I’ve been writing books for fifteen years now, with seventeen published, so I was a little dubious that this new how-to book about writing historical fiction would have much to tell me.
Turns out, I was wrong! It has loads for me to learn, in particular about the research side of historical fiction and different ways of organising and remembering all that material so that you can apply it where needed in the writing. I had never even thought of keeping a spreadsheet of historical data. The chapter on what horses can and can’t do, what they need, how far they can travel, and all the other bits of information you need as a writer writing about horses while actually riding around in cars and buses was also invaluable.
The book is written by a collective of writers, with different writers contributing different chapters, so the reader gets the benefit of the distilled experience of many voices. There’s also an excellent appendix with links to further resources for research and writing.
I would genuinely say this is the most useful one-volume guide to historical fiction on the market today.
I read Anthony Hope’s most famous novel, The Prisoner of Zenda, more years ago than I care to remember but I only recently found out that he’d written this sequel. Although its titled for the dastardly villain, Rupert of Hentzau, Rupert doesn’t really appear in the book as often as one would like, as he really is a thoroughly good villain, but Hope does ramp up the conflicts of the first book hugely. In the Prisoner, our hero, Rudolf, has to impersonate the king of Ruritania. In the second, he has to become the king, while impersonating the king, because the king has gone and died, after faffing around in a humiliated tiff that everyong preferred Rudolf as king to him. It’s a book of its time, and I mean that in a good way as it manifests the best of that era while showing few of its failings. A worthy sequel to the original.
I was a little non-plussed on first picking this book up: I had no idea that Pink Floyd’s guitarist had so intense an interest in Italy that he’d written a book about it. But then, I remembered the famous Pink Floyd concert at Pompeii and it all made sense. After all, having made ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, Dave Gilmour would have had more than enough money to buy a house, or houses, in Italy. But I did expect some sort of mention of Pink Floyd somewhere in the text.
Then I realised that it was a different David Gilmour, a journalist rather than a musician. I was, at first, a little disappointed as I was looking forward to learning how an extended Italian lunch had been the inspiration for ‘Comfortably Numb’ (at one family lunch in Italy when I was young I was reduced to tears by the refusal of my uncle to believe me when I said that I was full and I really, really, really couldn’t eat any more). However, it turns out this other version of David Gilmour is very knowledgeable, and opinonated, about Italy, so I gave up on hoping for Pink Floyd reminiscences and settled down to read his tour through Italian history.
Italy’s history is famously long but Gilmour only takes half the book to get to the 19th century: this is swift run through a rich story. It turns out, Gilmour is most interested in the Risorgimento, the movement in Italy that forced unity onto an Italy that was previously divided between different states, and what has happened since. My mother is from Piedmont so it’s interesting to see the Piedmontese, and in particular King Vittorio Emanuele, cast as the villains of the piece for straitjacketing a reluctant assortment of independent cities and statelets into a unified state.
Gilmour’s basic point is that Italian loyalty is more local and regional than national (except when the Azzurri are playing) and in this I think he’s right. Other countries spent centuries unifying, slowly assembling the sentiments and assembleys necessary to make a truly unified country; in Italy, they did this all in a couple of decades. As such, it’s no surprise that Italy remains a collection of regions forced into a country. And Gilmour’s book is a very good place to understand how that happened and its consequences.
A good friend of mine, Yossi Brain, died in an avalanche. He was climbing El Presidente, a 5,700-metre mountain in Ecuador’s Apolobamba mountain range with a climbing client, Dana Witzel, and two other climbers when an avalanche caught him and Dana. It wasn’t a big avalanche. Not one of those tides that sweep half the mountain away, just a slide of snow. In fact, it was so negligible that the other two climbers were unaffected. They scrambled over to Yossi and Dana as fast as they could but it was too late: they were both dead.
In the mountains, you can do everything right, take all the recommended precautions, and still end up dead. Just be in the wrong place at the wrong time. That was what happened to Yossi. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The Silent Land is about a husband and wife who are also in the wrong place at the wrong time. Skiers, they wake for the early snow, only to be caught in an avalanche. They survive, however, but when they return to their village they find it entirely empty. There is no one there. Nor are they able to contact anyone outside. And their attempts to escape end with them circled back to where they started from.
