History without the historian's obligation to the truth : historical fiction

Once again Elliot's not reading very much, but I did read further into "The General in His Labyrinth" and hope to read more today. It's a historical novel, but for the North American reader it might as well be fiction, as most of us know nothing of the history or characters (Simon Bolivar) so we're not internally fact-checking as we go through nor are we using it to broaden our base of historical knowledge - as, for example, when we read Gore Vidal's Lincoln, our interest is not in Lincoln the character in a novel but Lincoln the historical figure and how Vidal adds to our understanding of same. I've always backed away from historical novels, as my interest in reading fiction is the fictive qualities, and many of them seem to be cheap tricks, writers vampiring a set of facts and details and personalities, a ready-made scaffolding for a novel, and they can go their own way as they see fit but can fall back on the facts when they lose their way. Big deal. I think of Wolf Hall, so well written on one level but, by the end, or even well before the end, a total drag to read. Would we care a whit if we weren't trying to learn something about the historical figures? I remember cheap-trick books like the successful I Am Amelia Earhart, which was not only historical fiction but first-person narrative and really, why would a writer want to do that, other than that it's easy, the whole life is there for you. Garcia Marquez show what it really is to write an excellent historical novel, because this one stands up well against any of his other works, it's a narrative and world created in its own terms, and the historical setting is a "value added" - but it's not a half-hearted attempt to write history without the historian's obligation to the truth.