This is the third book by Alistair Moffat that I’ve read and, as you’d guess given the fact that I’ve kept reading him, I’ve enjoyed them all. The Sea Kingdoms is an attempt at a history of Celtic Britain and Ireland but, by the nature of the subject and the sources, it’s more a series of impressions and snapshots: places, events, people, all serving to illuminate some aspect of the other history of these islands, the history that has never been written but has been sung, recited, felt.
It’s as much a geography as a history, or a story of how the two interweave in the language and culture of a people acutely aware of the beauty and awe of their land. But, being united by the sea, the sea has also washed much away, leaving traces in the sand but only impressions where there was once much more. It’s unlikely that even the best efforts of archaeologists will retrieve too much else, and the history of the Celts, like the people, is bathed in the westering sun setting in the circle sea.
Matthew Harffy tagged me last Monday to do this book challenge called Lucky Seven. Here’s his Lucky Seven post from last week.
The rules are simple enough.
Go to page 7 or 77 in your current manuscript
Go to line 7
Post on your blog the next 7 lines or sentences – as they are!!
Tag 7 other people to do the same
I’ve not had the chance to tag seven other people, and I don’t think I actually know seven other writers, so I’ll let the challenge come to a discreet stop here.
Of all the battles Alfred fought, we have the most information about the Battle of Ashdown, which suggests that it loomed large in the king’s own memories. Alfred was still young, in his early twenties, and Ashdown was remarkable in a number of ways: for its victory (and Anglo-Saxon victories were rare indeed at this time), for it being the first time where Alfred clearly takes command and plays a crucial role in the battle, and for the toll it took on the high command of the Great Heathen Army.
When I was young, the book I nearly read most often was ‘The Silver Sword’. It was on the shelves of every library I visited (and I visited a lot of libraries when I was young) and, because its author’s surname began with ‘S’ like Malcolm Saville, a favourite of mine, I’d always see it there, pull it out, read the blurb again and, always, decide, ‘No, I don’t think I will read this.’ I think what threw me was the disconnect between the title, which suggested magical realms and dragons and all sorts of things I loved reading about, and the blurb, which said it was about a group of children making their way through war-ravaged Europe. I was quite interested in the history of World War II, but I had no interest then in how it affected children. So, I never read the book. But now, seeing it in the library still in print after all these years, I thought I would try it.
Would I have enjoyed the story as a child? Probably, but it wouldn’t have become a favourite, one of those books I read again and again. Did I enjoy the book as an adult? Yes…
In some ways, the writing is clumsy; there’s quite a lot of telling rather than showing. But the story transcends the limitations of the writer and now, as a father, the thought of the plight of separated children affects me much more deeply than it would have done as a child. So, despite its limitations, I found the eventual reunion of the family after all their hardships very moving.
Having a face that’s good for radio, I’m delighted that my first brush with the world of broadcast media did not involve any cameras! Instead, I went to the BBC radio studios in Great Portland Street and, having been ushered into a small recording studio, was told to put on the headphones, sit at the desk (surrounded by a fearsome array of technology) and wait. Then, sharp at the scheduled 10.30am, the headphones sparked into life and I was talking to Simon Logan from BBC Newcastle.
Simon Logan
Mr Logan is a fine interviewer and he put this broadcasting virgin immediately at ease. Then, on with the interview, talking for a quarter of an hour about Edwin, Northumbria and all things Anglo-Saxon. The interview is going out this afternoon – I’m listening to the show as I type, suspecting that, when I hear my own voice, I will cringe in the horror of that unfamiliar sound.
The show should be available on the BBC for a week or so, at this link.
A lovely, but slightly strange book. Higgins writes of her journies around Britain, in a rather asthmatic VW camper van, in search of the traces of Roman Britain. She writes of the places she visits with a journalist’s gift for telling detail and a botanist’s delight in plants, and sprinkles the text with fascinating anecdotes about the antiquaries of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries who first went looking for Roman remains in Britain, as well as the archaeologists who followed them in the 20th century. But, at the end of the book, Higgins remains as elusive as, well, Roman Britain itself. I’ve got very little idea about her, of what she’s like – this may be intentional of course – and the four centuries of Roman rule also seem to dissolve away under close inspection. They’re obviously not so inaccessible as the centuries that precede or follow them, but where the rest of Empire is illuminated by contemporary writings, Britain seems oddly silent, as if still existing in the mists of Oceanus. The letters discovered at Vindolanda go some way to rectifying that, but they are fragments, frustrating; imagine trying to recreate 21st-century society from a random collection of tweets for a flavour. A fine book, nevertheless, that suggests its subject as well as exploring it.
Well, sort of. I’ve made The Big Issue – not, I hasten to add, selling it, but instead proposing five books everyone should read before they die. Here’s the link for my choices – and Edwin: High King of Britain isn’t one of them!
Hugely enjoyable fictional recreation of the turbulent, traumatic period after Julius Caesar’s assassination. Iggulden is particularly good at showing how all the main protagonists believed, honestly, that they were acting honourably and for the good of Rome. A peculiarity of my reading is the extraordinarily long memory shadow cast by watching I, Claudius on TV in the seventies – it’s all but impossible for me to read about Augustus (Octavian in his youth) without seeing Brian Blessed.