They are good couple: Jake and Zoe love each other. In some ways, The Silent Land is a portrayal of a marriage, a marriage that works. Yes, there are the usual compromises and irritations, but it’s a marriage that is the making of both of them. And then it is tested – and found strong.
The Silent Land is a story of love, and loss, and the silence between the worlds. It’s a mystery and an unveiling and an invitation. It’s a story that stands on the borders of dream and verity, where we stand too although we think ourselves on solid ground. It’s a story that lingers long after the reading.
The Gospel of St Mark is the shortest, roughest, rawest of the Gospels. It’s written in Koine Greek, like the other Gospels, but it’s significantly less polished than the Greek of the other three Gospels. It’s now generally agreed by scholars to be the earliest Gospel to be written.
In this new translation, Michael Pakaluk keeps the original roughness rather than smoothing it out as most translations do. He retains the tense switching, where the Gospel moves in the same scene from the past tense to the present tense and back again. He includes the breathless ‘and thens’ and ‘immediatelys’ and the other connectives. And in doing so he demonstrates well his basic point: that this Gospel is the written record of Peter’s own account of Jesus’s life and death.
In 1977, the actor Alec McCowen, one of the greatest actors of his generation, stood on stage and recited all of Mark’s Gospel, from memory, at the University Theatre in Newcastle. He went on to tell the story at the Riverside Studios, the West End and Broadway. It took about an hour and a half.
Peter, telling his tale to listeners sitting around him, would have taken about the same length of time. Speaking as the witness to these events, he often omits his own name where the other Gospels name him. He includes the actual Aramaic words Jesus spoke. And the whole text is suffused with the sense of breathtaking urgency that comes from someone who watched this all unfold without the slightest notion of how the story would play out.
As such, it’s a way of reading the Gospel in a manner as close as is possible to those first hearers, sitting clustered around the big fisherman telling his story with the same astonished urgency with which he first witnessed it.
People go missing. People go missing all the time. In most cases, they are found again quickly. But some disappear.
Most of the disappeared are people who chose to disappear; people who walked out of ther lives. I suspect most of us, at some point or other, have faced that temptation: the open door, the road ahead, the train journey or the plane flight: a chance not only to leave a life behind but also the opportunity to become someone else entirely.
Most of those who disappear fall into this category. Then there are the tragic cases, the people abducted, kidnapped and killed. Many of these are found, eventually, their remains allowing a measure of closure to those that mourn them.
But there are other disappearances. Disappearances that stud the tales and folklore particularly of the ocean swept shores of northern Europe. In these stories, people walk out of this world, wittingly or not, into another realm that runs somehow parallel and somehow perpendicular to our own.
Otherworld, the land under the waves, the land of the living, Faerie, Avalon; these are just some of its names and, according to these tales, some of the people who disappear do so because they find the door to this otherworld.
The Mysteries is about people who disappear – and the people who search for them. It’s a story of loss and finding, weaving a detective story into a fairy tale and a fairy tale into a detective story. It switches from Turnpike Lane (an area of London which, I can attest, is about as far from Faerie as it’s possible to get) to the shores of Loch Sween in Scotland, which I can also confirm lies on the border between this world and… somewhere else.
It’s a story of losing and finding, and the perils that come with both. If you have ever walked down a suburban street at night when no one else is moving and the light pools around the street lamps and it becomes clear that it would be all too easy to turn onto a street in a different city entirely; if you have ever walked lost in mist on a hillside to suddenly find a stone standing in front of you, cold dripping from its face, then this is a book for you.
The subtitle tells the book’s theme: the greatest U-boat hunter of the battle of the Atlantic. Frederic John Walker, inevitably nicknamed ‘Johnnie’ after the brand of whisky, was a captain and commander of the small boat squadrons, largely consisting of corvettes and frigates, that were given the task of protecting Britain’s merchant-fleet convoys from German U-boats. Churchill famously said that the Battle of the Atlantic, that long, cold, patient, largely silent conflict that was fought on and under the ocean, was the only battle that kept him awake at night with worry.
Johnnie Walker did as much as any single individual to win the battle. From his revolutionary tactics, where he turned his patrol vessels into the hunters, seeking out and destroying the German submarines, to his unflagging devotion to duty that kept him on the bridge hour after hour, day after day, Walker led the way.
