Back in January, the overall Costa book award for 2015 (as well as the children’s award) was won by Frances Hardinge’s The Lie Tree, set in the heyday of Victorian science, and the success of Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins in the novel category made it five wins on the trot for wholly or partly historical titles, following wins by Andrew Miller, Hilary Mantel, Atkinson herself and Ali Smith. So there was little cause for surprise that such titles were prominent again in the Costa shortlists for 2016, announced this week. But their dominance – as striking as that of female authors, who took up 14 (up from 12 last year) of the 20 places available across five genre shortlists – looked even more marked than previously, with book after book inviting readers to be time tourists.
In the novel division, historical fiction’s run looks set to continue with a sixth victory, as the shortlisted titles include Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End (19th-century US), Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent (1890s England) and Rose Tremain’s The Gustav Sonata (second world war Switzerland). Only Maggie O’Farrell’s This Must Be the Place is contemporary, although it visits earlier decades in backstory scenes.
Among the first novel hopefuls, Francis Spufford’s well-received Golden Hill, set in 18th-century New York – and, like Perry’s book, benefiting from the Costas’ traditional role of offering succour and a second chance to those seen as unfairly snubbed by the Man Booker judges – is the likely favourite. Up against him are the Updikean 1960s New England of Susan Beale’s The Good Guy and the 17th-century Amsterdam (a popular destination previously frequented by Tracy Chevalier, Deborah Moggach and Jessie Burton)of Guinevere Glasfurd’s The Words in My Hand, with the 80s story My Name Is Leon, by Kit de Waal, the nearest to Britain today.
While none of the children’s category novels are costume fiction, those by Brian Conaghan, Francesca Simon and Ross Welford all involve the past, from the 1980s in Welford’s Time Travelling With a Hamster to the misty prehistory of Norse mythology in Simon’s The Monstrous Child.
And the Costas’ lone factual category, biography, follows the same pattern, as biographies are liable to do: looking back links the Gaddafi-era Libya of Hisham Matar’s The Return, the Tudor England of John Guy’s Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years, the post-1945 decades of Keggie Carew’s Dadland and the 80s-to-now rock scene of Sylvia Patterson’s I’m Not With the Band. Rather pleasingly, that leaves fuddy-duddy poetry, the remaining category (an all-female shortlist: Melissa Lee-Houghton, Alice Oswald, Denise Riley and Kate Tempest) as the only one full of non-historical books.
While the Costas’ tilt to the past seems unusually pronounced, it’s a trend seen in other prizes, too. Three of the last five Booker winners – by Mantel, Eleanor Catton and Richard Flanagan – have been historical, four if you include Marlon James’s 70s-set A Brief History of Seven Killings. The US National Book award has just been won by Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, which unfolds in the antebellum south, while the reigning Pulitzer fiction winner, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, centres on the Vietnam war.
There is no great mystery to why authors and publishers currently favour the past, with so many examples before them of both sales success and prize judges rewarding retrospection; and novelists now have an array of possible role models for how to do literary (as opposed to novelettish) historical fiction in the 21st century, from the postmodernist mock-epics of Thomas Pynchon to the versatile era-hopping of Mantel and Sarah Waters. But as to why so many seemingly do so because they find the British, Irish or American present difficult to deal with - well, that’s probably best explained by writers themselves.
