Yet no matter how dutifully you disguise a character, people will seize on one recognizable detail and it becomes, in that reader s mind, someone actual. We seem to be very complex creatures when it comes to questions of representation, willing to be deceived, yet not completely. Yet think of the power of great fiction to embody a profound historical understanding of the world. Think of Homer, Shakespeare, Tolstoy. And bad history in fiction of course means bad fiction.
Historians rightly share a professional suspicion of fiction.
Novelists, I think, are respectful of historians. Yet in our quest for new narratives we are compelled at a certain point to kick away the scaffolding and enter an imaginative domain where the facts, always open to multiple interpretations, may not answer every question.