The Magic of Orkney - John Dougherty

What is it about the distant past that can be so compelling? Why do so many fantasy novels reach into prehistory for their magic? To find out, I went on an expedition to Orkney.

Well, actually, that bit’s a big fat fib. I didn’t go to Orkney to explore its neolithic inheritance; I didn’t even know it had a neolithic inheritance to explore until we got there. I went because my wife won an all-expenses-paid Orkney weekend for two - including a whisky-tasting tour and a flight round the islands - courtesy of Highland Park.

But what an incredible amount of prehistory there is to discover on Orkney! Even the names have a kind of magic - the Ring of Brodgar, the Tomb of the Eagles, Maes Howe, Skara Brae: they speak of ancient enchantments and of mystery, of a time when humanity lived closer to the soil and the sky, of the places where the spiritual and sacred touch the physical world and leave their mark...

Well, they do to me, anyhow. And I suspect they do to many of you, particularly those who get annoyed about horned helmets on the covers of books about Vikings. But why? How is it that “times we don’t know much about” turns, in our imaginations, into “times when the world ran by entirely different rules”?

There are probably a number of answers, one of which is, “It’s all Tolkien’s fault” - assuming that ‘fault’ is the appropriate concept here, which it probably isn’t. But I can’t help feeling there’s a link here with my last post, the one about making up stories about real people. When we don’t know, we have a tendency to fill in the gaps, and the more and bigger the gaps, the more imaginative we are in those fictions.

This struck home particularly when we visited Maes Howe. It’s an ancient chambered tomb, older than the pyramids, and as well as some faint neolithic markings it also contains some of the finest examples we have of runes carved in stone, courtesy of a group of Norsemen who sheltered there from a storm, hundreds of years ago. Yet, what do those runes say? Do they tell of ancient mysteries? No, they say things like, “Ottarfila carved these runes”, and “Ingigerth is the most beautiful of women”. The more we discover about the ancients, the more they turn out to be just like us.

Not - I hasten to add - that I have anything against novels that suggest supernatural reasons for ancient monuments. My own Bansi O’Hara and the Bloodline Prophecy involves a ring of standing stones in all kinds of, ahem, nefaerieous goings on. And it’s quite simply great fun to imagine that the world was once a place in which magic happened.

There are, however, two lessons I’ve taken away from my weekend’s break. One is to remember that, well, people are people, with many of the same joys and challenges; and that’s probably always been the case.

The other is to remember, always, to enter prize draws at literature festivals. You never know your luck.

Preserving the Word by Miriam Halahmy

I have always owned a dictionary, from the little alphabet beginner books as a very young child right through to the Oxford tomes of my university years.

 I also like to collect dictionaries and so I have my son’s huge German dictionary and my Harraps shorter French which took me through a year in France, The Oxford Dictionary of new words which my brother bought me for my 40th, as well as Spanish and modern Hebrew dictionaries, etc. etc.

I take it for granted that I can find any word, in any language, somewhere in a book. And in these so modern of times, somewhere on the Net too. But of course it wasn't always like that.

Until Samuel Johnson’s English dictionary, which was the first to contain definitions  - albeit rather whimsical at times – words floated around unhinged, unboundaried, unrecorded in an accessible and agreed manner.

I just can’t imagine going through life without a dictionary. But even more remarkable, I now cannot understand why it took me until this summer to visit the home of the man who taught us how to preserve the very foundation of the writer – words.

If you haven’t visited Samuel Johnson’s house http://www.drjohnsonshouse.org/  you are in for a veritable treat. Situated behind Fleet Street, in a beautifully preserved 18^th century square, the first thing you see is the statue of Hodge, Johnson’s beloved cat. Take a good camera (which I didn’t, so my photos are from my phone) because you will want to snap and snap.

Entering Johnson’s house is like entering another world. It is so homely, so beautifully preserved, with so many amazing features. Like this custom made chain for the front door to prevent London rioters breaking in. Sound familiar?

I went with the writer Sue Hyams, who writes historical children's fiction and is also Membership Secretary for the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. 

Sue is so knowledgeable and enthusiastic about this period in history. She even googled a complete Johnson dictionary and suggested we bought it between us - for around £1500.00. (Crikey!)

Here are some original copies of the dictionary - talk about massive undertaking!!

The whole house has such a warm, lived in atmosphere and of course Johnson had a reputation of mixing with all sorts and bringing people to live with him. But for writers and all lovers of words, the greatest joy is to go up to the room where Johnson wrote his dictionary. Here I am sitting at the actual table he worked at. Apparantly he had a whole row of tables at the other end of the room where scribes stood and laboriously copied out the dictionary for him. And everyone used quill pens!! Put that in your laptop and grind it!

Johnson's house is now top of my list to take visitors to London to see and I do hope you get round to visiting one day.

