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Adventures in Bookland: The Serpent Sword by Matthew Harffy

7 August 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, Writers

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Like two warriors, we circled each other: wary, watchful, waiting for the other to make the first move. Each of us thought ourselves kings of our realm, alone and unchallenged until, through whisper and word, news came of another claimant to the throne.

The throne was the king of the 7th century and we, writers, working in what we had each thought was a personal playground until we found the other: the interloper, the intruder. The rival.

At least, that’s how it was for me. I’d been writing Edwin: High King of Britain for a month or two, all the while congratulating myself on my wit in staking claim to this most transformative yet unrepresented era in history when I learned that one Matthew Harffy was busy writing his own novel, The Serpent Sword, set in the same period. What was worse, Edwin, my King Edwin, was in his book as well.

My first reaction was, naturally, to hope for his complete and utter failure. That this Matthew chap – what was it with the two ‘f’s, after all? – would prove just another wannabe, telling the world he was a writer before he’d actually written anything of any worth.

But then he went and got himself an agent. Not good. Not good at all – particularly when I didn’t have one. All right, I had a publisher – Lion Fiction – but it was surely only a matter of time before his agent got him a publisher and then he’d be the first to put his words into the 7th century and lay claim on Northumbria. Luckily, I was almost finished with Edwin and, what’s more, we got a commendation from Bernard Cornwell – yes, that Bernard Cornwell – to go on the cover. Round 1 to me, I thought.

But then The Serpent Sword came out. And while it didn’t have Bernard Cornwell extolling it, it had pretty well everyone else. Looked like this Matthew bloke could write. What was worse, he was being nice to me online – he even bought (and read!) Edwin. Now what was I going to do?

Read his book, of course.

But there we hit the hidden fear that gnaws at the heart of every writer. What if we’re really not any good? All the good reviews flow off our backs like water, but every 1-star sticks barbs into our souls and refuses to come out.

What if I read Matthew’s book and thought it was better than mine?

Then my publisher asked me to read another book set in 7th-century Northumbria, The Abbess of Whitby by Jill Dalladay. While there was some overlap with my work, the focus was clearly different: I could try this.

So I read it and, reading, found myself twisted sideways, like looking at a spoon through a glass of water: everything distorted. Reading about these people – people I had written in my own books – imagined differently was intensely, in fact unpleasantly, distorting. Having finished The Abbess of Whitby, I realised I could not go near another vision of 7th-century Northumbria until I had finished my own exploration of the time.

While Matthew and I had become steadily more acquainted online – chiefly through his unfailing generosity and support – I prevaricated and circled around the great big elephant in our room: the fact that he’d read my book and I hadn’t read his. Two more books were written – my Oswald: Return of the King, his The Cross and the Curse – and still I circled away, attempting to repay his generosity with promises to, someday, read Matthew’s work.

Then, the day came. I had finished Oswiu: King of Kings. I was finished in the 7th century. Now there was no more hiding. Now, I had to read his book and answer the question: is he better than me?

The answer: yes.

Yes, he is. He is better at doing what he is doing than I could ever be. But, reading The Serpent Sword, I realised that Matthew isn’t doing what I am doing: we are writing different worlds set in the same place and time, and exploring different aspects of storytelling and world creation.

Matthew writes of men and battles and blood and war better than pretty well anyone else around – his nearest comparison is, in fact, Bernard Cornwell’s Uhtred and a mark of how fine a debut The Serpent Sword is, is the fact that Beobrand doesn’t suffer in comparison with Uhtred.

I don’t know how he did it, but Matthew seems to have escaped every single one of the usual first novel traps: there’s no over exposition, there’s no repeating information to the reader, there’s no failure to trust his words. Everything is lean and taut and finished: like the titular sword, this story cuts.

My only word of warning to prospective readers is that it’s pretty brutal. These were, of course, brutal times, but if you are squeamish about the depiction of violence, this might not be the book for you. But if you enjoy story telling of the highest order, this book is for you.

 

 

The Canon of Historical Fiction – what’s in it and what’s not

29 July 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Things You Never Knew, Writers, Writing

What is a canon? Apart from a camera maker, it’s also a cathedral priest, a church law and, for the purposes of this blog, the measure against which we judge what is good and what is not in literature. The canon is the ultimate best-of list, the books that have survived the centuries to speak along the conversation that is human history. But the canon must also show the breadth and possibilities of a literary genre.

