What to look for in Historical Fiction in 2014?
as appeared in
DuJour by Nancy Bilyeau
It’s been a brutal winter. What better way to fire up your
senses than to plunge into a rousing historical tale? These brand-new books,
ranging in period from the 12th century to the 20th, come from top talents in
historical fiction. Whether it’s a mystery solved on the gritty streets of
medieval London, an intrigue seething in czarist Russia palaces, a small
American town rocked by a Bohemian poet or a deadly mission in a Languedoc
gripped by the French Resistance, full immersion is guaranteed. When you next
look up, spring should finally be in full bloom.
12TH CENTURY
A King’s Ransom, by
Sharon Kay Penman ~ What happened to England’s legendary Richard the Lionheart
after the Crusades? Bestselling author Sharon Kay Penman tells the story of the
king’s harrowing capture and imprisonment—and the price he paid—both in fortune
and in love. (A Marian Wood Book/Putnam)
14TH CENTURY
A Burnable Book, by
Bruce Holsinger ~ Prophecy, murder, political betrayal and a desperate search
for the book with the answers make for a potent mix in this debut novel, which
captures life in medieval London in rich detail. (William Morrow)
Bonus: Nancy's and Bruce's chat about historical fiction... as appeared in The Daily Beast
16TH CENTURY
18TH CENTURY
Empress of the Night,
by Eva Stachniak ~ Following up on the enchanting literary tale The Winter
Palace, Stachniak brings to life one of the most fascinating—and
controversial—female rulers of all time: Russia’s Catherine the Great. (Bantam,
out March 25)
20TH CENTURY
Fallen Beauty, by
Erika Robuck ~ The author of Hemingway’s Girl and Call Me Zelda triumphs with
this enthralling Jazz Age story of what happens when a small-town seamstress
struggling for independence takes a job with the uninhibited Bohemian poet Edna
St. Vincent Millay. (NAL Trade)
Citadel, by Kate Mosse ~ With her talent for atmosphere and suspense, the author of the hugely popular Labyrinth and Sepulchre produces a heady page-turner that intercuts the life-and-death struggle of French Resistance fighters with the mystical secrets of 700 years ago. (HarperCollins)
Historical Fiction: A Conversation Between Bruce Holsinger
and Nancy Bilyeau
Novelists Bruce Holsinger and Nancy Bilyeau discuss the joys
and pitfalls of scrupulously researching the past and then turning it into
fiction.
Who writes historical thrillers, those thick suspense
stories filled with atmosphere and detail? The answer is, people like Bruce
Holsinger and Nancy Bilyeau, who each have novels out now. Holsinger, a
medievalist who teaches in the Department of English at the University of
Virginia, wrote A Burnable Book, a thriller set in 1385 London. Nancy Bilyeau,
a journalist and the executive editor of DuJour magazine, is writing a series
of mysteries whose main character is a Dominican novice in the reign of Henry
VIII. The second book, The Chalice, recently came out in paperback. Holsinger
and Bilyeau met on the writer’s conference circuit and discovered they were
kindred spirits. While Holsinger was on tour for A Burnable Book, he stopped in
New York City, where the two of them met to talk about all things medieval—and
how thick a skin you need to be published today.
Nancy Bilyeau: I learned about your book at Thrillerfest
last year in New York. That’s my favorite writer’s conference. I was in the
audience for one of the panels, and the other four authors talked about their
protagonists: cop, forensic pathologist, ex-CIA, whatever. And when it was your
turn, you said, “The main character in my book is John Gower, a medieval poet
who was a close friend of Geoffrey Chaucer’s.” Then you read a poem of Gower’s
and it was utter bleakness. I was so excited! What drew you to John Gower as
someone who could be the main character of a novel?
Bruce Holsinger: It came from my teaching of medieval
literature. I’ve read all of Gower—he wrote in Latin, French, and English. He’s
always been an interesting figure to me: contradictory, preachy but with
strains of nihilism. Chaucer refers to him any number of times in his work, and
at the end ofTroilus and Criseyde, he basically dedicates the book to him: “Oh,
moral Gower, this book I direct to thee.” He’s always had this reputation as a
very moral poet, this kind of schlubby, moralistic contemporary of Chaucer’s,
and in Shakespeare’s Pericles, Gower is the voice of the chorus. But I’ve
always felt that what Chaucer said about him at the end of Troilus was a little
bit tongue-in-cheek. I wanted to imagine a somewhat darker Gower.
