I submit that we can usefully distinguish between historical novels, perhaps even create a taxonomy of them, by carefully observing how they represent history, and inferring thereby something either about how their authors think reality works or about what ways they consider most artistic for reality to be represented. This contention enters my mind because I was reminded of the style of a certain kind of historical writing while reading Laurent Gaudé’s Ecoutez nos défaites— translated as Hear Our Defeats by Alison Anderson for Europa Editions—in which today’s world of espionage and geopolitics is filtered (intriguingly) through a historical lens, with the narratives and memories of three loosely-related contemporary characters being spliced (in the manner of avante-garde film; like the movie Crash, for example) with those of three entirely unrelated historical characters; with one main aesthetic function of such a non-linear sequencing of storylines being the formation of an operatic effect, a greater aesthetic whole in which not just the characters but some broader theme is dramatized. Of course, doing this is not quite as simple as merely invoking a theme (like defeat); the story must be its own persuader, with the style of its telling aiding in persuading.

Before determining the degree to which Gaudé’s novel accomplishes this, however, let us meet with these point of view characters and their operatically inter-leaved storylines: first Assem Graieb, an agent of French intelligence who was present at the death of Gaddafi in Libya, and is sent to track down our second point-of-view character, the Colonel Kurz-like Sullivan Sicoh, a former Seal Team Six member who was present in Abbotabad at the death of Bin Laden (the critical reader of historical fiction will note that I have twice used the phrase “was present at X” in this sentence), but who has now gone rogue (or has he, Captain Willard?) in war-torn Beirut; this same Assem Graieb shares a hazily defined connection with the third point-of-view character, Miriam, an Iraqi citizen and UNESCO aid worker who spends much of her storyline on the trail of (and agonizing over) ISIS’s destruction of ancient artifacts at the museum in Mosul and at heritage sites like Palmyra; this Miriam being the same who also, that one time in Zurich, had a one-night-stand with our first point-of-view character Assem, after which she and he never see each other again, but they nonetheless share an ineluctable bond Gaudé occasionally calls attention to (for reasons that are unclear) in the course of his narrative. Far more entertaining than these present day storylines are Gaudé’s departures into portraits of such figures as Haile Selassie, Hannibal Barca, and Ulysses S. Grant, a motley band of leaders whose only apparent link—and I’m not knocking it—is Gaudé’s intention of juxtaposing theirs careers of stirring successes and failures. It is also in these recurring vignettes that Gaudé’s talent—and tendency—for dramatization comes most to the fore. Whereas some writers might attempt to immerse readers into the worlds of these characters with a wealth of period detail, Gaudé mostly dispenses with that and instead perches readers right on each character’s shoulder, grandly psychologizing their existential worries with an explicit historical awareness that (to some extent) gains in pathos what it loses in verisimilitude. Consider Grant:

Could it be that four thirty in the morning on April 12, 1861 was the moment of his resurrection? […] Could it be that when that shot was fired, when the stone was shattered, this great eructation of pleasure was, for Ulysses S. Grant, a moment of resurrection?

Grant senses that the Civil War is the means by which he will be given a renewed purpose, freeing him from his failed life as a washed-up drunkard:

But isn’t that the very reason you drink? To blow your brains out with shots of scotch. He would very much like to have a glass or two right now, so his hand would stop trembling, and to ease the sting of humiliation. […] He’d tried. Seven lives. Farmer. Real estate agent. Firewood dealer. A wreck. He couldn’t do it. The bottle was always better.

This is all very effective exposition, highlighting the pathos and reasons for us to sympathize with Grant. And Gaudé has a certain flair for provocative first lines and sweeping rhetoric which comes through quite well in Alison Anderson’s translation. Hence his portrayal of Ethiopian leader Haile Selassie begins,

Today, he must resign himself to dying. And yet, everything is so beautiful . . .  His army occupies the hill overlooking Maychew plain, a huge crowd, led by the princes of Ethiopia, all of them, like him, descendants of the heroes of Adwa, the glorious warriors who defeated Italy: Menelik II, Taytu Beytul, Megesha Yohannes. Today every fighter is thinking of that as they hurry through the colorful crowd. They invoke the spirit of their ancestors and hope to prove themselves as brave as they were. They beat their chests, and encourage each other, hair disheveled, beards unshaven. They have braided their hair and are covered with jewels. They move forward in their brightly colored clothing. None of them are wearing uniforms. They have armed themselves with iron, occasionally guns or knives. They let the rage of war well up and again hope that this will be the day of their great victory.

