I’ve fallen hideously behind in my adventures in bookland – indeed, it might have looked like I had abandoned bookland entirely – but never fear, it remains my favourite place in which to travel, and Nick Brown’s series of the adventures of Imperial agent Cassius looks like it will be a very good place to travel. This is the sixth (and currently last) book in the series, but its story of kidnap, adventure, quest and survival is excellent, and the characters memorable and well rounded. An excellent example of historical fiction and highly recommended.
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Big Announcement Number 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R5gHF0vzew
Second, sustained drum roll….
Here it is, big announcement number 2: my next non-fiction book will be called Warrior: the Biography of a Man with No Name, and it will be published by Granta.
Now this really is pretty big: Granta is about the most prestigious publisher in Britain and having them publish my next book will ensure it gets noticed in all sorts of places that have previously ignored my work, including the national press (although that also opens the possibility of scathing reviews from reviewers working on the principle that a good kicking is always more fun to write and read in review than any amount of glowing praise).
As to the book itself, it is the story of one of the people excavated at the Bowl Hole Cemetery near Bamburgh Castle. While human remains provide all sort of useful archaeological evidence, their great drawback is that skeletons are mute: they tell no story. But for a variety of reasons, we can say much more about one particular man, buried within sight of castle and sea, than is normally the case, and it is his story that we will tell in this book. When I say we, it really will be a book written in the first person plural, as I will be collaborating on it with Paul Gething, one of the directors of the Bamburgh Research Project and the man who excavated the body of this Dark-Age warrior.
Warrior will be published in 2019.
Big Announcement Number 1
Drum roll…
I’ve finished writing my next novel. And here are the very first lines.
“Bloody Danes.”
I looked away from my horrified regard of what was happening to the man beside me.
“Bloody, bloody Danes,” Brother Odo muttered again, staring fixedly through the slats of the sty.
“Yes, they are,” I hissed. “And it’ll be our blood they’ll be covered with if you don’t shut up.”
Brother Odo turned terror struck eyes towards me. “Where did they come from?”
“The Danes? Where do you think?” I squinted back out through the slats. “Idiot.”
There you go. Does it make you want to read more? As you can tell, this story is again set in Anglo-Saxon England, but two centuries later than the Northumbrian Thrones, during the invasion of the Great Heathen Army. But if that is par for my normal writing course, the ‘hero’ isn’t, for he is a liar, a cheat and a coward; a man whose only virtue is the fact that he knows he is completely without any redeeming virtue. The story begins with the Great Army laying waste the kingdom of East Anglia and reaches a climax at the Battle of Ashdown, taking in martyrdoms, mysteries and a very unusual place to find a bishop’s ring along the way.
The book will be published by Endeavour Ink, the paper imprint of Endeavour Press, probably in the spring of 2018. (I can’t give you a title yet, as we haven’t decided on one.)
I’m Back!
A long time since I posted anything on my blog, but we were away for the summer in Sri Lanka, visiting the land of my father. Here’s a photo of me and my boys, trying to work out where we were going to go next!
More about the trip later, but for now, some big news and announcements that I’ll make in the next couple of posts.
Adventures in Bookland: Mont Saint Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams
The cover photo gives, as much as is possible, some idea of what is inside this most extraordinary of books. Look at it carefully. Rising from surrounding water a ziggurat of stone rendered into yearning patterns of ascent points to the overarching sky. It is a medieval rocket to heaven, a union of all the different worlds, a place that, seeing it, grabs the breath and awes the eye. The French refer to part of it as ‘La Merveille’ but it is all a marvel, almost impossible to comprehend. That the men of the eleventh century were able to make such a place seems scarcely credible, and yet they did, raising a work greater than any of the wonders of antiquity. Although the medievals revered the classical past, in truth they outdid it in what they built, in stone and thought and culture.
This book, faced with such marvels, answers with its own, for it is, without doubt, one of the three or four most extraordinary books I have ever read. The author, Henry Adams, was the great grandson of John Adams, the second president of the United States; his grandfather, John Quincy Adams, was the sixth president; his father, Charles Francis Adams, was US ambassador to Britain during the American Civil War. So, not much to live up to there then!
