Dibs

Genuine real-life historical figures who actually lived had actual experiences: birth, life, death, interspersed with specific incidents, dialogues, emotions and actions that actually happened. Shouldn’t this be enough for us? After death, these figures remain with us in memories, in films and photographs, in documents they wrote and documents written about them. Yet a certain breed of historical novel re-animates them, turning such long-dead icons as Abraham Lincoln and Marie Curie into fictional characters, now put through invented paces to serve contrived plots. This saves the authors enormous effort, as when you re-animate dead celebrities you don’t need to invent personalities from the ground up, quirk by quirk. Instead, your protagonists are readymade — with a few of your own added flourishes: Sappho is now a detective, say, or Mahatma Gandhi is a balletomaine. As a result, the borders between fact and fiction, history and fantasy blur in the minds of many readers. Is this wrong? Is it a crime against history? Such novelists say no, that they mean only to entertain — and further honor the dead celebrities. In Paul Malmont’s new novel Jack London in Paradise, London is an adherent of Jungian psychology, struggling to escape an obsessed pursuer in Hawaii. In the Q&A that accompanies review copies of the book, Malmont muses: “Jack London was such a popular writer that I knew there would be plenty of haters ready to tell me, ‘You don’t know Jack!’ But … his story was so unique that I couldn’t let go of it.” Nonetheless, it takes nerve to put words into the mouth of a dead wordsmith who can no longer defend himself. In one typical passage, Malmont has London declare: “”We’re going to see the waves. At this time of year they’re the biggest, most spectacular things in all of Hawaii save for the volcano, I hear. Everyone says it’s a sight to behold, especially the beach boys. … The Hawaiians considered Waikiki a sacred place, a healing place.”