What is your earliest memory of a dictionary?

www.miriamhalahmy.com

Facts and Fiction; by Leslie Wilson

The picture is of my grandfather in German police uniform in Cologne after the war. If you enlarge the image you'll see the little puncture marks where the Nazi-era medals have been removed.
I was commenting on extreme departures from historical fact in a kids’ book about the Holocaust, and somebody said to me: ‘Leslie. It’s fiction.’ I didn’t answer that, just thought about it. Because I have written two books about Nazi Germany myself, and getting it as right as possible really matters to me.

Before I go further, I have to say that I do view what I write as fiction, absolutely not works of history. Entertainment, even. I invent characters, and even if I wrote about people who actually existed, I’d still want to use my imagination to write scenes for which there is no documentary evidence. But – and this is very important to me – I like to know that the documentary evidence makes what I write probable and therefore feasible. So, when I wrote about a young girl who has a romantic relationship with a Jewish boy she’s hiding, I feel happier because I have read accounts by survivors who were hidden by their girlfriends. And I have on my shelves approximately 3m of books about Nazi Germany, ranging from the wonderful 4-volume Noakes and Pridham: Nazism, A Documentary Reader, to survivor stories in English and German; my mother’s memoir of her childhood in Nazi Germany; family letters, dvds of the bombing of Berlin, historical maps and timetables; and analytical books like Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, which should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand how people can commit atrocities.

Does this mean that I am hampered in my writing by so much research? No, I don’t think so. I use the books, sometimes to read myself into a sense of the period, sometimes because I need to check the facts. If I’m going to say that certain restrictions – like not being able to buy meat or new clothes – were inflicted on Berlin’s Jewish population at a particular date, I check it out in Noakes and Pridham. The fact-checking certainly makes me a slower writer. But I don’t, I hope, ever bludgeon my readers with chunks of information just to show that I’ve done my homework. The story is paramount, but it must be founded on something real.

In addition, one often finds things out that are better than anything one could make up, or which solve narrative problems. Like the escape hatches between cellars that were part of German air-raid precautions. I saw the construction of one on a German dvd of the bombing. That became part of a scene in Saving Rafael which I based on a story my mother told me, about being trapped beneath a blazing hotel in Berlin. Her story was far too good not to use, but her experience had been so traumatic that her memory had blanked some parts of the story out. I had to do quite a lot of reading – from a book I have called Berlin Im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin in World War 2) and watching the dvd, to work out how she and the others could have escaped. Also, on the topic of bombing, I read a diarist of the period saying: ‘I’d never seen so many people weeping on the streets,’ which gave me the image of people walking through the blazing streets, dragging stuff they’d managed to save from their homes, crying. Why make that up, when the facts are so powerful?

But do I regard myself as better than people who aren’t so thorough in their research? No, that would be very arrogant of me. I said in my July blog, that I love to time-travel. It’s my adult equivalent of going through the wardrobe door into Narnia. But I have always been fascinated by history, and wanted to know how things really were. I used to be so frustrated, as a kid, if I read a historical novel (and I read a lot of them) and then discovered that it had distorted or misrepresented the facts which I had taken on trust. I felt cheated.

When it comes to Nazi Germany, though, this desire to know is far more than mere interest. I am half German, and, since I grew up in the aftermath of the war, I heard many harsh and often hateful things said about Germans. Later, I discovered about the Holocaust, and some people told me that there was a fundamental, genetic flaw in the German identity, they were all monsters. ‘But you’re OK, you’re British.’ Only I wasn’t entirely. Like many other British people I have a heritage – and one I that is important to me – that doesn’t originate from these islands. And I loved my mother and grandmother dearly and I knew they weren’t monsters. I used to say, fiercely: ‘People are people!’ by which I meant that anyone – including black ‘immigrants’, who were being rather heavily demonised at that time - were human beings – you couldn’t define them by their nationality or race.

My parents wanted to discourage me from dwelling on what my father described as ‘Germany’s shame.’ It wasn’t loyal to my mother, I was told. But my mother wasn’t an easy person, and as I grew up, our relationship got more and more fraught. Then there was my grandmother who lived with us until she died. She was mentally ill and wandered round dressed like a peasant, fasting, praying, fanatically cleaning the house, and apparently doing penance for some terrible sin. ‘Poor little children,’ she used to say to my brother and me, ‘being born into this world.’ I knew my grandfather had been persecuted at the beginning of the Nazi period, and yet he had become a major in the police force, and, incidentally, a harsh, scary man who I found it hard to love. All of these things had a lot to do with the war and Nazi Germany, and I became less and less inclined to be content with the version of facts that my mother doled out to me – though of course much of it was fascinating and, when she wrote her own memoir, illuminating.

I wrote Last Train from Kummersdorf, which seeks to understand the mindset of a kid who’s been fed Nazi propaganda, after my mother’s death, initially because I went to see Schindler’s List and realised I needed to write about Nazi Germany, but then in order to comprehend the society my mother grew up in and perhaps understand a bit more about her. In the middle of writing that novel, I found out about my grandfather, who was indeed persecuted. I went to Berlin and read his file. The more I learned and understood about Nazi Germany, the more I myself walked and lived in it through the medium of my characters, the more I came to understand. I do know that my grandmother’s mental distress was brought on by a law passed by Hermann Goering in 1945 – no wonder she said Hitler was Antichrist. She said that in the mental hospital in 1939, and my mother was terrified she’d be murdered. Plenty of mentally ill people were.