What must it be like to grow up in such a milieu? Henry Adams went on to become a historian and journalist, but in terms of obvious accomplishment, he did not match his forbears. Yet he wrote two books, The Education of Henry Adams and this volume, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, that rank as classics, although each are strange members of that class of literature. The Education is an autobiography, of sorts, while Mont Saint Michel is ostensibly a travel guide. But when I was working as a travel writer for publishers such as Time Out, I’d have had my copy spiked if I’d submitted anything like Mont Saint Michel (oh, if only I could write so well!). Perhaps the best comparison, in terms of style, is John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, although that would not be obvious from the playful preface, where Adams dedicates this book to ‘nieces in wish’, willing to read the musings of an uncle on the strange and distant land of France and the stranger and more distant lands of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Adams, with a mix of erudition and wit (he assumes his reader is fluent in French, Latin and reasonably conversant in Greek), leads his niece in wish upwards through Mont St Michel, ascending it in thought and learning, placing it within the compass of the society and times that created it and, in doing so, he does something that I would have thought impossible: despite being something of an Anglo-Saxonist, he makes me appreciate the Normans. Then, by way of the birth of Gothic, Adams takes the visitor to the pinnacle of Gothic architecture, Chartres Cathedral, and sings the hymn of its inspiration and, in truth, its maker, the Virgin herself. No where else have I read such an intense and lived encounter with the medieval mind, such an appreciation of its peculiar and particular genius.
Yet, it was an appreciation born in a nihilism that, occasionally, shatters the stained glass and leaves the reader face to face with the dark cold at the heart of Adams’ world.
It was very childlike, very foolish, very beautiful, and very true,- -as art, at least:—so true that everything else shades off into vulgarity… For seven hundred years Chartres has seen pilgrims, coming and going more or less like us, and will perhaps see them for another seven hundred years; but we shall see it no more, and can safely leave the Virgin in her majesty, with her three great prophets on either hand, as calm and confident in their own strength and in God’s providence as they were when Saint Louis was born, but looking down from a deserted heaven, into an empty church, on a dead faith.
Few saints have seen as clearly into the mystery of Chartres and Mont St Michel as Adams, yet he sees it all as shadow play, and a play of shadows, the footlings of earnest and talented children before they shuffle into the dark.
It is a bleak vision.
But it only breaks through briefly and, for most of the book, Adams is content to walk in the vivid colours of the medieval, letting its bright, primary colours light his prose.
There are other points where the book comes to a juddering, jarring halt, however, and this is wherever Adams mentions Jews. He was, to put it simply, an anti-semite, and on paper at least a vicious one. Reading him, as complete a product of civilised 19th-century culture as one could wish to find, it becomes a little clearer how the 20th century could produce the Holocaust.
For some, these sudden eruptions of nihilism and hatred into this most civilised and civilising of texts might serve to render it beyond reading, and I would have no objections to that. But they are part of what makes this book extraordinary, for they serve to help to define how precious and rare a man of truly civilised culture is, and how even the best of these may be distorted by the culture they embody. This book is a 19th-century understanding of the High Middle Ages and it enlightens the modern reader about both in a way no other book I’ve ever read does. Do read it.
Two Stories Just Published!
Two of my favourite short stories have just been published by New Myths and See the Elephant magazines, and I’m absolutely delighted.
New Myths issue 39 carries my story, The Wall at the End of the World, about a Roman officer who is called to the wall that marks the end of the Roman world and there learns just why Emperor Hadrian decided that the empire should advance no further north. Here’s a quick taste of the story:
“The painted people!” The legate shook his head and spat into the fire before reaching for the cup and taking a swallow of the wine I’d brought with me.
“I’ve spent too many years fighting them to spend my off-duty time talking about them.” He looked at the cup appreciatively. “Good Roman wine this. The stuff they make here is vinegar.”
“That’s what I heard. It’s why I took the precaution of bringing a supply.”
The legate snorted with laughter, spraying wine over the woollen tunic he had wrapped around himself. “Maxentius told me you have a whole wagon stuffed full with amphorae.”
“The previous tribune brought an amphora of British wine back to Rome. I tried some when I met him to talk about the posting.
The legate stared into the cup. “What did he tell you of me?”
“He said to bring you some decent wine.”
And you can read the rest of the story here.
See the Elephant, issue 3, Slipping Through the Cracks, carries my story, Spellman Mathers’ Travelling Show & Zoo of Ordinary Creatures, which treats of boggarts, fairies and the thin places between worlds through which the unwary and the unfortunate might slip. It’s available through Amazon in Kindle and paper formats and you can find it here. This is the beginning of the story, where we meet one of my favourite ever characters, Spellman Mathers, the master of the strangest travelling show you will ever see:
Spellman Mathers’ Travelling Show & Zoo of Ordinary Creatures was shut up for the night. Tasks completed, Spellman kicked back a chair, lit a smoke and, hands behind his head, stared up at the sky. He breathed out, wreathing the stars with smoke, then, holding the cigarette between thumb and forefinger while inspecting its glowing core, he said, “I was like you once, kid.”
