The way history is told has changed over time, and the same is true of the historical novel. It starts with Walter Scott, for whom “history” was the site of romantic adventures: a young, likable hero goes out into the world and faces a struggle between historical forces – Whigs and Jacobites, Roundheads and Cavaliers, Crusaders and Saracens. He “wavers” between them (that’s why Scott’s first hero is called Waverley) before settling on the side of progress and modernity. The 19th century saw many Scott-influenced historical romanciers (Harrison Ainsworth, Fennimore Cooper), famous in their own day though forgotten now.
This style of historical novel went out of fashion over the 20th century. George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books parody it: Fraser’s hero is young and venturous, but also a cad, a coward, a rake. Toni Morrison’s historical novels deconstruct the pieties of the past in more serious mode, revealing worlds striated by hideous racism and sexism. Hilary Mantel writes the past with a fine but modern literary sensibility: her Thomas Cromwell is in effect a 21st-century individual, self-questioning, sensitive and with his creator’s hindsight. Alternate history novels – Hitler wins the second world war in Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Africa colonises Europe in Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses – figure history as fragile and contingent, enabling us to think through our assumptions about its permanence and inevitability.
James Buchan’s A Street Shaken by Light is not like any of these. In many respects, it’s a return to Scott. A likable, honourable young Edinburgh man called William Nelson travels to Paris in 1720 to work for the French royal bank. He is at once caught up in larger political struggles: imprisoned in the Bastille, then released to travel as a company official to Bengal. The story is romantic in the old sense – William has a series of adventures, fights duels, prospers by his wits – but also the modern one: for on his first day in Paris William sees and falls in love with the beautiful young Mademoiselle de Joyeuse, “the greatest heiress in France”, and remains true to her through all his exotic escapades, despite the opportunities presented by various other women, and even though Mademoiselle herself marries someone else.
This brisk, marvellous novel is the first of a projected six-part series, and if Buchan stays true to his Scott, William will navigate his wavering allegiances (France and Scotland, Catholicism and Protestantism) and eventually land on the “right” side.
Not that Buchan indulges in any Scottian stylistic prolixity. His prose is light on its feet, deft and precise. The novel includes various 18th-century spellings and idioms (“Mr Du Tot made a shrugg”, “bukket”, “oeconomy” and the like) but never ponderously or distractingly so. Throughout, Buchan’s historical verisimilitude is spot on, not just the fixtures and fittings of the period but its attitudes, its mores, its flavour. Buchan’s William gets into as many exciting scrapes as Flashman, but he doesn’t share Flashman’s cynicism, cowardice or venality.
The book is a hugely readable adventure-romance encompassing imperial France, the East India Company, Persia, the Jacobite rebellion, shipwreck, duels, derring-do and more. Buchan, grandson of the John Buchan of The Thirty-Nine Steps fame, really knows how to construct a ripping tale. As with his earlier 1970s-set A Good Place to Die, also a story about a young man who goes abroad with nothing but his wits, he folds tremendous emotional and psychological acuity and a compelling vibrancy into an exciting story. What might look from a plot summary like a pulp adventure is elevated by the writing into a work of thrilling art. Scott would be proud.
• A Street Shaken by Light is published by Mountain Leopard (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