So here I’m going to make a stab at defining and starting the canon of historical fiction. First, though, we need to define what we mean by historical fiction. The most obvious answer is that it’s written about people in the past, so we will begin by defining our first criterion: to qualify as historical fiction the work must be set in a time at least one generation before the time of writing.

Secondly, to give equal weight to both parts of its name, it must be a story grounded in historical fact. So while there will be fictional aspects to the story, it should not contradict history. By that criterion, something like Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, which I would otherwise very much like to include, has to be excluded from the canon of historical fiction as Arthur – if he existed – fought very different battles to those depicted in Le Morte.

Following from this, we must also exclude historical fantasy. While it’s true that peoples in the past accepted the supernatural much more readily and therefore, to portray them properly, supernatural and fantastical elements may be introduced into a story, they should not take precedence over history. With that in mind, I think we would have to exclude The Odyssey from the canon, for while it’s quite possible that Odysseus wandered widely in his return from Troy, the mythical elements of the story put it firmly into legend rather than history.

So, with these criteria in mind, what makes up the canon of historical fiction through the centuries. Let’s go!

The Iliad – Homer. The grandaddy of them all. The foundation stone of pretty well all western literature. And, for fans of hard hitting historical fiction, it contains some of the most brutal depictions of battle ever written, and all in dactylic hexameter! My favourite translation is the one by Robert Fagles.

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By my criteria, The Aeneid can’t be included as historical fiction (but it’s certainly still worth reading), nor Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (just as worth reading and considerably more fun).

Moving into the early medieval period, Beowulf is disqualified because of its fantastical elements but  The Song of Roland, despite the somewhat unlikely casualty figures, makes it both as an account of a real battle and as an unparalleled insight into the beginnings of chivalric culture.

Although they’re plays, Shakespeare’s histories are supreme examples of the writer bringing the historical past to life and interpreting it afresh through the ages. Indeed, Shakespeare’s take on the Wars of the Roses has probably influenced our ideas of what happened then more than those of any historian. As he’s recently resurfaced, try Richard III (although a particular favourite is Henry VI part 3).

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But historical fiction as a genre really gets going in the 19th century and the man who set it running was Sir Walter Scott. His Waverley novels introduce characters at the meeting of competing social groups, while Ivanhoe pretty well invents the modern medieval novel.

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Most of the 19th century giants of English literature turned their hands to the historical novel, with examples ranging from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (pretty well my least favourite of his works) to Vanity Fair.

But the greatest 19th-century work of historical fiction must be War and Peace. Tolstoy wrote it some 60 years after Napoleon’s disastrous (for him) invasion of Russia, although in the story Tolstoy is as much concerned with his present as the past.

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Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed also uses the events of the past – Italy in the early 17th century – as part of an examination of pre-unification Italy. It’s one of the great novels of Italian literature.

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Moving to the new world, The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper pretty well created the idea of the noble Indian, while tinging it with elegiac wistfulness for a disappearing people.

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Coming into the 20th century, Georgette Heyer pretty well single handedly created the Regency romance novel – she can’t be held responsible for its subsequent mutations! Robert Graves might have regarded I, Claudius and Claudius the God as literary hack work but they show less sign of being forgotten than his poetry, while of Mary Renault’s superb novels about ancient Greece my own favourite is The Mask of Apollo, which shows Plato trying, and failing, to put his political philosophy into practice through his teaching of Dionysius the Younger, ruler of Syracuse.

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There’s a strong strand of historical fiction written for children and, of these, I’d single out Rosemary Sutcliff and her Eagle of the Ninth as one of the best examples – and certainly worthy of a place in the canon.

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While I’ve mainly confined myself to the English-writing world, there is one 20th-century novel from an entirely different cultural milieu that every fan of historical fiction should read: Shusaku Endo’s Silence. Writing as a Japanese Catholic, Endo is both a part of and stands as observer to his culture, a position also endured by the hero of Silence, a Portuguese missionary priest in the 17th century who is forced to abjure his faith in the face of the torture meted out to Christians. Silence is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, so it definitely earns its place in our canon.