So – I myself need to know. But now I shall get on my tub and thump. I think there is a danger in propagating, even through the medium of fiction, easy and inaccurate assumptions about the Holocaust. It’s a period that has been more mythologised, maybe, than any other. It stands in the middle of human history, even after sixty-five years in which dreadful crimes against humanity have been committed, as the epitome of human savagery. But if we are to say ‘Never Again’ – an assertion which can bring on a fit of despair when one thinks of Pol Pot, of Rwanda, of our own country’s willingness to connive with torture – if one is to say this in any realistic way, I do believe we have to understand how these crimes get committed. Fiction, and the imagination, are part of that process, which cannot be carried by works of history alone. And if we fail to pay attention to the nuts and bolts of that, if we play off mythologised fantasies against an unreliable background – well then, it’s too easy to avoid confronting uncomfortable truths, and we won’t help the process of understanding.

I’ll come off the tub now.

Put Out Fewer Flags - Charlie Butler

When I told a friend that my daughter had been making anti-royal flags for the day of the Middleton-Windsor bash, she reproved me: “Every little girl should fantasize about being a princess!”

I disagreed, of course. I’ve nothing against children fantasizing about being princesses, just as I’ve nothing against them playing at dinosaurs (though I’d jib at either being made compulsory); but the former isn’t really an argument for monarchy any more than the latter is one for turning Britain into Jurassic Park.

I thought no more about the exchange until a couple of days later, when I was catching up with another friend, who writes fantasy fiction for adults. She mentioned that, although she is herself a republican, she is often assumed by her readers to be a monarchist because she writes about medievalesque fantasy worlds featuring kings and queens: “Whereas I spend most of my time showing what’s wrong with monarchies!” The trouble is that if you write about a Bad King in a medievalesque fantasy, people won’t respond by demanding full emancipation under a proportional STV system – they’ll ask for a Good King instead. Every genre comes with its own conventions, built into the DNA of its fictional worlds. It’s hard to mount an internal critique without evoking Dennis, the anarchist peasant from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!”

Where does the border between fantasy and reality lie in these cases? Oddly, many of the fantasy novels that most enthusiastically recount quests to restore True Heirs to their empty or usurped thrones are written by United States citizens who would reach for their muskets if it were suggested that the same thing should happen in their own country. Monarchist fictions have some kind of appeal for these writers and their readership – but what kind, if not a political one? We can blame the Disney Corporation for ensuring that millions spend their childhoods steeped in a flamingo-pink princess marinade, but that merely shifts the question, to one of why there is such a ready market for this feudal fantasy. (It’s a very selective feudalism, of course: not many children fantasize about being serfs.) One is tempted to summon Freud to account for its appeal, or perhaps Jung with his toolkit of archetypes, but as someone who appears to have missed out on the royalist gene, I’ll leave it others to explain.

If it were only a matter of fantasy, I don’t think this would bother me much. However, when it comes to royalty there is a strange porousness about the boundary between fantasy and reality. There’s my friend, for example, who believes that playing princess is incompatible with being a republican in real life. And the Americans, while they may claim they like royalty only in stories, still spent vast sums covering last week’s event. I think it’s safe to say that many, if not most, of the two billion people who watched the wedding worldwide did so not in order to express their approbation of monarchy as a system, but to indulge a vicarious fantasy about royalty and the associated pomp. (I’m not sure what “pomp” is, but it’s one of those things the royals seem to have bagged for their own use, like swans.)

Having talked to monarchists over the last few weeks, I get the impression that relatively few people really believe that choosing the head of state by means genetic accident is rationally defensible, but they value monarchy for its appeal to something beyond reason, something about identity, continuity and hierarchy that operates at a symbolic level – at the level of fantasy, in fact. And it’s true that we all get through our lives in part by using fantasy to add meaning and significance to drab reality. We all have our rituals, our treasured moments that seem to “mean” more than others, our special people and places. Seeing the ways in which these aspects of our lives intertwine with the quotidian is something I find fascinating as a writer and as a human being. I can well believe that the monarchical fantasy serves some such purpose for those who like it, even though it leaves me cold. (Specifically, this fantasy baffles me because it seems to contradict rather than enhance the positive values I associate with Britishness: for example, I don’t see how a sense of fairness is in any way enriched by a system based on the fetishization of unearned privilege – but, as I said above, I must leave that to others to explain.)

