Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

Good morning. Historical novelist Hilary Mantel will give the first of her Reith lectures today. Her theme is ‘Resurrection: The Art and Craft’. Speaking on this programme yesterday, she said she’ll be exploring the relationship between fiction and history, and the role that imagination plays in filling in the gaps in the historical record, bringing the dead to life. I loved that description, and I’ve been reflecting on it since. History isn’t simply the gathering of facts and evidence, though in this era of alternative truths and fake news these are more important than ever. It’s also a form of story-telling, but it must be constrained by the facts. Where the work of the historian ends, the work of the novelist begins. Her task is to breathe life into history by inviting us to inhabit those different landscapes of time and place through telling the stories of imagined lives. One day, historians will seek to explain these turbulent times we’re living through. They’ll try to join the dots of cause and effect and present a probable hypothesis about how and why we came to be where we are. In this process, most of our individual stories will disappear in the interests of tidying up the historical record and eliminating its inconsistencies and contradictions. The task of fiction is to redeem the untold stories that history leaves behind. It’s to immerse us anew in the random beauty and terror of life as it happens. The poet and novelist Helen Dunmore, who died recently, wrote that ‘the key thing about fiction, as in life, is that no character knows what is going to happen.’ I often think how easy it is for Christians to forget that important insight when we slide too complacently from crucifixion to resurrection. The story of Christ becomes over-familiar, because we think we know what happens next. Yet the resurrection is a mystery. It holds open the horizons of hope without ever coming close enough for us to grasp what it means. It’s the unexplained event that no historian will ever be able to explain from the other side. Christianity turns history on its head. It takes one obscure life from the margins of empire and power, and says that this is the story through which all of history must be interpreted. We don’t know the ending to that story, but we can be sure that it won’t conform to our expectations or predictions. Life rarely does. Perhaps that’s the most important lesson we can learn from the events of the last week.