Subject area and problematics of contemporary historical novels.

The analysed shift of attitude towards history has found its implementation not only in books about history and its influence upon people, but also in historical novels proper.

John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) set the precedent for much of the writing of historical fiction of the succeeding three decades. It heralded the revival of an interest in the Victorian period both for its persisting influence on the present and for its psychological, social and cultural distance from it. Of all John Fowles' novels The French Lieutenant's Woman received the most universal acclaim and today holds a very special place in the canon of post-war English literature. From the god-like stance of the nineteenth-century novelist that Fowles both assumes and gently mocks, to the last detail of dress, idiom and manners, the book is an immaculate recreation of Victorian England.

Since Fowles, three periods have proved particularly attractive for historical novelists of the past two decades: Britain’s coming-of-age, involving the sixteenth-century Renaissance and Reformation and the formative, turbulent seventeenth century; High Victorian Britain, with the empire at its zenith, the industrial revolution at full pelt and individuals enmeshed in a stultifying network of social and moral codes; and war, particularly the two world wars of the twentieth century.

Havoc in its Third Year (2004) by Ronan Bennett shows us England in the 1630s, shifting inexorably towards civil war. Bennett does not deal with the high politics of the period but his picture of the lives of a small number of inhabitants of a northern provincial town is equally evocative of the divisions, suspicions and tensions which beset the country at the time. This spectrum involved the closed mindset and political-religious intolerance of the hard-line Calvinists and Puritans, the confused ambivalent attitude toward Catholicism as the ‘old religion’. The main character, Brigge, one of the town’s governors, embodies a state of collective paranoia. He is a covert follower of Catholicism but in his public role is obliged to act as instrument of the State, often against those charged with similar though treasonous affiliations.

What elevates the novel above listless, simplistic allegory is Bennett’s presentation of the capacity for brutality, casual and enthusiastic, that sits so uncomfortably against our conventional perception of the seventeenth century as pivotal in the movement toward humanism and rationality. After every Court of Session the streets are littered with public spectacles of humiliation and pain, with the lash, the bridle, the brand, the stock and the gallows as the standard furniture of daily existence. Many, with noble exceptions such as Brigge, regard this as the norm and often derive a prurient, macabre pleasure from it, and here Bennett inserts wonderfully sly questions for the twenty first-century reader. Are you enjoying it too? If you are, how different are you from those sad denizens of the 1630s? The combination of grotesquery and near-romantic fascination that sustains our interest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries derives primarily from the fact that the period involves such a beguiling mixture of fact and speculation. We are certain that some people existed – Elizabeth I, Charles I, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Newton – but printed records of events were in their infancy and in the intervening four centuries hypothesis and invention have avidly occupied the gaps left by this scarcity of documentation.

Havoc, in Its Third Year is a novel of great power, drama and terror, at once a love story and a superb work of historical fiction.

The "hero" of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989) is Stevens, a butler whose pride in his impeccable service to Lord Darlington and "the most powerful gentlemen of Europe" did not permit him to see that the work these gentlemen were doing in the 1930s would one day come to be called appeasement. Ishiguro could have treated his blind deference and trust with satiric contempt, but instead he empathetically makes the aging Stevens the narrator of the novel, and his every sentence evokes the strangled personality of a man trained to think that service is his highest calling. We see his halting realization of his wasted chances, the aridity of living through his superiors, the inability even to voice a grievance, and the shrunken choices left in what remains of the day.

The narrator recalls his life in the form of a diary while the action progresses through the present. Much of the novel is concerned with Stevens' professional and, above all, personal relationship with a former colleague, the housekeeper Miss Kenton.

The most important aspect of Stevens's life is his dignity as an English butler. These philosophies of dignity, however, greatly affect his life – largely with respect to social constraints, loyalty and politics, and love and relationships. By preserving dignity at the expense of such emotions, Stevens in a way loses his sense of humanity with respect to his own personal self. Stevens's position as butler, and servant, has gradually made it impossible for him to live a fulfilling emotional life.

The novel does not present the situation of Stevens as simply a personal one. The social rules at the time were certainly a major constraint. As we see in the book, servants who wish to get married and have children immediately find themselves without a job, since married life is seen as incompatible with total devotion to one's master. Stevens is shown as totally loyal to Lord Darlington, whose friendly approach towards Germany, through his friendship to Mrs Charles Barnet, also results in close contacts to right-wing extremist organizations, such as the Blackshirts.

In common with his other novels, Ishiguro uses the structural devices of memory and perspective within this novel. Past events are presented from the view point of the main protagonist, the aging Stevens; elements of the past are presented as fragments, apparently subconsciously censored by Stevens in order to present (explicitly) a description of past occurrences as he would have the reader understand them and in order to relay the fact that the information supplied is subjective. On occasion the narrator acknowledges the potential inaccuracy of his recollections and this serves the reader by inviting him to question the pedigree of the information relayed by Stevens; the more the reader learns about Stevens’s character, the more we are able to interpret the sub-textual intention of the fragments of memory presented by him.

The work was awarded the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the English speaking world, in 1989. The Remains of the Day appeared in a 2007 Guardian list of "Books you can't live without" and also in a 2009 "1000 novels everyone must read. A film adaptation of the novel, made in 1993 and starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, was nominated for eight Academy Awards.

Pat Barker 's Regeneration (1991), the first in her trilogy of the same name, is set in a World War I military hospital that rehabilitates the victims of "shell-shock" or "war neurosis."). The novel explores the emotional and psychological consequences of being on active service in World War I. The broken combatants include the British poets who stripped modern warfare of its grandeur – Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves. Their vision of war as a slaughterhouse and sausage factory has resonated through the generations.

The plot turns around the relationship between a soldier and poet named Siegfried Sassoon and a psychologist named W. H. R. Rivers. Sassoon is being treated at a mental hospital in Scotland full of young men suffering from traumas from the war.

In interviews Barker has said that she was drawn to the subject of the Great War through her memories of her own grandfather’s inability to escape the legacy of his experiences in the conflict. When she grew up during the 1950s and 1960s questions were for the first time being raised in public regarding the moral and political legitimacy of the war and what actually happened on the notorious Western Front. Up until then the conventional account of what the war involved – a costly, tragic but necessary response to German aggression – was rarely encroached upon by the private experiences of those involved. "The trilogy is trying to tell something about the parts of war that don't get into the official accounts". She goes on to state that "One of the things that impresses me is that two things happen to soldiers in war: a) they get killed or b) they come back more or less alright. It's really focusing on the people who do come back but don't come back alright, they are either physically disabled or mentally traumatised."

Other themes discussed in the novel include masculinity, parenthood, homosexuality and entrapment.

The novel was a Booker Prize nominee and was described by the New York Times Book Review as one of the four best novels of the year in its year of publication.

Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001), like Waterland and Possession, is interested in the relationship between history, memory and writing. Atonement is a family saga novel. The novel is about understanding and responding to the need for atonement. A women seeks atonement for an innocent childhood mistake that ruined lives and reflects on the nature of writing itself for this end. It consists of four separate temporal sections about: her mistake; its effects; her search for atonement in young adulthood; and then in old age. Set in pre-World War II England, war time France and England, and later twentieth-century England it revolves around an upper-class female.

The novel is widely regarded as one of McEwan's best works. It was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize for fiction. It was also shortlisted for the 2001 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 2001 Whitbread Book Award for Novel. It won the 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the 2002 WH Smith Literary Award, the 2002 Boeke Prize and the 2004 Santiago Prize for the European Novel. TIME magazine named Atonement in its list All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels. In 2007, the book was nominated Academy Award film of the same title.

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