Story Vs Realism
M.C.Scott (author of The Emperor’s Spy) Lesley Downer (The Courtesan and the Samurai) and I have been chatting about what’s more important in a novel; the story, or the facts? Both Scott and Downer are renowned for their extensive and meticulous research, and yet they are both wonderful story-tellers. Nevertheless, we are all so often asked about story and facts as though the two are mutually exclusive. Here are some of my thoughts.
The historical context is the frame that you hang the story on and so it has to stand strong or else the reader isn’t going to trust it enough to spend any time inside it. So you get it right as far as you can. But what you don’t want to do is show everyone how much research you’ve done, because quite frankly, they don’t care. They want to be entertained on the tube or soaking in the bath after a hard day’s graft. They want to be drawn into other times and places and it’s our job to make their journey feel authentic.
I don’t want to tell my readers how Paris in the 8th century disposed of its people’s waste. I want my readers to smell the stink of a sluggish flow of filth sliding into the Seine. I don’t want to teach readers various Norse boat-building techniques. I want them to feel the sea-spray on their face and the tightness of their skin after the salt-water dries.
Of course I’ll exaggerate both in terms of the timescale in which the events happen (that is to say, a lot happens in 300 pages!) and the drama of the events themselves - to make the ride more of a thrill.
I’ll saddle my characters with a sort of omnipresence; that curse shared by Harry Flashman and Richard Sharpe of always being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
My next series will be set during the English Civil War. Now, if you were alive in the 1640s it might well be that your only experience of the conflict was a minor skirmish down some country lane. But that’s not the book I want to write…or read for that matter. No quiet life for my poor characters! They’re going to find themselves caught up in the Battles of Edgehill, Marston Moor, Naseby, Preston and numerous other scraps. My readers are going to smell the sulphur and hear the whine of lead through the smoke-thick air. Their mind’s eye is going to reel with the atrocious ‘sights’ of a blood-slick battlefield, and their hearts will hammer at the best and worst of man.
But my aim is to make it plausible. Historical fiction readers tend to be very well informed. They know full well if an author hasn’t done their homework.
But what annoys me is when I speak to people who say, ‘I don’t read fiction.’ As though it’s the complete opposite of non-fiction. These people seem to me to be suggesting that they don’t have time to indulge in a fiction author’s flights of fancy when there’s all that hard, cold knowledge to be sucked out of non-fiction books. Do you read non-fiction books cover to cover? I have shelves upon shelves of them and tend to jump in and out when I’m after something specific. They’re for reference. But when I pick up a Cornwell or King, I’m off. I’m outta here.
I suppose the fiction-dodgers may just lack the one thing you need if you’re going to enjoy a novel (I don’t mean time – anyone can make time to read) and that is an imagination. But that thought just makes me sad, so I’d rather not go into that horrible possibility.
I suspect when these people say they don’t read fiction what they really mean is they don’t read.
There’s no doubt in my mind that you can gain a deep understanding of past times from well-written historical fiction. Historical novels are the closest thing we have to time machines. But the story must come first. Always the story.
Blood Eye - The Paperback!
The posters for the paperback are being spotted round and about and I even took a trip to the train station in Leicester this morning to have a look for myself. The chap on the gate very kindly allowed me onto the platform without a ticket so that I could take a photo of the RAVEN poster in all its gory...I mean glory (there were 7 of them!) For years I've been standing on that platform, waiting for the London train, and I can't describe how amazing it felt to see my dream up on the wall, so close I could reach out and touch it.
Shout me if you see one!