The book is, in some ways, a military hagiography. There’s little in the way of criticism but then, there was little criticism warranted, particularly when you reach the end and read how Walker’s devotion to duty quite literally drove him to an early death. Walker worked himself to death, dying in 1944 when the battle was mostly won but the war not yet over. He also lost his younger son during the war.
The Walker family, like so many others, sacrificed so much that we might live. It is good to remember, and honour, him. And it’s also a thrilling read, conveying well the cold and tension of the long nights when the corvettes searched for the wolf packs, knowing that at any moment a torpedo might come barreling towards them.
OK, you could write a shorter history. It is possible. But if you did, it would be of the nature of here’s the Romans, long bit where nothing much happens but there’s a lot of fighting, Renaissance!, another long bit where there’s a lot of fighting, Risorgimento!, Fascism (hiss! boo!), fashion. What Ross King does particularly well in this book is fill in the bits where, apparently, nothing much happens apart from a lot of fighting. In this, he’s helped by Italy having a lot of really interesting history. So if you want to learn more about the history of Italy, and in particular the bits apart from Rome and Renaissance, then this is a good place to start.
The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights by John Steinbeck
Don’t lend out the precious books of your childhood – at least, not if you expect to get them back. I can count on the fingers of one thumb the number of books that, having lent out, have been returned to me. Unfortunately, one of the books that I ‘lent’ was this one, in a fine hardback edition. I have no recollection to whom I lent it but, if you should happen to read this…I was going to say, please give it back. But now, that’s no longer necessary. For as memory turns back to the books that most formed me, I have started searching them out and rereading them.
The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights was one of those books. I must have read it before I was ten and long, long before I read any other books by John Steinbeck. As a bookish teenager, I borrowed Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath and other Steinbeck novels from the school library (imagine having a school library that stocked such books!); impressive, immersive books, worthy of a Nobel-prize winner.
But none of them moved me – made me – as much as The Acts of King Arthur. Reading the introduction to this new edition, I learned that Steinbeck was given a copy of Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur as a child. Rather than being repelled by the strange version of English in which it was written, he found it fascinating, relishing the aura of age and faerie that lay in the very words on the page, complementing the tales the words told.
As an adult, Steinbeck set about retelling Malory’s Arthurian legends but, sadly, he never completed the task. However, after his death, what he had written was published. It is remarkable. Undoubtedly the best retelling of these stories I have ever read. Steinbeck finds the language to set his stories in the same semi-legendary world in which Malory wrote, a world suspended between our own and the realm of quests and wizards and giants and dragons, a world where the temptations and virtues of chivalry are laid bare in a way that makes it, for a child such as me reading it, an invitation to emulate those virtues and follow those ideals.
It really is the most wonderfully written book but what sets it apart is the deep wisdom that supports the words on the page.
Having read Steinbeck’s version of Malory, I set about reading the original myself, both volumes in the old and much missed Everyman series. While I enjoyed the original, I must admit that I preferred – and prefer – Steinbeck’s retelling. If you’ve not read this book, do so. It will transport you but, more importantly, reading it will make you a better person.
Jack London, who died when he was only 40, packed more life into those few decades than most people could manage – or endure – in twice the time. He was a gold prospecter, a sailor, a tramp, a hobo, a journalist, a writer and a war correspondent.
The Road tells of London’s life on the road, as a tramp and a hobo, riding the trains, cadging meals off kind families, following the signs left by other travellers on the road, signs that told whether a town had good pickings or a mean sheriff inclined to throw vagrants in jail.
Among the many fascinations of the book is London’s ambivalence: it was a hard life and often brutal but its freedom clearly appealed greatly to London. His views, as expressed in his later works, were clearly influenced by the social Darwinism of the time, which viewed life as essentially an amoral struggle for survival. But bound with this was a deeply romantic view of freedom and the possibilities available to a man around the next corner or over the next hill. The two come together in The Road, a celebration as well as a requiem for a way of life that could only be spawned by poverty.
I presume that Cormac McCarthy read London’s book before writing his version of The Road. It strikes me that there would be an interesting thesis to be had from comparing and contrasting the two stories.
