Documentary is a way of interrogating the world of fact, and of reintroducing us to the value of the craft that creates characters and narrative.

Thomas Keneally in Schindler's Ark, which salvages the stories of 1300 survivors of the Holocaust, and attempts to characterise their improbable preserver Oscar Schindler, is deliberately entering a territory that, notoriously, still beggars imagination. The story he reconstructs is one that goes against the grain of the general horror, and reinstates a degree of freedom and choice in a context where such things were, seemingly, impossible…. In characterising Schindler, and in making his particular choices plausible (as opposed to merely factual: the historical record does that), Keneally is reopening the question of how adequately we have imagined what happened.

What the book addresses is the imagination's apparent addiction to the worst: 'novelists spend most of their time writing about the fairly predictable triumph of...