Historical Illiteracy in Popular Fiction

Popular fiction has never been known for its historical literacy, but recently things seem to be getting worse. During a recent mini-break to the beach, I took along a few new thrillers, including Sebastian Faulks's disappointing updating of the James Bond series, and an execrable effort by Brad Thor that reads like a C- effort by a Rush Limbaugh fanatic for a high school creative writing course. I only finished both of them because I was feeling too lazy to get out of my beach chair to find something else. But in additional to their literary failings, I was amazed at just how much they get wrong, historically.

The Faulks book is set in the late 1960's, a time which the 55-year-old Faulks probably thinks he remembers well enough that he doesn't need to read up on it. Yet the book contains a number of howlers. Most amazing: the villain has a factory in independent Estonia. Yes, Estonia, known to most people in the 1960's as the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, one of the component states of the Soviet Union. He also sets a number of scenes in the miserable, seething, crime-plagued suburbs of Paris. The problem here is that in the 1960's, North African immigration to France was at a beginning stage, and the suburbs Faulks describes were still dominated by native-born French people (and heavily Communist). They only really developed into the hell-holes they are today much later.

As for the Thor book, it is -- if such a thing is possible -- a weak imitation of The Da Vinci Code that makes the original look like John Le Carré. The plot centers on the absurd idea that as a result of the wars against the Barbary Pirates, Thomas Jefferson recognized that someday radical Islam would pose the greatest threat ever seen to the United States. At the same time he somehow uncovered a previously-unknown revelation of Mohammed that, if revealed, would discredit radical Islam and force a Reformation in the Muslim world (I really am not kidding about this). Except that oddly, instead of publishing this revelation, Jefferson hid clues to it in a first edition of Don Quixote, leaving it to Thor's rugged secret agent hero to discover the truth two hundred years later (while along the way having said secret agent denounce Congress and the media as spineless appeasers who would let a little thing like the Constitution stand in the way of the War on Terrorism). It hardly needs saying that the Barbary Pirates were not fundamentalist Muslims, that indeed fundamentalist Islam of the sort we are confronting today is largely a creation of the twentieth century, and that its closest late eighteenth-century equivalent, Wahabism, was only practiced more than 1500 miles away from the Maghreb states that fought against the United States. And it hardly needs saying Thomas Jefferson wrote very little substantial about Islam as a religion.

The thought that Sebastian Faulks can get a period he himself lived in so wrong is amusing. The thought that anyone might take Brad Thor seriously is more than a little frightening.