In the excellent short story included at the end of the book, with Augustus at the end of his life fretting over who should rule the Empire after him, Livia was, inevitably, Sian Philips and Tiberius was George Baker. Still, they are fine shadows to have cast over a story!
Fascinating. Quite fascinating. I’m not sure what Oliver Goldsmith would have made of Mr Spock, but the eponymous Vicar of Wakefield could almost be an 18th-century take on the Vulcan’s position, aboard the Enterprise, of observer and actor in human dramas, but with sturdy Anglican morality (a tautology in the 18th century but not now) taking the place of an alien devotion to logic. Generations of readers and critics have been unable to decide if Goldsmith means the vicar to be example or exemplar; both, I think. He shares something of Captain Mainwaring’s (from Dad’s Army) pomposity, yet also his essential goodness – at the end, when all comes right for the vicar and his tribulations are resolved amid a torrent of coincidences the reader is right there beside him, rejoicing in his deliverance. So, above all else, the vicar is a human being: composed of contrasting traits, some good, some bad, others annoying or endearing, and that is the secret of the novel’s enduring success.
Apologies in advance for the supremely geekie nature of this post, but it’s a lament for a lost magazine and this generation’s denigration of the written word over images.
Warhammer 40k
For many years, Games Workshop (the company that produces Warhammer and Warhammer 40k games) published the magazine White Dwarf – the monthly fix for people who like to paint little plastic figures and then fight battles with them using insanely complex rules. As part of the gaming experience, Games Workshop also developed the universes these wargames inhabited, employing some extraordinarily talented writers to do so (Dan Abnett, Justin Hill, Ian Watson). Every month, White Dwarf contained the new releases, interviews and features about the worlds of Warhammer and 40k, and a battle report, an in detail look at a battle with lots of background information opening up on to the wider fictional universes. And I loved it – I just loved it. I didn’t play the games much – the rules and gameplay are too lengthy and complex for the time I have available – but I became quite immersed in the shared universe the company and its writers and game designers had created. I used to look forward each month to White Dwarf arriving through the post (I even subscribed, that’s how much I looked forward to it).
Image source: Bell of Lost Souls
And then, they stopped it. Without any warning, Games Workshop stopped sending me White Dwarf, and they replaced it with Warhammer Visions, a handsomely produced, thick small mag/large book, full of gloriously reproduced photos of wondrously painted Warhammer and 40k figures. At first, I leafed through it in amazement. And then I looked through it again, looking for the writing. There’s nothing there. Well, not quite nothing, but where before you’d get a thousand-word feature, now there’s a paragraph. One paragraph. The battle report has become pages of beautiful photos and about four paragraphs.
Damn it, what’s with people today? Doesn’t anyone read any more? Are you all just staring into some little screen (which will turn you blind before you’re old, you mark my words!). Come on, Games Workshop. Give us our words back, give me my worlds back! I have an imagination – I don’t need your pictures, I can make my own, if you just give me the words to trigger them.
This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, not with a word but a picture.
Another Monday, another blog tour. In this case, I was tagged by Matthew Harffy, another writer inspired by the history of Northumbria. The first volume of his Bernicia chronicles is with an agent and hopefully should soon find a publisher, and he is hard at work on the sequel – I trust the wait will not be too long, because I want to read it! Read what he had to say about Beobrand, the hero of The Serpent’s Sword, here.
Next week I pass the baton on to A.H. Gray, yet another author in love with the history and rolling sea mists of Northumbria. See below for more on her work.
Now, on with the tour.
At the London Book Fair 2014
1) What is the name of your character? Is he fictional or a historical figure/person?
Edwin. He is a historical character – in fact, one of the best attested in a period where there is very little history.
2) When and where is the story set?
The story is set in Britain in the early seventh century, specifically in the kingdom of Northumbria although it also visits some of the other kingdoms into which Britain was split at the time.
3) What should we know about him?
The story begins with Edwin in exile, and pursued by the man who usurped his throne. Exile, or death, were the common fates of kings at this time – long life was not a facet of rule.
4) What is the main conflict? What messes up his life?
The initial conflict is between Edwin and Æthelfrith, the man who took his kingdom. When this is resolved, the rest of the book follows Edwin as he attempts to unify his kingdom and the country under his rule. In this, he is opposed by the last great king of the Britons, Cadwallon of Gwynedd. Welsh sources indicate that Edwin took refuge in Gwynedd during his exile, staying with Cadwallon’s father, Cadfan. Later events suggest an unusual enmity between the two men, the sort of enmity born of a particular personal grudge. I try to explain this in the book.
5) What is the personal goal of the character?
Initially it is to regain his kingdom, and then to secure it for his sons. But, above everything else, Edwin is trying to understand his life and its meaning amid the violence and brutality of the world he has been born into.
6) Is there a working title for this novel, and can we read more about it?
A H Gray lives in sunny Perth, Western Australia. She has a double degree in History and Archaeology from the University of Western Australia, yet due to the lack of Anglo-Saxon hoards or Viking boat burials down under, she has had to content herself with writing about them instead. Her debut historical fiction novel is The Northumbrian Saga and she writes weekly posts on her favourite historical period http://ahgray.wordpress.com/.
