Book review: The Mercies, by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Historical novels require research. This is obvious. Yet the research should not be obtrusive. It should be absorbed and lived with so that the novel seems to have been remembered rather than made from books and documents. The difference is evident in Scott’s Waverley novels. All those set in Scotland in the 17th and 18th centuries are made from material that had matured in his memory since boyhood, so their roots are deep. His mediaeval novels owe more to bookwork, to what we recognize as research. Yet in the best of them – Quentin Durward, for example – his imagination so plays on 15th century France that the novel has some of the rich qualities of the Scottish novels.