What do you want in your historical fiction?

I've recently joined the Historical Novel Society. Amongst other things, each issue of the society's journal – the Historical Novels Review - briefly reviews a great number of historical novels and, having read quite a few of the back numbers the society has kindly sent me, I am struck by something. Though the reviews talk a lot about plot, character and authenticity and, to a slightly lesser extent about structure there is very little comment on language, voice, vocabulary – how the author has used the narrative tone to convey some impression of the period they are writing about.

Now, for me, this is one of the most important – and interesting – things about writing histfic. But how important is it to readers?

If you read historical fiction, what are the criteria by which you judge a historical novel? What are the things you look for? What are essential and what optional extras? I'd be fascinated to know.

Wolf Hall - Rush out and buy it now.

I'm on record as being the sort of person who doesn't automatically rush out and buy the whole Man Booker shortlist. Or even the eventual winner. Actually, my automatic tendency is to curl a lip and think 'not for me, I think'. But I really did rush out and buy this year's winner – Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.


I've read a couple of Hilary Mantel's other novels and been very impressed; also slightly at a loss to know why she isn't more widely read. But Wolf Hall knocks them into a cocked hat.

OK, I suppose it was a pretty fair bet that I'd like it – it's a historical literary novel – my absolutely favourite genre, if genre it be; but it is an absolutely cracking read.

I must admit I did groan slightly when I heard that it was about Thomas Cromwell – not another novel about the Tudors, I thought. But this is not another novel about the Tudors. This is very much a novel about Cromwell – who, as if his centrality needed emphasising, is 'he' throughout the text. I'm not sure Mantel ever refers to him as Cromwell herself after the first chapter – she lets other characters do that. And they do refer to him, a lot, though they're not always so polite as to call him Master Cromwell.

Because I'm fundamentally a medievalist and find other periods of history less compelling, I have to confess to not knowing a huge amount about Thomas Cromwell. OK, there's Hans Holbein's painting which makes him look like a toad - kind of sticks in the mind, though I can't say that he looks particularly like a murderer, an appearance several people accuse him of in the book. But then my knowledge runs out with CJ Sansom's rather machiavellian Cromwell in the Shardlake books and the nastier version in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. Bolt's play portrays Cromwell as the jealous, scheming villain who is out to bring down hero of the hour and popular saint, Sir Thomas More. Mantel does it the other way around and, I have to confess, I found her version more convincing. Bolt's More was heroic – yes – but chilly, too, as fanatics are prone to be. Mantel's Cromwell is anything but chilly – he is a humane pragmatist who combines a very street-smart kind of wisdom with a deep understanding of what makes individuals tick and a vast capacity for loyalty. Portrayed as unswervingly faithful to his patron and mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, even in the latter's downfall, Wolf Hall's Cromwell is a man it is very easy to like – as even the haughty and autocratic Duke of Norfolk discovers. And it is his commoner's disarming lack of personal vanity, coupled with an uncanny ability to make things happen for Henry which sees him rising up the notoriously greasy Tudor political pole.

It's not just Cromwell himself who is humane in Mantel's Tudor court. Unlike many other fictional Tudor-fests – both on TV and film as well as in novels – there are no monsters here; though Thomas More in his unyielding fanaticism and unlikeable treatment of his family comes close. Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk and Anne Boleyn's uncle, is usually presented as, essentially, a ruthlessly ambitious pimp of his neices. Whilst Hilary Mantel doesn't let him off this particular hook of accusation neither does she major on it, allowing us to see Norfolk as a rather more human character, one whose initial antipathy to Cromwell is worn down by the latter's sheer, unremitting competence and utter failure to pretend to be other than he is.

On the whole, it's the women who come off worst. Whilst in Cromwell's immediate household (a wonderful place – a cross between a job centre and a refuge) the women are feisty, opinionated and generally full of the usual human foibles, those at court are an unappealing bunch. Chief amongst them, of course, is Miss Unappealing 1533 herself, Anne Boleyn. Mantel's Anne is calculating, selfish, ambitious, jealous and ruthless. It will be interesting to see whether she can – or indeed wants to – generate any sympathy for La Ana, as the French ambassador calls her, in the sequel to Wolf Hall.

Jane Seymour – whose destiny the reader knows, as the characters do not – emerges as a the only kind woman at court and as someone Thomas Cromwell has more than a passing interest in. And it is the Seymours' family seat in Wiltshire that gives the book its name. This confused me, initially, as Wolf Hall itself receives very little attention in the book beyond the recounting of a notorious and quasi-incestuous scandal which took place there. Then I realised – Wolf Hall would actually be a wonderful alter ego name for the Tudor court where, as Cromwell says on more than one occasion homo homini lupus – man is a wolf to man.

