Venture Back In Time

The Age

Monday August 4, 2008

Lili Wilkinson

Immersing yourself in a historical novel can bring the past to life, writes Lili Wilkinson.

When I was in high school, I thought history was boring. Why would I want to read about a bunch of dead people?

I was wrong. History is not boring.

History is full of great battles, evil villains, beautiful romances, terrifying monsters and crazy adventures, more than any novel you could pick up.

And when novels and history collide - amazing stories ensue, and the past comes alive.

Historical fiction isn't dry and dusty. It's filled with characters such as Alexander the Great, who travelled many, many miles across a desert, just to have his fortune read. Or the Russian mystic Rasputin, who wouldn't die after being stabbed, poisoned and shot, and was eventually drowned in a frozen river. You can't make that stuff up.

Reading novels is a great way to learn about the past. Catherine Jinks' Pagan Chronicles are set during the Crusades, but the books are packed cover-to-cover with action, romance, adventure, betrayal and lots of humour.

History can teach us a lot about the present as well.

Kirsty Murray's Children of the Wind series tells the stories of four young people in Australia throughout history, from Bridie in 1848, escaping the Irish potato famine, to Maeve Lee Kwong in 2005 trying to figure out where she belongs.

You can read each of these books separately, but Maeve's modern-day story is so much more powerful when you know what happened 150 years ago.

Like your history with pictures?

Try Osamu Tezuka's Buddha, an epic graphic-novel adventure about ancient India. Or for something a little more recent, try Marjane Satrapi's graphic-novel autobiography, Persepolis, about growing up in Iran in the 1980s.

Sometimes it's fun to re-imagine history, or add magic, like in Mary Hoffman's Stravaganza series, where in the alternate world of Italy magic happens. Or Lian Hearn's Across the Nightingale Floor, which is set in a land that is very close to feudal Japan, but not quite.

Sometimes the historical part is disguised as something else, such as The Rabbits by John Marsden and Shaun Tan, which is actually about the colonisation of Australia by white people. Or Art Spiegelman's Maus, which is the story of the Holocaust told with mice and cats.

If you like your history a bit more realistic, try The Drum series of non-fiction books about young people in history, including Ned Kelly, Alexander the Great, Joan of Arc, the Eureka Stockade, the Olympic Games, the Kokoda Trail and East Timor. And each chapter is introduced with a little snippet of fiction.

No matter what kind of story you like, there's something for everyone in history.

Lili Wilkinson manages insideadog.com.au, the Centre for Youth Literature's website for teenagers about reading. She's also the author of Joan of Arc, Scatterheart

© 2008 The Age

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