Fiction is the only way to arrive at a certain kind of knowledge. Not because nonfiction is false, but rather because facts arranged neatly in a textbook seldom elicit strong emotions. Dates don’t bleed. Names don’t grab you by the collar. This is what historical novels do quietly and underappreciatedly: they make you care about something that happened before you were born, to people whose names you would not otherwise know, and in a place you have never been.
This may be the reason why so many readers, reflecting on their own education, will cite a novel rather than a classroom as the point at which a nation, a conflict, or a culture finally made sense to them. The Biafran conflict. The rise of the Taliban in Kabul. Japan occupied Korea. The CIA’s meddling in the Congo. A geography lesson did not fill in these gaps. Novelists filled in the gaps by deciding that someone had to properly write it down.
Consider the 2006 book Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Somehow, Western education had overlooked the Biafran War, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the late 1960s. Once a well-read individual who had never heard of it was genuinely shocked, according to a French journalist. And there’s reason for that shock. As a direct result of carelessly drawn colonial borders and power transfers without planning, it was a war marked by European fingerprints. Adichie did not write a book about history. She wrote about a houseboy named Ugwu who is forced into a nightmare he did not choose, as well as Olanna and her estranged sister. You see the war through their eyes. It matters that you experience it before you comprehend it.
Adichie understood, as do all the greatest authors in this tradition, that it is impossible to present a comprehensive picture of an epic subject from the perspective of a single individual. You must break up the story. Ugwu does not have access to the political conversations taking place at the dinner table because she works in the home of Nigerian academics. However, he witnesses things that Olanna was unable to see when he is pulled into the battle. The majority of us experience history in fragments, pieced together over time, and the reader holds all of it at once, piecing the picture together.
With A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini accomplished a similar thing—possibly under greater pressure. One of the trickier routes in fiction is writing about women’s interiority as a male author, and many authors have made terrible mistakes in this area. In general, Hosseini didn’t. Mariam’s story succeeds because Hosseini avoids easy outrage. Mariam is married off to a stranger at the age of fifteen and is deprived of all choices before she is old enough to comprehend what choice means. He earns it gradually, allowing the reader to put themselves in her position and experience the particular burden of a life that is limited in every way. The novel then takes an unexpected turn when Laila, a second wife who is younger and equally devastated, shows up: a relationship between two women that ends up being the most significant aspect of both of their lives. The backdrop is the Taliban. The real story is their bond.
It’s difficult to ignore how frequently female relationships are the source of these novels’ greatest power. All of the voices in Barbara Kingsolver’s 1998 book The Poisonwood Bible, which tells the story of a Baptist missionary who drags his family into the Belgian Congo, are female. Nathan, the father, is unable to hear that he is not carrying out God’s will. His daughters and wife observe, put up with, and analyze him. One of the twin daughters, Ada, has hemiplegia, which causes her to read and think in a way that makes language seem almost coded. It turns out that this reflects a spy plot that is operating covertly beneath the domestic drama. Kingsolver is teaching you about American exceptionalism, the CIA’s role in Patrice Lumumba’s downfall, and the particular conceit of coming to a place with answers to issues you don’t comprehend. She accomplishes this without giving any lectures. You solve it piece by piece, sideways, and backwards, just like Ada does.
In addition, Min Jin Lee’s multigenerational novel Pachinko follows a Korean family during decades of Japanese colonial control. Many people put off reading this book because of the intense hype surrounding it. The first fifty pages do not support the suspicion. Lee creates a whole century out of Sunja, a young woman who was seduced and left pregnant by a man who refused to marry her. Because pachinko parlors are the only places available to them, Koreans in Japan live in a ghetto that no one else would enter. They work there, feeding a machine that steals their money and returns very little. Among other things, it tells the tale of what it means to be viewed as nothing by the government, the culture, and the structures of a society that are meant to keep you out.
Decades before, Mary Renault was doing this in a completely different register. Her second book about Alexander the Great, The Persian Boy (1972), tells the story of Bagoas, a young man who was sold into slavery, castrated, made a courtesan to King Darius, and then drawn into the grasp of the conqueror who vanquishes him. Renault employs one of the oldest and most dependable devices in fiction—the outsider narrator—with accuracy that is still relevant today. Like the reader, Bagoas finds Alexander with caution, skepticism, and then an irresistible pull. Because Renault herself has faith in the cuisine, attire, customs, and violence, you can trust them. There isn’t any shakiness or anachronism.
In the end, this is what distinguishes period-costume novels that actually teach from those that just amuse. Research depth is important, but it’s not the only factor. It’s whether the author has forced you to live in the world instead of just visit it. Whether you emerge from it knowing not only what transpired but also what it was like to be inside it, including the heat, the fear, and the unique kind of hope that endures when it has no right to. History is not replaced by these novels. They put in more effort. They pique your curiosity, which is the sole purpose of education in the first place.