Festival of History
Another year, another Festival of History, another time Sally has talked me out of buying a longbow. Darn it. But they’re just so beautiful and shiny and well-crafted and…well…deadly. I know, it’s not the most practical thing I could spend my money on, but so what? Neither is a Ferarri, but it doesn’t stop those wallies sitting in London traffic, deafening pedestrians with the obscene roar of cars so ridiculous that they struggle over speedbumps. Still, I enjoyed every minute of this year’s dizzying historical odyssey. That’s not to say it’s not a little weird sometimes. After all, there you are munching on a hotdog in the rolling Northamptonshire countryside, looking up toward the grand 18th century Palladian style mansion of Kelmarsh hall, when six or seven WWII commandos march by, the whiff of khaki woollen cloth floating in their wake. Slurping the ketchup off your sausage, you just watch them go on their way, water canteens sloshing, boots stomping the brown summer grass. Strangely, they don’t see you, but I’ll get to that later. Then, thinking it’s probably best if you bought a waffle with chocolate sauce, you stop to let a column of Roman legionaries tramp past, complete with clinking cuirasses, shields, javelins and sandals that Jesus would have thought a little ‘last year.’ It’s all rather strange. So you make your way to another field, where two Viking armies are winding themselves up, frothing at the mouth, banging shields and hurling insults across the open ground. This year the Vikings really went for it. Some challenged their enemies to come and taste their huge Danish pastries…err…axes…Danish axes, which they swung and looped through the air. The fight was a good’un, too, the shieldwalls meeting with a clash to wake the gods! It was at this point I realized I had not put the memory card back in the small country of a camera I had taken along specially. B*****ks. The only way through this disappointment was via the beer tent, and into the arms of a couple of tall, damp, real ales. Even they tasted historic, prompting me to wonder what beer tasted like in, oh I don’t know, the time of King Charles I. Pondering such weighty issues, we followed the cannon’s roar to where the dashing Prince Rupert was leading his horse against the pikemen of Parliament. Even when you know they’re coming, those cannon blasts still make you jump, making you feel a right wuss. It really does go a little way toward making you realize how mind-bendingly terrifying it must have been to take part in such a battle. The cannon being a bit too loud for Sally (ahem) we moved on. There were archers and men-at-arms, mud spattered from the field of Agincourt, Roman gladiators sparring in their pants, (sorry, loincloths) jousting knights at full tilt, and Redcoats fresh from pounding Boney at Waterloo. So anyway, back to my mystical musings. I’ve never really believed in re-incarnation - not even when I was regressed and spouted (on tape) for 30 mins about my life in an Anglo Saxon village - but then I got thinking. What if all these re-enactors were folk who were somehow re-living parts of former lives? As for myself, sometimes when writing, the images are so clear and strong in my mind that they are almost like memories. I know how it feels to desperately want to go back in time, so desperately that it hurts. So, maybe the guy dressed as a Roman legionary was a Roman legionary…once…killed during the invasion of Briton. Perhaps that WW1 Tommy fought and died in the filth of the Western Front, in some former life. And could it be that that hairy Viking with the bird’s nest of a beard looked just the same when he walked these or other lands in AD 802? I know I know, you think I’ve been on the real ale again. Well maybe I have. But I’ll tell you this; whatever it’s all about, next year I’m buying that bow. Yew just watch me.
Long Live the Ring!
On Wednesday night we went to the Royal Albert Hall to watch Howard Shore's score to The Lord of the Rings performed live on stage by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, to a high definition cinematic screening of the film. It was a new experience for me to listen to a score performed live and it was stunning. Having said that, I’m such a fan of the movie that for some of the time I forgot the orchestra was even there. Liv Tyler's Elf princess, Arwen, stirs my soul with a very big spoon, and I don’t mind admitting I want to be Aragorn. But what the evening confirmed to me (other than I really do wish I lived in Midde Earth) was what I have always thought – that movies can be the ultimate artistic form. Paintings, sculptures, books and songs can all be creations of incredible power. They can inspire and excite you. They can provoke and disgust and influence you. They can rip out your guts and stamp on them. But some movies combine it all to take you on a journey you’ll never forget. The movie is a combination, a marriage of the story, the image and the music, and when all three hold up their end of the bargain, as in the Lord of the Rings, what you have is a masterpiece. And perhaps that’s why I still get that prickle of excitement when the lights go down in the cinema and the expectant hush falls across the auditorium.
Then again, I take it all back. You can’t beat a good book.
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