Now Is the Time by Melvyn Bragg review – fictionalising the peasants’ revolt

Fifteen years in the writing, Bragg’s novel is hamstrung by his desire for accuracy, while new scholarship has demolished many of its foundations

Where should history end and historical fiction begin? Some historians despise historical fiction as an aberration from the truth, but I’ve always been an admirer, not least because the novelist can go forward fearlessly and explore the gaps in our knowledge where professional historians have to stop and admit that we don’t know all the answers. Fiction writers can do this either by immersing themselves so deeply in their subject that the transitions are seamless, as Jude Morgan does in his novel about the Brontës The Taste of Sorrow, or, like CJ Sansom and Philippa Gregory, by using peripheral characters, real or imagined, to interpret what is happening on the greater stage. If they really know and understand their subjects, the best historical novelists can – and should – be both insightful and utterly convincing.

Although Melvyn Bragg has demonstrated repeatedly in previous novels that he possesses both historical empathy and imagination, he fails to give them free rein in Now Is the Time because he is hamstrung by his historian’s desire for accuracy. It’s easy to see why the subject appealed to him. What could be more dramatic or exciting than the story of the first and biggest popular uprising in English history? During that extraordinary summer of 1381, thousands of angry men and women marched on London and exacted their vengeance on the corrupt workings of government by summarily executing the chief officers of state, destroying some of the capital’s most important buildings and publicly burning the records of their servitude. When they confronted the boy-king Richard II in person, they demanded, and briefly won, the abolition of serfdom so that, in future, every man, woman and child in England would be free to live and work as they pleased. It was, of course, too good to be true. The forces of reaction closed in, the rebels were dispersed, their leaders arrested and executed, and the brave new world they had dreamed of remained just a dream, albeit one that would inspire generations of future revolutionaries.

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