implication seems to be that novelists and nonfiction writers are doing much the same thing, that a historical novel, done well, can also replicate what a nonfiction treatment of the same subject can do.
But the jobs are incompatible. The novelist imagines a reality, and tries to evoke it so vividly that it seems real. If that is successfully done, if the novel feels true, it succeeds. A great novel imagines reality brilliantly. You can judge if a novel is great, but it is a fool's errand to try assessing its evidence, how it weighs its evidence, and its conclusions from the evidence against whatever is known about the real characters and situations it evokes. Novels can brilliantly convey an imagined reality. But it is impossible to test imagination for accuracy.
I've heard it argued that nonfiction is about facts and fiction about "truth." But fiction is about imagined truths, and nonfiction is not about facts. Nonfiction is always a search for truth, an endless search among slippery possible facts gleaned from incomplete and possibly misleading evidence. You are entitled to form conclusions about a nonfiction work's accuracy and reliability by assessing its sources, the reliability of its interpretations from them, and the credibility of the writer, but a history remains an argument about the past as a novel remains an imagination of it.
As I've said before, Hilary Mantel has written a great novel about Thomas Cromwell in which he is a hero, and Peter Shaeffer wrote a great play about him in which he is a villain. But it's not a question of which of Wolf Hall and A Man for All Seasons is right and which wrong. The greatness of their fictions does not depend on the literal truth or accuracy of their interpretations and arguments. It arises from how they evoke scenes and characters. Even if you want to judge its accuracy, fiction by its nature doesn't provide the materials for the task.
If you want to seek the truth of events, study events. If you seek ways to imagine realities, read (or write) fiction. They are both worthwhile endeavours, but not interchangeable.
I still think Wolf Hall is a terrific novel (I was less struck by its sequel Bringing Up the Bodies, perhaps because Wolf Hall seemed entirely original, and the sequel more of the same. I have not read The Mirror and the Light yet.) If I wanted to pursue some conclusion about the hero/villain status of Thomas Cromwell and his antagonist Thomas More, I should probably start with the MacCullough biography Mantel recommends,