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I am no great fan of The Name of the Rose, but as an example of a sub-genre of historical fiction, the historical detective story, it deserves a place in the canon. On the other hand, I admit to being a complete fan boy of George Macdonald Fraser and Patrick O’Brian: I will complete this list of the historical fiction canon with Flashman and the Aubrey/Maturin books.

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Now, it’s your turn. Tell me what else you think should form part of the canon of historical fiction.

The Reviewer: A Story Review of Robert Aickman’s Strange Stories

8 July 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, Writing

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The Reviewer – for that was how he signed his name at the bottom of his column – sat down at his desk. He always took an almost physical satisfaction at it: the grain of the polished wood, the smoothness of the carving, the finish, all quietly spoke, in unison, of the taste of the man who sat before it. That was, the reviewer, thought, as it should be.

He picked up his pen, feeling it thick between his fingers, and paused, holding it above the fresh expanse of virgin paper that waited, spread upon his writing desk. Always, the pause; the delicious hesitation, the wait.

Ah, the wait.

The Reviewer allowed the wait to turn into the weight: the heavy load of words, building in his mind, swirling there in inchoate, pregnant silence.

Then, release.

When it was over, and he was spent, the Reviewer put the pen down, laying it neatly beside the sheet of paper: always, exactly parallel to the edge, and an inch away. Precision in such matters was a signifier of his own singularity.

With the pen retracted, the Reviewer turned his eyes to the paper. First, he cast his eyes over its entirety, taking the expanse in, in one single, appraising glance. The shape of the review was the first element of its felicity: how often had he, in his youthful, fumbling experiments, cast aside a work simply because the words made an unbecoming shape upon the page.

But here, the paragraphs were well proportioned, their very form propelling the reading eye onwards, down the page towards the final, juddering climax. For, of course, the Reviewer saved his best work for those authors he cared for most deeply: the ones he truly despised. For them: evisceration. The exposure of their incompetence was his satisfaction, the reason for his existence as a reviewer.

And this was one of the worst. A writer whose cod historical dialogue was meant to add veracity to his recreation of the 7th century, but who revealed, by the inversion of word order and his failed attempts to catch the alliterative punch of Anglo-Saxon poetry, only the tin ear of the 21st.

The Reviewer, satisfied with the form, steepled his fingers.

Now, to read.

The writing always came in a Bacchic flood, the word frenzy flooding his body and mind, so that he did not know what he wrote; only, that he was, finally, deliciously, spent.

The reading, however, was Apollonian: the careful, weighted appreciation of every word and phrase, every syllable and sentence. The Reviewer knew no purer aesthetic experience than the first reading.

He breathed out, calming mind and body, then brought his eyes to the page.

The Reviwer read through to the end.

He stared long at the page.

The words upon it did not change.

For a moment, he thought if, perhaps, some other hand had written them. But he was too fastidious in memory to allow himself that escape.

The words. Those trite, banal, graceless words were his.

They were worse, even, than the talentless hack he had sought to expose.

The Reviewer stood up. He left the paper white upon his desk, and went out into the street. The street lamp, its dirty yellow staining the pavement, lit him. The Reviewer looked up and down the street where he lived. No one left and no one came.

The Muse had left him.

No matter. The Reviewer knew where to find her again.

The last time, she had called herself Jade. The Reviewer’s lips ticked upwards in something like a smile. She had said, he had the biggest talent she’d ever seen.

He would just have to find the Muse again.

As he set off, walking down the street towards the cluster of drab yellow neon that told of the Muse’s presence, he wondered what she would call herself this time.

The End

(There. Robert Aickman’s strange stories are, indeed, strange, and I wasn’t at all sure how to review them. But if you like this little tale, then you’ll enjoy Aickman’s stories too.)

 

Who Killed Horror?

8 July 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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I’m old enough to remember how, back in the 1980s, it seemed like the horror genre was going to take over the world. Stephen King, of course, had started it: Carrie came out in 1974, Salem’s Lot in ’75, The Shining in ’77 and The Stand in ’78. Jumping on the bandwagon, a whole host of writers and publishers began churning out horror books through the following decade – and I was a big fan of them, picking lurid covers off the shelves at bookshops.

