I must confess that I don't read a lot of fiction-based-on-history, but these are a few that I've fallen over in my travels, and enjoyed.
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THE TESTAMENT OF MARY" (Colm Toibin, Ireland, 2012)
This is a fairly shortish novel so I finished it in a couple of nights, a story ostensibly told in the first person by Mary, Jesus' mother, as she looks back in older age, mainly to the events just before, and during, the terrible death of her son, but also touching on his childhood when he was still simply her boy.
Books like this are never easy to comment on, as regardless of your philosophical and/or religious leanings, it's going to tug at various parts of your psyche, as Mary is depicted here as bluntly human and also a grieving, and justifiably angry, mother. A mother that feels she's been subtly used by political forces, doesn't trust many of the band of her son's followers, and is all the time in fear of her own life, from the same religious and political factions that saw her boy in a horror of a death.
For me, it was a great reading experience, as it once more gave me another angle on - strange, at this point I can feel myself hesitating, like tip-toeing through sensitivities. Why the heck does Capital R Religion do that to us?? Look, do yourself a favour and read it. But read it before you read the 'experts' reviews. You should always do that anyway for my money. Make up your own mind.
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Jim Crace had this first published in 1988, but is (today) a 70 year old multi-award English author, but one I've never read before, although I'll definitely be looking for some of his other works now.
This novel grabbed my eyeballs and wouldn't let go, the story of a boy who loses his right arm. But not in your average setting. This is way back in pre-history in the age of the hunter/gatherers, and the lad is from a tribe of professional flint-knappers in the south of England, where a one-armed male is probably going to be reasonably useless. But the lad finds his own niche, as a story-teller.
This novel - not very big - doesn't try to be "The Inheritors" or "Riddley Walker" with their cleverly crafted languages to fit their odd circumstances, but instead Crace uses a sort of "loose" narrative style that you get used to in the first few pages, one that some say is "poetic" but that doesn't really do it justice. It's simply Crace's own chosen style for this novel. And is works well. Do yourself a favour and hunt this one down.
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I'm not really big on the detail of the period this historical novel is set in - Egypt around 400 AD when it was part of the Roman Empire - but a quick catchup on Google authenticates the text, but it has that ring of deep research about it anyway, and no surprises to find that Fourikis was an academic (an Aussie, and died only recently), although his own discipline was radio-astronomy.
Apparently he spent several summers in Alexandria and was taken by the story of this remarkable woman and her shocking demise, turned it into this pretty decent novel.
Hypatia, a privileged "freewoman", and a mathematician and astronomer like her father, also taught philosophy, in a turbulent time of the Empire, especially in Alexandria where the Roman influence was waning. But the Roman administration tended not to get too involved in the four-way tensions between the growing influence of the Christians (already divided between "Orthodox" and "Heretical"); the ancient Jewish factions; the Pagans who still clung to the old Roman deities; and the educated free thinkers, who were considered to be the most dangerous by the dogmatists and lumped in with the Pagans! It was not a happy place.
This is more than just an historical novel, it can easily be seen as an indictment of so much that has been, and still is, the worst aspects of Dogma in religion, all those ritualised and pre-packaged ways of ensuring a life after death rather than allowing your evolution-endowed mind to roam free.
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