Unlike many historical political novels Wolf Hall takes zero time to get into. We are plunged in to Cromwell's abused childhood and, within a few pages, he has fled his brutal father and packed himself off to the continent to make his fortune, returning in the next chapter after a decade and a half as Cardinal Wolsey's right hand man. At first, I thought this opening chapter was simply an attention-grabbing device on Hilary Martel's part but, as the book progresses, you realise that she is making the reader privy – as nobody else in the book is except Cromwell himself and his despised family – to the truth about his origins. Wolsey, obviously delighted with his diamond in the rough protege, has told numerous scurrilous stories about Cromwell's upbringing and it's amusing to see who has been told what and who has believed what. But then, it becomes increasingly clear, as the book progresses, that it is possible to believe anything of the king's fixer.

Thomas More says of him 'Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning, and when you come back that night he'll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks' tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.' He has the knack of knowing what to do, who to placate, who to threaten, who to pay off, in any given situation. And he does it with charm and wit and we love him. That's why over 600 pages in his company still feels insufficient.

The priviliged-information trick of the opening chapter is hardly Hilary Mantel's only clever device. The whole book is an object lesson in historical fiction writing. She manages to convey a flavour of the speech of the time without ever resorting to gadzookery or making it feel anything less than fresh and authentic. You can hear the characters speaking, they're then and they're now – it's the true historical writer's trick.

And how does she manage to encompass so much politicking, so much grandeur, so much intrigue in 672 pages and still write a book which feels so light of touch? Answer – she never labours a point, sometimes she barely makes a point, allowing the reader the satisfaction of grasping what she is talking about without having it spelled out. Time and place are beautifully conveyed but in the small details of recipes, lacings, books; a hanging here, a painting there. I was dribblingly grateful to be spared endless details of what everybody was wearing – Wolf Hall has no acres of velvet, seas of brocade nor bushels-full of seed pearls - only occasionally do we get an insight into what people are wearing and it's always relevant, always tells us something about the character.

So as to help the narrative and the reader along, Mantel also surrounds Cromwell with younger men (as I'm sure he would have himself) which means that he always has a reason – other than the need to explain things to the reader, I mean – to unpack what's going on, what he's thinking, why he's doing what he's doing.

I could go on but that would involve going and getting the book and prising it from the Other Half's desperate fingers, so I will stop and just urge you to go and buy Wolf Hall – now, don't wait for it to come out in paperback, it's the sort of book (and I rarely say this) that you need to own in hardback. Except, as I know to my cost, that it's ruinously heavy for reading unobtrusively in bed...

If all Man Booker prize winners were this good, I'd be waiting on the bookshop's doorstep on shortlist morning, ready to devour the lot.

The Hows and Whys of Historical Fiction

I mentioned the other day that I’d had an interesting time thinking about Testament from a technical point of view, so that I could talk about it cogently to the folks up at Waverton.
I believe I mentioned plot, character, theme and language.
So, while I’ve got a few minutes to think about the blog, while it snows outside, I thought I’d jot a few things down.

I thought I’d start with a few thoughts on research.

I do two basic kinds of research for my historical fiction – the general kind where I immerse myself in the period as much as I can so that I get a feel for how the people and places I’m writing about would have looked and sounded, felt and smelled. I need to know what my characters would have thought and believed, the likely prejudices of the age, the things so taken for granted that they’re never spelled out.
At this stage, I’m trying to find out what, at a basic level, it was like to live then.

Then there’s the more focused research – for Testement, this involved teaching myself about medieval architecture and building, medieval learning and the difference between English universities and those on the continent, the state of the English church and the heretical sect known as the Lollards. After trying to find out about everything, you suddenly narrow your focus to a very small field.
This can lead to interesting imbalances – like when I realised that I knew pretty much every tool and technique a journeyman, labourer or master mason might use during the day but I had no idea how they arranged the whole issue of going to the toilet… Fortunately, I didn’t need to know but it bothered me that I hadn’t managed to find out something so basic. (Interestingly, I know that kind of detail for the book I’m writing now, which is based in the nineteenth century. And I know because the contemporary commentators were so outraged at the primitive arrangements in the area I’m writing about. Sources are everything…)

Of course, I’m not doing all this research so I can put every last little detail in my book. Far from it. Paradoxically, you do research so that you can leave most of it out. In the same way that you know your own contemporary world intimately, but never refer to the vast majority of what you know, you need to leave most of what you’ve learned about your historical period in your notes. You still need to know it’s there, because you might want to refer to it tangentially, without going into detail, but for each fleeting reference, you’ll probably have a whole page of notes on how this fits in to the world of century/decade X.
At least, that’s how it is for me.

You see, I think the reader of historical fiction enters into a relationship of trust with the writer - he trusts that you know the period and will continue to trust you until or unless you make an obvious mistake. It’s not a matter of proving how much you know by the barrowloads of colourful period detail you put in; you prove your grasp on how your plot and your characters inhabit the period by the telling details you choose to include.