The interesting thing is that, in many ways, monarchy has survived in this country largely by pretending to be a fantasy, by trading on its symbolism and moving itself as far away as possible from the visible levers of power. It uses its glamour in the old-fashioned sense of the word, as a form of legerdemain. For, while the monarch has little direct power by comparison with some of her predecessors, she stands at the apex of a system that has been remarkably (if discreetly) effective in retaining both influence and wealth. In terms of land ownership, Britain remains effectively a feudal country, with two-thirds of the land owned by a mere 160,000 (mostly aristocratic) people – just 0.3% of the population. The honours system keeps politicians and civil servants quiescent, the jewel-encrusted carrot of hope being more effective than a knobbly blackthorn for this purpose. And whilst we fret about which voting system is best for the House of Commons, we seem remarkably unfussed that half our legislature has no democratic component whatsoever. A flash of ermine, a dazzle of diamonds, and we flip into fairy-tale mode. Robes and furred gowns hide all.

This traffic between fantasy and reality also runs in the other direction – at least for me. I don’t much care for books in which True Heirs get restored and it’s the taken-for-granted duty of ordinary people to die in order to achieve this consummation. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1915 Ruritanian novel The Lost Prince may be a little old-fashioned as a real-world adventure story, but its assumptions are in perennial vogue in fantasy.

Historically, however, it’s not a fantasy at all. Today is the 540^th anniversary of the Battle of Tewkesbury, at which Edward IV finally defeated Henry VI in the Wars of the Roses, at the cost of some 3,000 lives. A decade earlier, at Towton, he had defeated him less decisively in the bloodiest battle ever fought on British soil, leaving some 28,000 dead. Like many of our famous battles from Crecy to Culloden, the Wars of the Roses were primarily a family dispute about who was the True Heir, and the disputants had no hesitation in seeing thousands who had nothing to lose or gain by the outcome hacked to pieces in their cause. It’s a longstanding tradition, but not one I feel like celebrating in fiction, or dressing up with the conventional lie that the True Heir is always a good person, and the Usurper always a pernicious tyrant.

Maybe, in fact, I have more in common with my princess-loving friend than I first thought. Neither of us believes there is an impermeable cordon sanitaire between the games you play, the stories you tell, and the beliefs you hold. The difference is, of course, that her beliefs are Wrong and mine are Right.

Maybe I should simply have said that at the start?

Children of the Revolution; Leslie Wilson

I adored historical fiction when I was a kid - a fact that's hardly surprising to anyone who knows my work! Only I found quite a lot of what was on offer a bit depressing. Stories about Kings and Queens, or about ordinary people who were devoted to Kings and Queens and recognised their inferiority.

I loved The Children of the New Forest for the way in which it portrayed the life of the children, suddenly having to learn to hunt and cook and keep house in the country. But there was an uneasiness, for me, about the story about the Restoration and the way in which the Puritan Intendant (forgive me if I've got this wrong, but I don't think so) turns out to have been scheming for the return of the monarch all the way along. Because my family were on the side of the Parliament - my Grandad, a Methodist lay preacher and staunch Liberal, once wrote an essay about his admiration for Oliver Cromwell, which my brother still possesses.



Then - aged about eleven, maybe? I read Trumpets in the West, by Geoffrey Trease. It's about the Glorious Revolution, when William of Orange superseded the last Catholic monarch of Britain. It made me happy that Trease didn't endorse the persecution of Catholics; the issue, as he (I think correctly) portrays it, wasn't about resistance to James Stuart's Catholicism, but about the ongoing conflict between King and Parliament. The regime-change that happened then was about Parliament's key role in a nascent democracy, about resisting the Stuarts who would have loved to introduce French-style absolute monarchy. Trease's hero and heroine are a young musician, Jack Norwood, who finds himself standing up for his principles, risking his career and his life in the process, and Jane, a girl who flouts her aristocratic background to become a real, professional singer. It's an issue-novel, but a gripping adventure and I was thrilled by it.

I kept reading Trease; The Crown of Violet, set in Athens, the first democracy; Follow My Black Plume about Garibaldi's nineteenth-century uprising in Italy; Thunder of Valmy, a novel that showed all the idealism and joy that fuelled the beginning of the French Revolution. And Comrades for the Charter, which portrays the Chartist movement, not in terms of 'what a pity they were undisciplined and turned to violence', but as a movement that turned to violence reluctantly, only because the authorities wouldn't grant to the visionary Chartists liberties that we now take for granted. Liberties that they shed their blood for.

Trease had great heroines, too, who took risks, had adventures along with the boys, who had aspirations, not just to be the cleaners-up and admirers of heroes, but to achieve something themselves. The 'feisty' heroine is right there in Trease's novels, up to date and capable. Girls who had better things in mind than being WAGS - or marrying a Prince and entering on a life of expensive and boring public duties.

And yes, I am writing this blog, on this subject, because of the expensive wedding that's happening tomorrow. Because, like Geoffrey Trease, I don't define patriotism as slavish admiration of a particular group of people, of a monarch who rules by the accident of birth, in a patriarchal system of succession that actually contravenes the law of the land - and whose family can engage in all kinds of skulduggery and get away with it because Parliament isn't, for some reason, allowed to criticise them.