NB: I’d like to switch to the prostitutes. In A Burnable
Book, you do an amazing job of depicting the lives of London prostitutes in
1385. It felt so real, it was as if I were working the streets, too. How did
you find all of the details?
BH: I began with secondary scholarship. I read a wonderful
history of medieval English prostitution, and then I drew on some of the
documents the author looked at. The most provocative one is an interrogation of
a male transvestite prostitute from the London Guildhall in the 1390s. It’s an
actual document from one of the record offices. It describes his life as a
prostitute, the streets he was on, his clientele—which included priests,
friars, businessmen, and women.
NB: So one of the prostitutes in A Burnable Book is based on
an actual medieval transvestite?
BH: Yes, and one of the things I did craft-wise was, when
Edgar is dressed as a man, I refer to the character as a “he.” When dressed as
a woman, Eleanor is a “she.” Once or twice, that changes within the course of a
single chapter.
NB: What a fun character to write. I’m jealous.
BH: Now tell me about the community of women you wrote and
imagined in The Chalice—a priory of Dominican nuns.
NB: I didn’t have Guildhall interrogation documents,
unfortunately. But I worked on my first novel for five years, researching the
lives of nuns in England in the early 16th century, reading all the books I
could and digging up letters and wills. Once I found out what a nun from that
period would have to do—their routines revolved around set times of prayer—I
could build my characters’ daily lives. It’s the little things, though, that
you need to build a scene with convincing detail. What was the material of the
novice habit, what kind of incense did they inhale, what was on the plate at
dinner.
BH: And you flesh out those aspects of daily life with
remarkable skill, without a lot of hand waving or showing off of historical
details. I actually struggled a bit with this at first. I knew the medieval
period in terms of its literary history, but in terms of the details of
everyday life, that was a brand new learning experience. I had to go back and
relearn a lot of what I thought I knew. There are so many passages in the
literature that will tell you about, say, the food at a feast, but I never
really paid attention to those until I had to figure out what people ate in a
scene I was writing.
NB: Exactly! I was never happier than when a curator at the
Tower of London scanned in a diet sheet of an aristocratic prisoner in the
1540s and sent me a PDF. I had every detail down to how many pigeons eaten a
week. It occurs to me we are both writing about societies in fear of their kings.
BH: Yes. Medieval London gives us a particularly rich site
in which to explore those kinds of issues, particularly as they pertain to
issues of authority, jurisdiction, tyranny and so on. In 1385, England is just
about to enter a period that some historians have characterized as the “tyranny
of Richard II”—he’s coming into his majority, and he’s just starting to get a
bit capricious and arbitrary when it comes to the exercise of his power.
NB: Prophecy is the key source of mystery and danger in our
books. I made mine up, although I based it on a real prophecy that was current
at the time: “When the cow doth ride the bull, then priest, beware thy skull.”
That was interpreted at the time as meaning that Anne Boleyn’s dominating King
Henry VIII—convincing him to divorce his royal Spanish wife and marry her—that
would lead to the overthrow of the Catholic religion.
BH: I also wrote the prophecies in A Burnable Book. In fact,
I wrote them in Middle English, and then I modernized the spelling and grammar
to make them more compatible with contemporary sensibilities. I modeled them on
the poetry of William Langland and the Gawain poet: lots of alliteration,
four-stress lines rather than the five-stress lines we find in Chaucer’s early
version of iambic pentameter.
The prophetic language and the cryptic riddling are modeled
directly on medieval prophecies of the sort written by Dante and others. If
prophecy didn’t have the power to bring down kings, it certainly had the power
to make them and their inner circle paranoid, and that’s part of the atmosphere
I’m trying to explore.
NB: I’ve read that there’s often a surge of interest in
prophecies when any society is under extreme strain. That’s what I try to
capture in my second book. The nuns and monks and friars have been thrown out
on the streets, the monasteries demolished or given to the king’s cronies. It’s
a frightening and confusing time. People grab hold of prophecies and are more
susceptible to plots and conspiracies. Yet that is when Henry VIII cracks down
on dissent even more savagely. It’s a cycle.
