Historical fiction

Gillian Vine reviews The Best of Men, The Book of God and Physics and Galileo's Dream.

For the novelist, how to treat historical figures and events is tricky.

Too little detail smacks of insufficient research, too much bogs down the storyline.

Claire Letemendia falls into the latter trap.

The Best of Men (Jonathan Cape, $39.99, pbk) begins in July 1642, just before civil war breaks out in England, and ends in October the following year.

The story follows the adventures of Laurence Beaumont, a former mercenary who returns to England from Europe and is pressed to work for King Charles I's spymaster, Lord Pembroke.

It hinges on a prediction that the king will be assassinated - he eventually was - and how the date will be revealed in coded letters accidentally acquired in Holland by Beaumont.

Letemendia obviously knows her Civil War really well, but in her eagerness to share, slows down the action, as do the excessive number of flashbacks to Beaumont's European adventures.

Reading The Best of Men, Pembroke's descendants probably will be less than thrilled by some of the fictional actions and comments attributed to him, which raises the second problem, that of having real people talk and act without unnecessary distortion.

In The Book of God and Physics (William Morrow, $29.99, pbk) Enrique Joven gets around the problem by having a modern setting in which his characters examine two historic mysteries, the cause of the sudden death of 16th-century mathematician Tycho Brahe and the meaning of Voynich manuscript, whose coded script is yet to be cracked.

Hector, a young Spanish Jesuit, teaches physics at a rundown school whose land the local council wants for a carpark.

He and two others, Mexican Juana and Englishman John, correspond by email as they work to break the code in the parchment version of the Rosetta stone, the Voynich document.

Without a codebook, it seems impossible and the suggestion that such a key may exist and be in Spain brings the three researchers together for the first time.

The possibility that astronomer Johannes Kepler may have killed Tycho Brahe is tied to the main story, as is the fate of the school.

A bit Dan Brown-ish at times and suffering from its clunky title, The Book of God and Physics is a clever mix of fact and fiction.

Kepler also makes an appearance in Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson (Harper Voyager, $34.99, pbk) but his is only a bit part: as the title indicates, Galileo is the star of the novel.

Going the whole hog, Robinson has Galileo acting, thinking and speaking like any fictional character, which is likely to irritate some readers.

The twist is that about a third of the novel is a science fiction tale, in which the past - seen from Galileo's viewpoint - is always changing.

For instance, the astronomer is taken to the moons of Jupiter he discovered in 1610 and finds them colonised by humans who have destroyed and fled Earth.

Sci-fi buffs may enjoy the complexity of Galileo's Dream but readers who prefer a simpler form of allohistory (or literary "what if") are likely to be less than impressed.

- Gillian Vine is a Dunedin writer.