Gaudé excels at painting such portraits, and the seductiveness of his rhythmic, anaphora-laden prose is not to be understated. I must admit, however, that on some level the third-person omniscient narration of the novel began to feel a bit quaint to me. At all times, the voice we are hearing is Laurent Gaudé’s, Laurent Gaudé psychologizing these characters, Laurent Gaudé emphasizing the historical significance of the action taking place, Gaudé interpreting the characters in lieu of showing us the characters acting and allowing us to interpret them ourselves. The result is dramatic and especially enjoyable to hear read out loud, but also a bit heavy-handed:

He is the emperor of them all, king of kings, Haile Selassie, he is sure of their defeat but what good would it do to tell them? He keeps his legendary calm, saying nothing, no words of fear or haste.

Look at this passage. Is Selassie the point of view character? The most obvious answer is yes, given that the first sentence psychologizes him, but then the next sentence talks of his “legendary calm” and we are now no longer talking about Selassie’s thoughts, but the thoughts of those around him; the third-person omniscient narrator allows Gaudé to flip freely between perspectives, but also dilutes the power and persuasion of any one perspective. Likewise, it is not clear when Gaudé invokes History, as in this passage,

That is what lies ahead for them, all of them, his sons-in-law, his warriors, all his subjects put together: they will die in one last, great battle. A head-on collision, pointless and bloody, but History will remember it

whether what is colliding is not our narrator’s overriding emphasis on (capital H) History as a concept, and of the historical character’s omnipresent awareness of it, with the reader’s verisimilitudinous sense that historical actors do not, in actuality, constantly obsess over their own historicity (otherwise they would never get anything done!) And while I may have thought I was merely imagining how often Gaudé invokes the capital H word, in fact I wasn’t imagining it at all. This novel is positively littered with such grand Tolstoyan pronouncements. Thus when we are given Gaudé’s treatment of Hannibal’s famous traversement of the Alps with his elephants, and his victories at Lake Trasimene and Cannae (I remember appreciating David Anthony Durham’s novel-length version of these events a bit more), Gaudé fills his characterization of Barca with such historicizing nostrums as:

[of the Carthaginians] History is written—who could ever doubt it?—with a weapon in one’s fist, in serried ranks around three brothers. … [and of the Romans] They can sense that they are about to be penetrated by History, whether they are dead or alive, glorious or crushed.

These phrases certainly sound striking, but I am rather incredulous regarding the assertion that Roman soldiers would ever use such a phrase (or its Latin equivalent) as “penetrated by history.” Such a phrase comes less from a Roman soldier’s mouth than from an urbane modern writer channeling Arnold Toynbee.

So what should the author have done? Well, at no point can we say that Gaudé uses free indirect prose or stream of consciousness or any other of the literary advances brought to us by modernism to bring us closer to his character’s experiences than this third-person omniscient narrator. Nor does he characterize his characters subtly through carefully chosen sensory detail. Instead we are told how to feel, and we feel at the level Gaudé’s dramatizing choreographs for us, but no deeper. A dramatist as well as a novelist who has previously won France’s prestigious Prix de Goncourt, Gaudé wrings no shortage of pathos out of each these stories, but also splices them together with the apparent purpose of creating an operatic structure for the novel, a greater aesthetic whole (with an intellectual component) in which not just the characters but the abstract idea of defeat becomes dramatized, a profound truth brought out that wins awards and makes a classic; and I’m not convinced the novel really fulfills that ambition, in part because its depths are not so profound—neither Assem nor Miriam have any great revelation or change in character, and as my roommate (a military man) remarked as I described the character to him, there is nothing Sullivan Sicoh had to say that millions of other people don’t also already say, and no horror this ostensible Kurz had to reveal that we don’t already know about—and even if there had been such depths, Gaudé’s chosen narrative technique—closely akin to that employed in a lot of historical fiction, and sharing many of the same problems—is perhaps not the best suited to effective bring them out.

In some ways I feel this mismatched narrative style is reflective of the novel’s miscast purposes, its response to a perceived deficiency of heroic models, an ennui afflicting the Occidental world. Much of the subject matter Gaudé manages to rope into his narrative—the war on terror, ISIS, the Syrian and Libyan civil war—has a timeliness to it which, combined with the genuine dramatic appeal of Gaudé’s historical interludes, might win us over into thinking, yes, this is exactly the novel the world needs right now. (For no one who reads through such elegiac prose can have any doubt about the author’s heroic intentions; and as a sidebar, I won’t have any truck with those who say we can’t interpret the intention by the product, that we can’t know the earnestness was earnest or the romanticism truly romantic; at the end of the day, anyone can pretend to be anything; but I can and will talk about the achieved effects.) But opposite every defeated hero/heroine is one who triumphs in but fleeting gains; both romanticize themselves, insofar as ISIS’s Hollywood-aping propaganda positions them as longed-for heralds of the end-times every bit as much as Gaudé positions his idealistic Assem, Sullivan, and Miriam as preventers of it. Both their posturing and Gaudé’s, I would argue, already appear to be past their sell-by date, and one potential pitfall of writing novels that are timely is they may lack such perspective of hindsight.