So, I’ve always taken the view that I will put no more detail into the historical strands of my fiction than I include in the contemporary scenes. If I don’t routinely describe what my twenty-first people are wearing (and I don’t), then I won’t give you a garment-by-garment description of what my fourteenth century people – or, in the work in progress, my nineteenth century characters – are wearing either. People in my contemporary worlds are rarely seen eating so I’m not going to give you much in the way of what my historical characters had for breakfast unless it’s strictly relevant.

Interestingly, though, research can often take you in unexpected directions. As part of the background research for Testament, I read a book on the economic climate of the late fourteenth century. It sounded as dull as ditchwater from the title (I’m sorry, I’m too lazy to go and unearth it so that I can tell you the proper title and author, I’ll try and do that for the next post) but it turned out to be a gem. The author had ploughed through endless manorial and court accounts – who paid what to whom and what for – and, because money makes the world go round, it was fascinating.
It told me, for instance, that an order was given, one summer, for all journeymen, whatever their trade, to down tools when the weather was fair, and help to bring in the harvest. Previous years’ harvests had been diabolical and there was a serious risk of mass starvation so the powers that be (and I had no idea how much the machinery of the state interfered in every aspect of daily life in the fourteenth century) decided that the harvest was the thing and everyone would have to do their bit to make sure it was successfully brought in.
Well, once I knew this, I had to include it, it was just too fascinating to ignore. And, fortunately for me, it provided a useful way of moving the plot on and providing conflict. Because, if the weather’s been dreadful and the harvesters have been waiting for a few nice days to get the grain in to the barns, the master mason has been waiting for exactly the same weather to progress his building. Send his journeymen out to bring in corn when there’s building to be done? I don’t think so…

More next time on getting the language right in historical fiction.
Don’t go away…

Love and hate revealed in fiction

In the book I am currently reading - ‘The Moment You Were Gone’ by Nicci Gerrard – a character keen to give an unknown correspondent some idea of what she is like lists, at length, the things she loves and those she hates. It’s interesting, she remarks, how much more the things we hate reveal about us.

Is that true?
Is passionate loathing more fundamental to who we are as human beings than passionate love? Do the people, situations and things we avoid like the plague reveal more about us than those we rush towards?

Does the fact, for instance, that I hate even thinking about crawling through low-ceilinged tunnels as potholers do or standing on the edge of a very long drop (think Tom Cruise at the beginning of Mission Impossible II standing on that tall pinnacle of rock in the desert) tell you more about me than the fact that I love wild western beaches and blustery autumn days on a hilltop? Possibly so. Those facts tell you that I am not gifted with huge amounts of physical courage. I do not strive to push myself to new limits of endurance or tolerance. I am not an adrenalin junkie. I quite like my nature wild but I’m never in any doubt who’s in charge – no stamping my authority on nature for me, ta very much.

OK then, maybe so far so revealing, but how about the fact that I loathe the whole notion of fashion-victimhood with a vengeance whereas I am a sucker for the latest electronic gadgets? I cannot tell you how much I covet an iPhone, how much I love my laptop (no, really, it is love) how ironing is a whole new ballgame now I listen to podcasts and discover things I never even thought about knowing.

And if loves and hates are revealing, do the books people write reveal as much about them? Is Tom Clancy a real action man like his fictional heroes when not sitting at his computer, or is he an armchair adventurer who would throw up his hands and wave a white hanky at the first sign of the kind of thing his characters routinely laugh off with a wry witticism?

Do the intricate - not to say machiavellian - plots of those who write crime fiction indicate characters forever scheming and planning, or are they more likely to be people who like things to be neat and tidy, moral, organised people who long for good to triumph in the end and for order to be restored?

Are romance writers romantic in their own relationships? Or would they just like to be? I’ve always been told that it’s impossible to fake it where romantic fiction is concerned (‘No, Alis you can’t just knock off a few Mills and Boon to subsidise your other writing…’) It’s impossible to just turn it on and be convincing, you’ve got to be behind your story heart and soul. You have to absolutely believe that this rugged, impossibly handsome man and this feisty, quirkily beautiful and ultimately melting woman would fall in love despite all the obstacles placed in their way.

So, what does the fact that I have a tendency to produce books which combine contemporary and historical narratives say about me?
That I can’t make up my mind?
That I’m easily distracted and can’t keep on one track long enough?
That I’m not dedicated enough to my historical characters to write totally historical fiction?
No. At least, I don’t think any of those things are true.
For me, history is fascinating, particularly the everyday kind of social history – the nitty-gritty of how people lived. I’m not a historian - I studied English at university - but the things I enjoyed most – Anglo Saxon and the History of English – taught me a lot about how England has come to be the country it is now.

I have a feeling that, in my books, I’m trying to work out how, if things had been different in the past, we might be living in a totally different present. More on this, I have a feeling, anon.