But I can also see, as I write, how much Trease has set his mark on my own writing; like him, I like to portray the lives of 'ordinary' people who're caught up in history and have to act, even if, like Jack Norwood, they really only want to get on with their lives. So thank you, Geoffrey Trease, for those stories. And for the example!!

Book review: Stones for My Father by Trilby Kent (review by Leila Rasheed)

For a change, I thought I’d post a book review today. Stones For My Father, by Trilby Kent, is a historical children’s novel published in Canada and the U.S. by Tundra Books. Set during the Boer war, it’s the story of an Afrikaans girl, Corlie Roux, whose life is changed forever when her farm is burned by the British army and she has to escape into the bush. From the days hiding out with the laager, to her final imprisonment in a concentration camp, Corlie’s struggle to survive in the beautiful but harsh African landscape is richly and evocatively described. Animals, in particular, are so well-painted that they leap off the page. This is one of those books that leaves you feeling as if you have really been there.

“We continued in silence, stopping only to watch a goshawk slice between the treetops on its afternoon death-cruise. When we reached the river-bank, I tore off a thread from the hem of my dress and showed Gert how to tie it onto a fishhook. We gathered sticks for rods, and used bright protea leaves for bait. Then we slipped our dry-soled feet into the sparkling water and waited, trying to ignore our growling stomachs.”

Corlie’s mother – who hates her, for reasons that are revealed at the end of the book – is one of the adult characters who are so well-described that they seem to have physical weight in the mind.

“’Get out of here,’ she snapped. ‘Take your brother to Oom Flip’s. He owes us a box of tobacco.’ Despite her godly airs, my mother was a prodigious smoker. Pa had never approved of her pipe habit, but Pa wasn’t around anymore to tell her so. My mother’s face had turned quite red, the veins in her temples bulging where her hair had been scraped back into a severe bun. ‘Are you deaf, girl? Do you want me to get the sjambok?’”

There was a discussion recently about hope in children’s books on the Balaclava mailing list, and I thought this was an interesting book in relation to that discussion. Corlie’s life is tough and unredeemed by love. No-one comes out of this well, not the British who burn farms and herd children like Corlie into concentration camps to die, nor the Boers who consider Africa given to them by God and casually beat the African servants by whose knowledge and skills they have been kept alive in the bush. There is a sense of people made hard by their hard lives, and all – from soldiers to children - caught up in the chaotic whirlwind of war.

The most obvious source of hope is in the figure of Corporal Byrne, the Canadian soldier fighting on the British side, who finally gives Corlie a future. But I think there is another one, which pervades the whole book – the physicality of Africa itself; the animals, the vegetation, the land. This is a harsh and dangerous place where Corlie is at risk, but it is always described with love and a sense of joy in its immense beauty. The land itself is the hope.

There is another interesting issue, which may or may not be obvious from the excerpts above: it’s difficult to determine the reading age for this book. This is certainly not The White Giraffe, for example! Corlie herself is twelve, but narrates the book from some future point of adulthood, and very much as a literate and educated adult – for example, on the first page she describes a baby as a ‘putto’. There’s plenty of exciting plot, but I did feel that the final chapters, particularly around the dream sequence, might drag for the child reader. The novel would probably be best suited to a thoughtful teenage reader or an adult. If younger children who like a challenge try it, though, I’m sure they will find much to enjoy, for Corlie’s Africa is a world which will entrance you and convince you. When I put it down I could still hear the lourie birds calling and see the bright wildflowers trembling in the breeze.

**

Stones For My Father is Trilby Kent’s second novel for children. Her first is Medina Hill, and her first novel for adult readers: Smoke Portrait, has just been published by Alma Books. She lives in London.

Yes, but is it TRUE? - Sue Purkiss

I was a little bit apprehensive about going to see 'The King's Speech'. It had been so highly praised that I feared it couldn't do anything but disappoint. In fact, I loved it. For anyone who hasn't yet seen it, it's beautifully written and incredibly well acted. It illuminates a very particular and specific area of British society - the royal family; but it also explores what it is like for any human being who has to struggle against a profound difficulty or disability - or even a relatively slight one: who among us who has on occasion to speak publically has not felt cripplingly nervous at the thought?

You're presented with the horror of it right at the beginning. Here is a stadium full of people waiting expectantly for a speech from the King's son: a man who suffers from an appalling stutter. He cannot refuse to do it: everyone is waiting. He knows that humiliation awaits: he has no choice but to endure it. Why, he must think, why did I have to live in an era when someone invented the microphone?

I won't go on - there can't be anyone who doesn't by now know the story. The reason I'm writing about it here is because of something my husband said after we'd seen the film. He's a history teacher, and he noted that in fact, Winston Churchill would not have been so prominently involved in the abdication as he was in the film. And it struck me that - in fact - Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth would have been older at the beginning of the war than they appeared to be in the film.

