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!
Blog
Book review: The Blood of Gods by Conn Iggulden
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!
Book review: The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith
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.
White Dwarf and Warhammer Visions
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.
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).
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.
Blog tour: Meet My Main Character
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.
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?
An actual title – Edwin: High King of Britain. Here is the publisher’s blurb and there have been some excellent reviews published in Publishers Weekly, Carpe Librum and Medieval Reader, as well as on reader sites such as Good Reads.
7) When can we expect the book to be published?
It’s out now! Go buy 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/.
Book review: Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
It’s a strange facet of its own success, but ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ has almost become a cliche; a travelling carnival calls into a sleepy plains town and, of course, the ringmaster will be a sinister, threatening figure, promising gifts to the unwary that come at the cost of something much greater; there will be freaks, unfortunate, tortured individuals offered up to the ridicule of the rubes; and there will be two town boys, living on the cusp of puberty, running semi-wild and drawn to the carnival as irresistibly as, well, as boys to a travelling show.
Bradbury’s original is still wonderful, although the writer’s word painting grows a little tedious sometimes; I presume he is a fan of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins as he imports many of Hopkins’ techniques into his prose, but where alliterative word runs work beautifully in the concentrated explosion of the Windhover, they become repetitive through 250 pages of prose. A writer can become too intoxicated by words. But the strength of the story and the imagery carried me through, with a little skimming here and there, to the end.
Our Lady of Mercé
First written for Time Out Barcelona Guide.
You’d have thought that being mother to God would take up all of your time, but you’d be wrong. In fact, as with her Son, not even death has been able to put a stop to the activities of the young woman from Nazareth, and on 1 August 1218 Mary appeared in a vision to a young Catalan named Peter Nolasco, instructing him on how to continue his work of redeeming captives. During the seven-and-a-half centuries of conflict between Christian and Muslim Spain a common feature was the taking of captives for ransom. Now this was all very well if you were a member of the nobility and had someone to pay for your release, but many Christians from poor families were also captured in the general trawling for profit and plunder that took place during a gaza (a religiously sanctioned raid into the dar ul harb or house of war, that part of the world that had not accepted Islam). To be captured during a gaza was by definition to become a slave, a state which could be escaped only by conversion to Islam (which many prisoners did) or redemption. It was this work of buying out of slavery the ‘poor of Christ’ that Peter Nolasco embarked upon, helped by his background as a merchant. In fact, Nolasco switched from buying goods to buying people, but all his efforts seemed only to swell the number of captives held in Muslim hands.
It was at this point that he received his vision of the Blessed Virgin, who advised him to form an order dedicated to the redemption of captives. The next day Nolasco sought an audience with the king, Jaume I, who received him well and agreed to help in the foundation of the Order of the Virgin Mary of Mercy of the Redemption of Captives (or Mercedarians as they are called). The order set up a redemption fund to buy back captives but, if all else failed, each member of the order took personal vows to hand himself over in place of a prisoner. The best estimate we have is that the order brought 11,615 slaves out of captivity between 1218 and 1301.
If that wasn’t enough, Our Lady of Mercy delivered the whole city of Barcelona from a plague of locusts in 1637. A grateful city adopted her as patron and celebrated her feast on 24 September, or at least it did until Franco clamped down on all things Catalan. But sometimes things suppressed simply wait for an opportunity to burst forth, and that’s precisely what happened with the Festes de la Mercé. What had been a simple religious feast turned into a week-long celebration of Catalan identity, all inextricably bound up with a long-dead Jewish girl. But then, what else would we expect of her?
Boys, in one photo
The picture tells the story.
A Walk Around Mersea Island
First published in The Great Outdoors magazine.
A wild walk can be an excursion into time as well as place. I’ve always been fascinated by how the geography of Britain has changed over the centuries, with generations of farmers nibbling at the sea, while the sea gnaws the coast elsewhere. Mersea, a tidal island in the Colne Estuary, demonstrates this vividly. And who wouldn’t want to walk around an island?
