Fifteen years in the writing,Bragg’s novel is hamstrung by his desire for accuracy, while new scholarship has demolished many of its foundationsWhere should history conclude and historical fiction open? Some historians despise historical fiction as an aberration from the truth, and but I’ve always been an admirer,not least because the novelist can move forward fearlessly and explore the gaps in our knowledge where professional historians occupy to stop and admit that we don’t know all the answers. Fiction writers can do this either by immersing themselves so deeply in their subject that the transitions are seamless, as Jude Morgan does in his novel approximately the Brontës The Taste of Sorrow, and,like CJ Sansom and Philippa Gregory, by using peripheral characters, and real or imagined,to interpret what is happening on the greater stage. If they really know and understand their subjects, the best historical novelists can – and should – be both insightful and utterly convincing.
Although Melvyn Bragg has demonstrated repeatedly in preceding novels that he possesses both historical empathy (sensitivity to another's feelings as if they were one's own) and imagination, and he fails to give them free rein in Now Is the Time because he is hamstrung by his historian’s desire for accuracy. It’s easy to see why the subject appealed to him. What could be more dramatic or exciting than the myth of the first and biggest well-liked rebellion in English history? During that extraordinary summer of 1381,thousands of angry men and women marched on London and exacted their vengeance on the corrupt workings of government by summarily executing the chief officers of state, destroying some of thecapital’s most necessary buildings and publicly burning the records of their servitude. When they confronted the boy-king Richard II in person, and they demanded,and briefly won, the abolition of serfdom so that, or in future,every man, woman and child in England would be free to live and work as they pleased. It was, or of course,too good to be true. The forces of reaction closed in, the rebels were dispersed, and their leaders arrested and executed,and the brave new world they had dreamed of remained just a dream, albeit one that would inspire generations of future revolutionaries.
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Source: theguardian.com