SILENT MASTER.('The Master')(Book Review)

Fiction about actual historical persons, so intrinsically conflicted and impure, feels like part of postmodernism's rampant eclecticism. True, examples exist before the twentieth century, in, say, Tolstoy's depiction of Napoleon and the Russian general Kutuzov in "War and Peace," and in the portraits of the poet Petronius, the emperor Nero, and the saint Peter in Sienkiewicz's "Quo Vadis?" But until truth became thoroughly relative, and image seized priority over fact, and the historical past became an attic full of potentially entertaining trinkets, the famous dead were allowed to rest in the record they left in their documents and documented deeds, in their letters and ...