BH: And this happens on the more local level as well. The
city of London, with its corrupt and often thuggish mayors, also dealt quite
severely with criminals, curfew violations and so on. The butchers, who play a
key role in A Burnable Book, are a great case in point. They’re heavily
regulated by the city but they also constantly violate regulations and in the
records they’re found tossing filth in the river and along the streets.
NB: The details of what really happened are always so
intriguing. And I think the poetry and fiction of the medieval period is more
emotionally engaging than what some people might think. Did you find many
“thriller” type stories in your research?
BH: A great question. There’s lots of hard-hitting crime
fiction in the medieval period, and I’m very influenced by the language of
accusation and punishment we find in works like the Canterbury Tales. Of all
the thrilling and suspenseful moments in literature, probably my favorite is
this incredible scene in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the late 14th
century. We’re near the end of the romance, and Gawain is riding along to meet
his fate at the hands of the Green Knight, who has vowed to chop his head off.
As Gawain rides along the bank of a creek, he hears this sickening sound
ringing from above. And he soon realizes it’s sound of an axe being sharpened,
the very axe that he believes will soon behead him.
NB: That is chilling. I love it. You’re familiar with so
many fantastic stories. I think academics are awarded instant respect by the
book-buying public but genre writers … not so much. How has it been for you, to
plunge into the fray of writing thrillers?
BH: I’ve always been an avid reader of thrillers, and my
first “drawer novel” was a contemporary thriller about terrorism, though with a
medieval background. A Burnable Book is something of a hybrid: It’s
bibliofiction—that is, it’s a book about books—and has a somewhat literary bent
given the story about Chaucer and Gower. But at heart it’s a thriller pure and
simple, and I’m quite unapologetic about that. Some of the best fiction writing
right now is genre writing!
NB: Oh, I agree with you. But not everyone has gotten the
memo. Genre snootiness comes from unexpected places. I remember with my first
novel, The Crown, the editor in chief of a certain women’s magazine didn’t want
to cover it because she preferred “more sophisticated fiction.” Meanwhile, the
magazine itself ran stories on how to remove stains from clothing and lose five
pounds fast. I just didn’t know what to make of that. OK, to the point of your
novel’s description, I see that A Burnable Book is often called a “literary
thriller.” Is that because of the literary attention to character and theme?
How does that … happen?
BH: No, I think it
refers to the novel being self-conscious about the bookishness of itself and
its subject. In this case a literary thriller is a book about a book.
NB: Like A.S. Byatt’s Possession?
BH: Exactly.
NB: Except that I’ve seen The Name of the Rose by Umberto
Eco called a literary thriller and that is a straight-up murder mystery set in
a 14th century Italian monastery.
BH: In many ways The Name of the Rose fits the category,
too: lots of references to book culture, medieval philosophy, and so on.
NB: Hmm, maybe you’re right. A lot of nasty things happen in
the Benedictines’ scriptorium.
BH: Yes.
NB: I have to say, you seem much calmer than many other
authors with a debut novel out. Is that because you’ve published nonfiction
books and a lot of journal articles and papers? The academic world does have
the reputation for sharp elbows.
BH: Academic criticism, and I’ve written a lot of it and
taken a lot of it, is a whole different level of severity. It could be because
of that being my profession, I have a pretty thick skin. The life of a novel,
just like the life of an academic book, is much longer than the first few weeks
or months of publication, and even as A Burnable Book is debuting this month I’m
thinking about what I want to be writing five years from now. At the moment I’m
working on the sequel, set the next year and beginning with a mass murder and a
pile of bodies in the London privy channels. What’s next for you?
NB: I’m finishing the third book in the series: The
Covenant. It is set in 1540 and some of the action takes place in Whitehall
Palace, the one that burned to the ground in 1698. Which means, of course, I
can’t look at it. I found an in-depth book on its construction, and then, after
reading a lot of letters from the time and studying John Stow as never before,
I was able to re-create it all on my kitchen table: the palace buildings, the
gardens, the tiltyard, the gatehouse, the river stairs. The kids had to eat to
the side for a while.
from The Daily Beast
BOOKS 03.30.14
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