The best novels that turn history upside down

Brave New World is a relatively well-known British novel, lazily classified as science-fiction. Instead, it is actually a dystopian novel that offers a view of the future that is not grim or tyrannical, like 1984, but passive and disheartening. Nobody is in pain in Brave New World, everyone is happy and acquiescing, enjoying the pleasure of the senses. I loved it for its satirical hints to Ford’s assembly line and for its prediction of what genetic engineering may do to society decades before the discovery of the DNA. It is a novel that creates a possible future from real historical events in Huxley’s lifetime and throws back to us the egoistic and trivial side of human nature we, in part, see today.

I love it when a book uses a relatively less popular genre to create a new world with new rules. Fatherland starts with the premise of alternative history (what if Hitler had won the war?) but never spends time explaining how this alternative 1964 works. Instead, he tells us a spy thriller story like any other and I love how the author subtly feeds us the perils of dictatorship, making us wonder if it had happened in reality. It is a subversive novel without being apocalyptic or fatalist, and most of all, the ending is a clear attack on those who deny the evils of totalitarianism in every shape or form.

Reliving the lives of two famous Romans in a new fictional light is what makes this five-book series a dazzling example of magical realism. The entire settings, that is Ancient Rome during the Republic, is real and has existed in the form it is presented. The characters, though, have taken on a more personal shape, independent from the historical image we know. Caesar and Brutus become larger-than-life characters, allowing more to be told about them, their feelings, their ambitions, and giving us a version of them we may never read in history books. We become closer to them, and try to understand them more as human beings engulfed by history rather than historical figures. It is an unparalleled humanisation of history through fiction.

Here we enter the topic of time travel, a concept very dear to me from both a fictional, moral, and scientific point of view. Many novels have attempted to show how one change in the past could change our future. Elton’s novel struck me for its originality in picking a notorious historical event largely ignored by fiction when it comes to time travel and alternate history. The assassination of the Franz Ferdinand of Austria is used not just as the spark of World War I but as the start of the ideological and warmongering terror that would spread through Europe. The novel is an example of man’s fixation with trying to find one cause for all problems when maybe there are multiple causes going back years and years. The search is as vain as the main character’s attempts to change history.

Although not historical fiction per se, Sherlock Holmes is a strong product of his time. He embodies the revolutionary modernism of the late Victorian period and for this reason alone the famous fictional detective has become a real character himself embedded in history. The fact his home address half-exists in London makes him even more real. His stories were one of the sources to inspire me for the Wynnman. This idea of creating real characters in a real setting that share their way of thinking, their passions, their curious attitudes, without having to answer to the hard, crude boundaries of factual reality.