One of the favorite reading genres of individual readers and book clubs alike is historical fiction.
This genre combines a love of historical fact with a love of story and characters. It avoids the dryness that often mars pure historical writing and brings real events and known historical figures to life by adding what might have been going on in the background and who might have taken part.
If you are a stickler for absolute, documented truth, historical fiction will offend you. You’ll sputter your way through a novel like Anita Diamante’s The Red Tent, the imagined story of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob in Genesis, since the Bible doesn’t tell us much about her. You’ll be fuming by the time you finish Ken Follett’s wonderful Pillars of the Earth because it introduces imaginary characters and details of 12th century English life to the real facts about building the great cathedrals of medieval Europe.
But you’ll still be reading about historical truth and soaking up the broad strokes of an historical era or event.
In reading this genre, you must accept the fact that the writers of pure history can’t know all the thoughts and motivations of real figures or their complete backgrounds. Writers of historical novels can’t either, but they fill in those details from well educated imaginations.
One of the best historical novels I’ve read is The Rose Code by Kate Quinn, published in 2021 and based on a great deal of research.
I came upon the book through a piece of reader’s serendipity— I found it on the free book cart at the Magee Library. I liked the cover (it’s not true that you can’t tell a book by its cover), checked the positive blurbs on the back, and grabbed it when I saw that it dealt with the codebreakers of Bletchley Park in World War II.
Historically, Bletchley (one of the least attractive names I’ve ever heard, but I digress) was a well kept secret in England’s near death struggle with Nazi Germany in the 1940s. The site had been a family estate but was commandeered as a center for breaking coded enemy messages detailing plans for attack in the war, troop strength, naval maneuvers and so on. It is said that the military intelligence that came out of Bletchley shortened the war by two to four years. It was also a starting point for computer science.
England’s brightest code experts were brought there, trained and made to sign an oath that they would never, for the duration of the war and after, divulge any detail about the work that had gone on there. Most of them kept that oath to their dying day, or until Bletchley’s work was made public in the mid ‘70s.
I knew that historical background when I found the The Rose Code, and I was interested to see how Quinn had interpreted the story in fiction. I had also seen the BBC series Bletchley Circle, which follows four women who had worked together at Bletchley during the high stress war days and reunite after the war to catch a serial killer.
It helps to have that background before you read the book, or at least go online and read some of Bletchley’s history to orient yourself to the situation before launching into The Rose Code. It dramatizes the lives of female codebreakers by following three fictional women from various backgrounds as they endure the exhausting but exhilarating work of crypto-analysis—Mab Churt from the wrong side of the tracks; socialite Osla Kendall, based on Osla Benning, the real girlfriend of Prince Philip before he married the girl who would become Queen Elizabeth II; and Beth Finch, the shy but brilliant decoder who is forced into an insane asylum at the end of her service at Bletchley by a traitor that she had caught selling secrets to the enemy.
I was thoroughly entertained by the fictional exploits of the women and as thoroughly impressed by Kate Quinn’s excellent writing and command of the material. The love stories— of course women of their young ages will have love stories— are realistic. this is a page turner!
Quinn touches real history at so many points that you are learning even as you are being entertained. The buildup to
D-Day that stretched every codebreaker’s nerves to the breaking point was real. The bombing of Coventry that Beth knew about but had to keep from Mab, whose family was headed to that doomed city, was real. The impending royal wedding that broke Osla’s heart was real.
You history and fiction buffs alike will enjoy making yourselves a cup of English tea to enjoy under your reading lamp as you enter the world of The Rose Code. You can find it at the library or order it online.