In his hiding place, in the deep dark beneath the bales of animal feed, Sadhu, his skin as brown as a nut and his eyes black as the sky, all but cried out. He couldn’t have seen him, couldn’t have. In the hiding place, dark and deep, he was invisible so long as he did not move and made no sound.
“I had no home, no folks, and I snuck into the circus one night and when the circus left town, I went right along with it.” Apparently satisfied with the cigarette, Spellman drew on it again, then breathed the smoke out, and it billowed and writhed until it became a little smoke boy, hiding behind a cage while peeping out fearfully at a frightening world.
“But that was back then, when I were little, and the world’s moved on. The circus ain’t the right place for a youngster to be growing up no more.”
Adventures in Bookland: Night’s Bright Darkness by Sally Read
To be a poet, a true poet, is to be infected with the same sort of madness that produces prophets. It’s a calling, a vocation to stare into the depths of meaning and the dark abyss of words, to stand exposed beneath a pitiless sun and to teeter upon a knife ridge between unfathomable falls. This is the story of how a poet became a prophet. And it’s quite the most brilliant and compelling conversion story I’ve read since… well, to be honest, since Augustine. Whether Sally Read’s story will resound down the ages in the same way is unlikely, but it speaks with a particular clarity to another product of the peculiar culture that has produced us both: a culture of lights and wonders and flashing distractions; where we can speak across worlds, live the thrills and tragedies of other lives, and rush, rush, rush, always rush, to the freshest, hottest promise of purpose.
Sally Read was a poet before she became a prophet. It was the uncompromising nature of her immersion into the nature of meaning, the play and dance of sounds and shapes, semantics and syntax, that is the stuff of poetry and the foundation of words and worlds that opened her up – an atheist born, bred and convinced – to the raw nature of reality and, most profoundly, its wonder. And Wonder spoke. It showed her, it revealed itself, it sang to her. And, in its speaking, it showed itself to be a Person.
Really, I can say little else other than to urge you to read this book. If you have any interest in language, precisely deployed to tell a story and evoke that which is beyond language, then read this book. If you have any interest in how today’s aggressively secular culture can be reopened to grace, then read this book. If you have any interest in reading an extraordinary story by an extraordinary and slightly scary woman, then read this book.
Adventures in Bookland: Praetorian by Guy de la Bédoyère
De la Bédoyère’s book on the Praetorians will likely become the definitive account of the rise and fall of the emperor’s bodyguards but whether it is the best book on the subject depends on what the reader is looking for when opening its pages. If you are looking for a sober and scholarly history of the Praetorians, with a thorough examination of the sources (or lack of them) and extensive discussions of such issues as whether the guards’ cohorts were quingenary (composed of 500 men) or milliary (made up of 1,000 troops), and the evolution of the term cohors praetoria from the purely descriptive to the imperially prescriptive then you will be in historical heaven. However, if you would prefer a gossipy trip through the underbelly of Roman imperial politics and the temptations attendant upon being the bodyguard to the most powerful man in the world, then Praetorian might disappoint. A serious historian, de la Bédoyère prefers to pass over, or passingly refer to, some of the more salacious details of Roman history on the not unreasonable grounds that these were likely inventions to please an audience no less keen on scandal then than are audiences of reality TV today. In Roman terms, de la Bédoyère is more Josephus than Suetonius. While no one would disagree that history should inform, it’s an open question as to how much it should entertain. For instance, when presented with an opportunity such as Hadrian’s praetorian prefect going by the name of Quintus Marcius Turbo, should the responsible historian abstain from the temptation to turn name into pun as being beneath his historical credibility, or should he revel in it, claiming that it will help the reader to remember while really indulging in wordplay for the sheer fun of it. It will come as no surprise that de la Bédoyère reacts to the name with all the disdain of Lady Bracknell presented with a handbag.
This is not to say the book is dull but rather that it turns, deliberately, from the sensational to the plausible. It is at its liveliest where our sources are most extensive, but it becomes interestingly scholarly where the sources are at their thinnest as this allows de la Bédoyère to deploy his considerable knowledge of epigraphs – the inscriptions cut into tombs – and temple dedications to deepen and broaden our understanding of how the Praetorians were deployed in the later stages of the Empire. From being bodyguards, they had become imperial firefighters, putting out rebellions and repelling invasions, or even acting as sentries on a grain route in far-off Numidia. It was a long way from the intrigues of Sejanus. Indeed, it was the intrigues of the prefects in the disastrous third century that eventually led to the dissolution of the Praetorians, when they picked the wrong side in the war between Constantine and Maxentius. Having gained the purple, Constantine was not about to let the Praetorians play the role of emperor maker again, and the Castra Praetoria, their camp in Rome, was demolished. The Praetorians were no longer players. But, among the many books on the Guard, this one certainly is.