There may be lots of other factual inaccuracies or grey areas - I don't know. But it made me think - does it matter? I write historical fiction. I spend a ridiculous amount of time researching, but I'm not a historian so I generally start from a position of profound ignorance. I try to check facts which seem to me important - but then I make up conversations, I ascribe thoughts and motives, I imagine how that place looked, at that time, to that person; how this one felt, what that one dreamed. I imagine these things - I don't know them. I have written about real people: in Warrior King, I was writing about Alfred, a Dark Age king. I found out a lot, but there was a point at which I realised that some very basic stuff - how old he was when his mother died, how his brothers died, for example - was shrouded in mystery. I contacted an academic historian, who cheerfully reassured me that as it was all in the Dark Ages I could really make up what I wanted - and I did. And I think that's okay.

But is it okay when you're writing a book or a film about people who are still alive, or only recently dead? I felt uneasy after I'd seen the film about the founder of Facebook, The Social Contract. It had a very clear narrative, which was not complimentary to the young man at the centre of it. And he is still young - very young. How must it be for him to see writ large this version of his own life?

Is it enough for us to say - well, everyone knows it's fiction? Isn't it natural for all of us to assume that if we see something or read something, it's largely true? - even for picky individuals like me, who always want to know what the evidence is?

I don't know. I really don't. It's not going to stop me writing historical fiction, or reading it - to me, it's such a brilliant way to explore the worlds of the past. But - what do you think? Am I right to feel just a little bit uneasy about what I'm doing with the truth?

An Interview with Frances Hardinge - by C.J. Busby

I first met Frances Hardinge as part of an intrepid SAS contingent that stormed the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton in October 2013. We had a great time, although there were fewer costumes than I'd hoped, and no centaurs galloping through the plenary session...

Myself, Teresa Flavin and Katherine Roberts do the costume thing...

I recently read and reviewed Frances Hardinge's new book, Cuckoo Song, for ABBA reviews (you can find the review here).  I loved it - and I wanted to ask Frances some questions about it, and about her writing in general, of which I am great admirer. So I thought I would hijack my ABBA post this month to interview her. Luckily, she is a very accommodating person, and was happy to allow me to grill her. As we live at opposite ends of the country, this had to be by email: but let's pretend we met in a chippy in Brighton for this conversation...

Waiting for fish and chips

So, Frances, unlike in previous novels, Cuckoo Song is set in a real historical period. How did you find that compared with setting your stories in secondary worlds where you are free to make it all up? 

Writing a book set in a specific real world time period is much harder. There's always the fear of getting some detail wrong, and being caught out. One becomes obsessed with checking historical minutae, even for details that probably won't make the final cut. In a way it's a lot of fun, and you discover lots of new things during the research, but you can go quite, quite mad. In spite of my checking, I'm sure there are still lurking errors.

I did find myself making some compromises. Sometimes to preserve the pace of the book, you can't afford to detour into lengthy explanations of historical context. 

And I had to compromise when it came to the dialogue. At first I really wanted to have my characters using plenty of slang from the time. Then I started looking at the things people actually said in 1920s Britain.

I say! Rather! I should think so! Jolly decent. A good sort. Old thing. Old bean. Old man. Ragging. Blighter. What rot! What a lark! That's torn it!

Nowadays we can't read these phrases without hearing them in the voice of Bertie Wooster or Billy Bunter. They sound flippant, innocent, comical and bit twee. When one is trying to build suspense in a tale of psychological horror, that's the last thing you need. The characters might as well be exclaiming:

“Oh well, never mind, old girl. What ho! Ginger beer!”

Yes - that would have ruined the atmosphere for sure! It's a bit like the dilemma of using Shakespearian language in an Elizabethan setting - the odd words and phrases give a sense of a different time, but too many 'thee's and 'thou's and it starts to sound like a send up. Of course, in Cuckoo Song it's not only a case of real-world historical details, because you are also depicting another world - the fairie realm. I loved the idea of fairies as these strange bird-like Besiders who lurk in out-of-the-way places. How much did you draw on particular details for myths and folktales as inspiration when developing your otherworld characters?

In the case of Cuckoo Song, I drew quite heavily on the old changeling folktales. These tales make for a disturbing read, not just because of the nightmare scenario of a malignant imposter taking the place of one's child. In the stories, the human hosts usually rid themselves of the changeling through utter cruelty - leaving them on a dunghill, flinging them into deep water, hurling them into the fire, etc. (It's particularly unpleasant because there's evidence that in past centuries some children with severe disabilities really did die from such brutal treatment, because they were thought to be 'changelings'.)

The nature of the changeling varies from one folktale to another. Sometimes it's a fretful, sickly fairy child, swapped for a healthy human infant by envious fairy parents. Sometimes it's a full-grown adult fairy, infiltrating the mortal cottage so that it can be pampered and fed. Occasionally, however, the changeling nothing more than a doll, fashioned from leaves, wood or wax, and enchanted to look like an ailing child. It was the third type that started to fascinate me.

