Question: What Is Imagination?

     . . . .  Arturo Pérez-Reverte believes  a novel is made of three parts: documentation, imagination and personal experience.

He defines imagination as narrative talent.

Some readers have objected to where this author's own narrative talent and his experience, plus the Muslim and Christian documents he's studied, took him with the great national hero -- who, when the Cid lived, there wasn't even an idea of a 'reconquista', much less a nation called "Spain." After all, even Charlemagne's forays into al-Andulus were mercenary jobs, fighting some Muslim states on the behalf, for pay and booty, other Muslim states.

"El Cid was a guy who, in a turbulent, bloody and uncertain territory, was looking for his life. El Cid was a mercenary!"

Then there is the place of landscape in novel creation.  Though  Pérez-Reverte didn't include landscape in his definition of the parts that make a novel, he puts landscape in the title, "Sidi Un relato de frontera."  He sees Sidi moving in a world that is a John Ford Western, which makes so much sense in so many ways.

Which further explains why there are readers who feel offended by this portrait of Sidi -- they are are rejecting what this novel is, which above all is a novelist's vision. Additionally it appears that many readers were expecting something more along the lines of the Charelton Heston-Sophia Loren 1961 film, El Cid. Sometimes readers adore a novelist's vision of a notable historical figure, as readers adore Mantel's Thomas Cromwell.  Sometimes, as with many Spanish, and Sidi, they do not.  Think of how infuriated so many people in the US were / are. when shown, in a novel, in history, and on screen, that Thomas Jefferson kept an enslaved woman as his concubine for decades, until he died, and fathered several children on her.  It's like that, among a lot of Spanish readers. Reverte tried to create a Sidi who was a real man, not the glorious myth, who has been used as a convenient channel for whichever current political mythology was in fashion at the time.

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     .... Going back to 'narrative talent' ... would this explain why very young children's lies so often charm and amuse adults? 

Though little children's imagination is lively and vigorous, their experience, like their documentation, is sharply limited.  Since their lies  are transparent, without documentation and experience, "innocent", we tend to enjoy them rather than judge them. Maybe this is part of what Blake was pursuing, in his Songs of Innocence and Experience?