Story Sale! The Pigeon’s Revenge
My story, The Pigeon’s Revenge, is available to download (to Kindle, e-reader and pdf) for only 20p from Alfie Dog Fiction in their sale. That’s right, £0.20 – you’d hardly bother to pick it up if you dropped it in a shop and it rolled away. What’s more, this is one of my favourite stories, and one of my best:
The pigeons of London discover a fiendish plot to drive them from the city. It’s left to the newly formed Pigeon Squadron, with some unlikely and unexpected allies, to beak up to the enemies and defend the skies.
Get the story from Alfie Dog fiction here (scroll down the page to find it).
Adventures in Bookland: Crusoe by Katherine Frank
It’s not often that you read such an interesting book that so completely fails in its stated intent. What Katherine Frank is trying to do is write the interlinked biographies of two men, Daniel Defoe and Robert Knox, to show how the real-life adventures of Robert Knox were the key inspiration behind Defoe’s creation of Robinson Crusoe. In that, she fails. But the failure is probably more interesting than her succeeding would have been. Yes, she does show quite clearly that Defoe had read Knox’s book of his 20-year captivity on Ceylon (Sri Lanka as it is now), and indeed that he’d simply lifted, whole and entire, some of Knox’s work into his own (in particular the seldom read sequel to Robinson Crusoe). But Defoe stole from other writers with as much panache and as little guilt as he defrauded tradesmen and bankers. Given the prevalence of nautical yarns of adventure and shipwreck at the time, and Defoe’s evident reading of other works in the genre, there’s nothing to say that Knox was the key influence on Crusoe. In fact, quite the opposite, as what defines Crusoe apart from all the real-world shipwrecked sailors is that he never ‘went native’. Rather, he recreated his lonely isle as a little England, remaking it in his own image. That is something that very much comes from Defoe’s own life, and how he remade his disasters and failures as triumphs. In some ways, Defoe was the first of the positive thinkers.
So if Frank fails in what she intended, where does she succeed? For one, in her vivid portrayal of Robert Knox. At the age of 19, accompanying his father on a voyage to the Indies aboard an East Indiaman, storm damage forced them to land in Trincomalee in Ceylon. At the time, the western coastal areas of Ceylon were controlled by the Dutch, but the Kings of Kandy maintained their independence in the mountainous interior of the island. Coming ashore, Knox, his father and a party of twenty sailors were initially welcomed by representatives of the king, but then taken captive.
It was a strange sort of captivity. The men were split into ones and twos and assigned to villages, for the villagers to look after. They were free to move about within bounds, and given food and accommodation, but they were not free to leave. There was, in the end, no meeting with the king, but just this ongoing captivity. It has the quality of a tropical, multicoloured Kafka (if such a thing can exist). Knox’s father died after a couple of years captivity, but on his deathbed his son promised him that he would endure and escape, to carry word back to England to the rest of the family of what had happened to Knox senior.
After 20 years (20 years!), Knox and another member of the crew did escape, making their way overland to a Dutch fort in the north east of the island and then taking ship back home. During the long voyage home, Knox wrote a detailed account of his time in Ceylon, and the geography and customs of the people of the island. Returning, a stranger, to England, Knox found it so very different from his departure. The Commonwealth was finished; there was a king again, and he needed employment. So, a year later, Knox set off sailing again, this time captain of an East Indiaman. But before he left he gave his manuscript, which had been worked through by his cousin and also the great scientist Robert Hooke who had befriended Knox on his return, and in his absence the book was published and became a best seller.
Frank tells this story wonderfully well, and brings Knox vividly to life. She visited Sri Lanka and tracked down the locations where Knox lived. Indeed, for my part as the son of a Sri Lankan, I would have happily had her write Knox’s biography alone, and to have learned more of what he learned and recorded of the country then. This is where the book is at its best, but because of the shared narrative, we don’t spend as much time in the tropics with Knox as we might.
On the other hand, the time spent with money grubbing Defoe in the streets of London is just as vivid and exciting. It’s a shame Frank didn’t write two books, one on each man, with maybe a nod towards Knox’s influence on Defoe, and a big embrace towards the strange way a writer will take influences and ideas and remake them under the demands of the blank page.
But, nevertheless, Crusoe was a real pleasure to read.