The journey of Triss and Pen into the Underbelly is inspired by a particular folktale called "The Smith and the Fairies". After his son is stolen by fairies, a smith is advised by a wise man to go to the green hill on a certain night, armed with only a dirk, a Bible and a crowing cock. The way into the hill will be open that night. He must drive the dirk into the ground to make sure the hill does not close behind him. The Bible is protection. It is the rooster, however, that will most upset the fairies...

In some ways, however, I deliberately deviated from traditional fairy lore. The fairies of folklore tend to be vulnerable to cold iron, but also to trappings of the church - Bibles, prayers, blessings, church bells. In my book, the Besiders are twilight creatures, inhabitants of the in-between and unmapped places, and their great enemy is certainty. Most iron will not hurt them, but they have a horror of scissors, which cleanly and cruelly divide, leaving nothing in between. Religious faith is dangerous to them, but so is faith and certainty of all kinds.

I found the idea of the scissors as a symbol of dividing everything neatly into one side or the other quite chilling - as you make clear, so much cruelty comes from that kind of black and white thinking. The book is very good at delving into the grey areas between, and showing how mixed-up most people's characters are. I especially liked your portrayal of the relationship between the two sisters, Triss and Pen. As one of two sisters myself, I totally recognised that combination of fierce hatred and love - the way your sister can be both your worst enemy and the one person you can always rely on. Do you have sisters, or was that an impressive feat of imagination?

I do have a sister. I was older, but by only eleven months, and it always felt as though we were basically the same age. We constructed elaborate imaginary worlds together, tried to set up a detective agency (we never got any cases), wrote plays with songs, invented codes and fought like fury. The first time one of my milk teeth came out, it was because I was biting my sister.

Ha, ha. I knew it! I was also the eldest and my sister was thirteen months younger, so a very similar gap. And yes, we fought bitterly, but also collaborated to create imaginary worlds and games, write letters in code, make maps and search for hidden treasure (we never found any). It's a great apprenticeship for writing children's books! 

One of the things I also like about your books is that you never really hurt or destroy your main characters - they may have some heart-stopping or tearful moments, but they are generally put down gently on safe ground at the end. Are you conscious of that, and is it related to the age you write for, or is it just part of who you are as a writer, that you don't have a desire to take your readers to very dark or unhappy places? (Or do you secretly nurse a desire to write a book with a massacre in it?)

Funnily enough, one of my books does have a massacre in it! It's my third book, Gullstruck Island. I won't say any more since it's an important plot event, and I wouldn't want to commit spoilers.

Ah - I haven't read that one! (Orders it from the library immediately...)

My books tend to have a bodycount, and for the course of the story I like my readers to be in real doubt about whether my main character will survive. Most of them live in quite unforgiving worlds. I suspect that in fact I probably do take my protagonists to some dark and unhappy places... but then allow them to find a way out again, through their own ingenuity, courage and strength of will. 

My books don't often have neat or straightforward 'happy endings', but hope generally triumphs. That isn't because I'm softening my books for a younger audience, but because I'm naturally quite a hopeful person. I'm a cynical optimist.

I think that's what I meant, really - not that there aren't dark times or places, but that as a reader I feel safe. I know that somehow it will work out, the main characters will find a way. I like the idea of being a cynical optimist - I think I'm probably one, too.

I'd like to finish  by asking you a bit about the nuts and bolts of how you write. Your language is wonderfully inventive - your descriptions always fresh and original. Is that something that just flows from your pen or do you refine a lot in subsequent versions?

I am not one of those authors who manages to produce the same number of words each day (though I admire the discipline of all those who do). I have spurts of productivity where I turn out a lot of text in a day. Afterwards I go back and fiddle with it neurotically, and usually the 'fiddling' takes the form of cutting. I have a terrible addiction to metaphors, so when I revise my own work it usually involves the gentle patter of snipped metaphors and similes hitting the floor.

That's interesting - so the first draft has even more of that inventive figurative language! I'd love to see a Frances Hardinge text before it's been pruned, all overgrown and tangled with trailing metaphors. What a treat! But your stories aren't just beautifully described, they have cracking plots. Do you work these out beforehand, or follow leads as they come up? In other words, are you a plotter or a pantser?

I always plot out my books before I write them. For my first book I even had a chapter by chapter outline. I haven't gone into quite that much detail in plans for my later books, but I always map out the main incidents, and know what the ending will be.

However, there's always some room for making things up on the fly. A book should be a journey of discovery for the writer as well as the reader, otherwise the writing process can become dull and leaden. My stories surprise me. Characters develop in unexpected ways. Just now and then, I change my mind about my plot structure halfway through writing the book. It's still useful to have that first plan, though, even if I decide to deviate from it. I need that trellis, even if I can't full predict how my story-vine will grow.

What do you do when you get stuck? How do you get the ideas and words flowing again?

I seldom reach a point where I can't write. Instead, I get a form of writers' block where I write the same chapter over and over again, and can't get the text to 'work'. It lies there on the screen like a stunned weasel.