To avoid the July heat, I crossed The Strood, the causeway linking Mersea to the mainland, at dawn. Now tarmac, and regularly inundated at high spring tides, The Strood is itself a link to the past, for the causeway was first laid around 700 AD, when an Anglo-Saxon magnate ordered three to five thousand oak pilings to be sunk into the underlying clay. Oak pilings don’t talk, and later Viking invaders destroyed pretty well all written records in East Anglia and Essex, but one candidate as builder was the monk-king, Sæbbi of Essex, who abdicated to devote himself to prayer.
The rising sun drew a morning mist from the ground and sea. The tide was coming in, and in the dawn silence I heard it slow swirl through the channels of the mud flats. Continuing across the island to West Mersea, I parked and set off clockwise around the island. Walking away from the harbour, seaweed shaggy pilings rulered out into the slowly filling channel and, when I again reached the causeway, the lunarscape of mud flats had been replaced by flat sheets of grey water.
From here, a short detour inland made for a long walk into the past. At the top of the rise overlooking the causeway is a barrow dating from the start of the second century AD. Now topped with an oak tree, it would once have been the most visible feature of the landscape for people crossing the causeway. When the mound was excavated early in the twentieth century, archaeologists found, at the heart of the barrow, a lead box containing cremated bones, creating a conundrum under the hill. For the Romans did not raise barrows, and the Britons did not cremate the dead. But here were both.
Returning to island circumnavigation, I followed the Pyefleet Channel. The sun had burned off the morning mist and the water sparkled in the early light. Saxon invaders, in their shallow-drafted boats, used these channels as highways into the country’s heart. Not far up the coast, at Sutton Hoo, an Anglo-Saxon king was buried in one of these boats, accompanied into the next life by some of the most magnificent jewellery and armour ever made. It was not hard to imagine the creak of oarlocks and the hiss of oars as the dragon-prowed boats moved stealthily upstream. Indeed, the settlers and invaders of 1,500 years ago were accompanied by much the same soundtrack as I was: the harsh croak of seagulls, the piping whistles of curlews, and the hiss of water and wind. For a few miles I walked in a soundscape unaltered for thousands of years.
The north shore of Mersea Island is quiet. I saw a handful of people, mostly on boats, but many swifts, the birds of eternal summer, jinking over the salt marshes, and, along a thistle-lined stretch of path, a cortege of butterflies accompanied me on my way.
Reaching the tip of the island, the North Sea opened out, unusually blue and tranquil, to the south, the land marked by shallow orange cliffs. The sea is hard gnawing the land here. Tree roots jut out into empty space, clawing against the inevitable, and then, finally, tumble down upon the beach. The cliffs were laid down 300,000 years ago, when elephants, rhinos and bear roamed the area, and fossil hunters still turn up remains.
The sun was up and I was thirsty and hungry. An advantage of this walk was ending it at one of the excellent seafood shacks in West Mersea, eating the wildlife – oysters, cockles, shellfish – that had, unseen, underwater, accompanied me around the island.
Book review: Lordship and Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England by Richard Abels
A clear and thorough examination of, well, lordship and military obligation in Anglo-Saxon England. Abels is particularly good on the changes brought about by the rise of bookland, that is, land that was given by hereditary right, first to the Church and then to the king’s retainers, and way the kings of Mercia and then Wessex responded by redefining the three common burdens of service, fortifications, bridge maintenance and military service, into the Alfredian system of burhs with garrisons and a standing, mobile army.
An extra commendation for this book having the longest section of footnotes I’ve ever encountered; the text runs from page 1 to 187, the footnotes from 204 to 282! Add in the other appendices, bibliography and index, and there’s an additional 126 pages of text. That’s what I call a proper academic book! But Abels writes well too, so don’t be put off if you’re interested in this, rather specialised, subject.