And then, it died. Not for Stephen King, of course, but for the rest. The blood-stained tracks became too trampled, the public lost interest, the publishers stopped publishing. The 1990s saw lots of articles written, asking variations on the question, who killed off the horror genre.

Now, having read The Turn of the Screw, I can answer the question. We did. We writers, we killed it off. Drove a stake through its heart, chopped its head off, pulled out its entrails and painted its drained blood upon the walls.

And that’s how we did it too: by piling up bodies, horror on horror, and forgetting that, for horror to work, there has to be something worse than death and the pain of dying; something much worse.

This is what makes The Turn of the Screw, and the other Victorian ghost stories, so effective: because these writers believed – or at least belonged to a culture that believed – that there are things worse than death. That a soul can be lost and, in its loss, something infinitely more precious than the mere pumping of blood and inflating of lungs is lost too.

After all, the problem with death, when that’s all there is, is that death ends everything. It’s the black curtain, the exit, the end, the close to suffering and the final release. Writing in a culture where death is the great, the sole, evil, robs horror of, well, its horror. Take away dread, the unspoken, wordless, formless dread of things and fates beyond and above and below death, and horror is reduced to variations on torture porn: how much can we make the protagonist suffer before his end? There is no horror in this, only the workings out of a monkey curiosity, drained of empathy.

So, for horror to work, then there must, indeed, be fates worse than death. It is the knowledge that this is true that makes The Turn of the Screw – despite Henry James’s rather curious prose style, so much more laboured and laborious than his brother, William James’s – into such a haunting book. And, reading it, tells us how flattened we have allowed our imaginative world to become.

 

Adventures in Bookland: The Colour Thief by Andrew Fusek Peters

8 July 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

25590502Depression exists underneath words, and outside them. It drains meaning from them and renders them pointless squiggles on a page or passing breath, taken by the wind. So, this picture book largely dispenses with words and uses pictures to tell of how a young boy learns of, understands and copes with his father’s depression. It does so beautifully and the central metaphor – of depression as the thief of colour – works perfectly. Highly recommended for anyone having to deal with depression in the family, and particularly when it affects children.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Here Comes the Poo Bus! by Andy Stanton

5 July 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, Poetry

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In Here Comes the Poo Bus! narrative poetry – an undeservedly neglected form in the 20th century – reaches a new pitch of artistic tension and, final, blessed, relief. Have you ever reached that point, in the creative process, where the artistic load has grown to such a mass that it simply has to be dumped, immediately, no matter where you are and what you are doing? Even in the midst of the most important meeting or walking the high hills of Yosemite, unseen connections have been made in the dark, unplumbed places and then, suddenly, they all come together and have to be released.

Ever had that happen to you?

Or, if not, have you ever been overcome by the desperate, this-will-not-wait, desire to do a poo?

Then this is the book for you!

It contains what is, I think, the single finest verse ever committed to paper:

Here it comes! The poo bus!
Along the avenue.
It’s big! It’s brown! It drives through town!
It’s made out of poo!

I should mention that, before I read this extraordinary work, my favourite poetic couplet came from T.Rex’s seminal statement of artistic, cultural and political change, Children of the Revolution, and simply states:

I drive a Rolls Royce
‘Cos it’s good for my voice.

Mind, it’s worth bearing in mind, when choosing suitable reading matter for yourself and your children, that my own finest poetic achievement came in distilling the emotion (“Oh my goodness me, I cannot believe I am seeing this”) in the tranquility of recollection. So, to finish, here it is. If you like this, you’ll love Here Comes the Poo Bus!

Gorillas eat their poo?
I can’t believe they do.
Oh no! Oh yuck!
It’s true!

 

Tell Us What You Really Think, Mr Teacher

2 June 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Things You Never Knew

This may be the finest example I have yet read of a teacher saying what he really thinks of his pupil. Sadly, nowadays school reports are anodyne documents, cloaked in cliches. But this example, from a Geography teacher’s report, I can personally vouch for: I have seen and read the dog-eared report (a report treasured down the years by the boy, now man and a teacher himself, who received it).

David has failed completely to impress me favourably this term. Apart from his manner, which is frequently offensive, his term time marks and exam scores are abysmal.