If you're sitting alone in a study for too long you can get hypnotised by your own screen. Sometimes I go for a ten-mile hike, just so that I can work through some plot knots in my head. 

I find it a lot easier to write, however, if there is a deadline looming, even if it's an artifical one. I belong to a couple of writers' groups, and I find that I become a lot more productive just before the sessions...

I think that's probably enough. I could happily carry on all day, but we need to get started on those chips! Many thanks for answering my questions, and good luck with the next book!

It's been a pleasure. Pass the ketchup!

I hope everyone's enjoyed this conversation as much as I did - and if any of you haven't come across Frances's books, do go and seek them out. They are among the most inventive, delightful and original books for older children I've read.

C.J. Busby writes funny fantasy for 7-10. Her latest book, Deep Amber, is out with Templar. The sequel, Dragon Amber, will be published in September.

Website: www.cjbusby.co.uk

Twitter: @ceciliabusby

Past Perfect Sheena Wilkinson

I have a secret other career.

Though I’m most known – insofar as I’m known at all – as a writer of contemporary YA, I have since 2006 (four years before my first novel was published) been writing, and publishing, short stories for adults, mostly historical, almost all about World War One or its aftermath. 

Now I’m having the chance to combine my two great writing passions – realistic YA and historical fiction – as I have a story included in Walker’s forthcoming anthology The Great War (pub. 3 July 2014). All the stories are inspired by actual artefacts, and my story, ‘Each Slow Dusk’, is inspired by a collection of 1914-19 school magazines, from the school where I taught for nineteen years. I curated an exhibition based on these magazines in 2004, so in a way this story has been ten years in the making.

school magazines from WW1 

 I fictionalised details of the school’s war effort, foregrounding the experience (often overlooked in war literature) of a schoolgirl, sixteen-year-old Edith, whose dreams of higher education are shattered when she has to leave school to care for her older brother, invalided out of the army with rheumatism. It’s very like the rest of my World War 1 stories, apart from the fact that the main character and the intended readership are younger.

Historical fiction always produces tension between wanting to evoke the period so that it comes alive for the reader, but not recreating it so systematically that it lapses into pastiche. The story must work as modern fiction, so it has to feel fresh, especially to a teen reader, who is likely to baulk at anything that feels worthy or schooly. This was a big challenge for me: there are no battles, no gore; the story takes place in a single day in a Belfast suburb. How could I make duty and quiet desperation interesting to a modern teenager?

music from the period

Unlike the intended readership, who are likely to have a prolonged period of young adulthood, the teenage characters in ‘Each Slow Dusk’ are children at school one minute and adults the next – not only leading men into battle, but, in Edith’s case, taking an adult caring role. Notions of duty are much more pronounced than they would be today, and Edith seems both older and younger than a modern sixteen year old.  How could I make her voice and choices accessible to a modern teen reader without compromising the sensibilities of the 1917 narrator?

In trying to evoke the Zeitgeist of 1917 I was scrupulous, but not heavy-handed, about period detail, and about ensuring these details are used only when it is natural to do so – when it would be equally natural to mention them in a story set in modern times, rather than have them come blazing signs shouting Period Detail. Being a geek, getting every detail exactly right matters to me, but accuracy isn’t always enough. In ‘Each Slow Dusk’ Edith and her friend Maud pass notes in class, and in one note they use the @ symbol – Meet you @ break. I spent some time checking that this sign was in common usage in 1917, and was pleased to find that it was. I liked the fact that it looks so modern, and hoped it would be one of the many small details to help bring 1917 alive for my reader. My editor agreed – but in the end the @ sign had to go. Why? Because, although I and my editor knew it was correct, it was flagged up at the copy-editing and proofing stages as looking anachronistic. And it only takes one little detail to break the reader’s trust in you. On the night before we went to print, @ was replaced by at.

I once started to read a novel set in the thirties, where the characters’ sexual attitudes were anachronistically modern. When they gathered round a television to watch the coronation of George VI, I flung the book away in disgust, saying ‘Wrong coronation! Can’t even get that right!’ Later I discovered that it was technically possible, if highly unusual, to have watched the 1937 coronation on television, but by getting the tone wrong in other areas, the writer had compromised my trust. Once that compact between writer and reader is broken, all the accurate period detail in the world will not restore it.

the first in Wilson's excellent Victorian series 

I’ve been thinking a lot about historical fiction recently. I’ve just finished Bring Up the Bodies, where Mantel established that trust so confidently that she could have told me anything about the 1530s and I’d have believed her. Last month I blogged about temporarily abandoning an academic paper in favour of a week’s uninterrupted first-draft scribbling: that paper was a chapter about Jacqueline Wilson’s Victorian novels for a forthcoming Casebook study of Wilson. It’s now finished and submitted, and the whole process was invaluable to me, even though it kept me away from my real work for weeks on end. I loved the Hetty Feather books, and thought Wilson dealt deftly with all the tensions I’ve noted above. This week I’m coming back to the present, for a big edit of my next novel. Set in 2014. I hope I get the details right.