Summertime, and the readin' is easy...

Summer is the time to (hopefully) kick back and take things easy – sometimes regardless of the to-do list!  Here are some new historical and classic recommendations for slower paced reads from members of my critique group.

Victoria Dixon aka the Ron Empress, recommends two new YAs (Young Adult Books), both my Pat Lowery Collins: Hidden Voices, set in 18th century Venice and Daughter of Winter.  Since I’m not familiar with Ms. Collins, I’ve taken the liberty of paraphrasing from her website here.  Daughter of Winter is set in mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts. After twelve-year-old Addie’s father has left to go gold prospecting, and her mother and brother die of the flux, Adiie flees into the woods, where she meets an older Wampanoag woman takes her in and she begins to learn the truth of her past.

Hidden Voices is set in 18^th century Venice and tells the stories of three girls living in the Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage renowned for its extraordinary musical program. The girls are sheltered by the orphanage and their talent nurtured by the young Antonio Vivaldi, but they are to learn that life in the real world, and a search for love, brings unthinkable dangers.

Writer Carolyn Domini reminds us to pick up the Brother Cadfael mystery series by Ellis Peters (Edith Pargeter).  She comments, “For an absorbing traipse into the world medieval, there is nothing better, no character more soothing or sharp-witted at once, no medieval mystery more finessed.”  If you’ve only seen the TV series, it’s time to treat yourself to the original books.  If you’re familiar with neither, but enjoy murder mysteries and/or medieval history, you’ll love these stories of warrior-turned-monk Cadfael, the herbalist at Shrewsbury Abbey.  Ellis Peters writes in the classic vein of the traditional mystery and sets the bar high for all medieval mystery writers that have followed her.

Since my theme is summer reading, and I’m actually at the beach in Dorset, I recommend The Shrimp and the Anemone by L.P. Hartley.  It’s the first in three books, sometimes published as the Eustace and Hilda trilogy, and a book I first read while at school.  I liked it so much that it prompted me to read the others voluntarily!  Plus, I think it counts as a neglected classic nowadays.

In The Shrimp and the Anemone, set in Edwardian England, we meet Eustace and his sister Hilda as children, holidaying on the Norfolk coast.  Their mother has died several years earlier, and Hilda has taken it upon herself to fulfill this role for her Eustace, unconsciously setting up a domineering relationship that will affect her sensitive and introverted younger brother his whole life.  The story unfolds gently through the eyes of Eustace, and it is L.P. Hartley’s triumph that he captures so exquisitely the inner life of a young boy while allowing adult readers to read, sometimes painfully, between the lines.

Enjoy your summer (if it’s summer in your hemisphere); if I get more recommendations for historical and classic slow reads, I’ll be glad to highlight them in another post.

Abook

From Horrible Histories, one of my favourite children's TV shows, comes this sketch on abook.  Enjoy!

Neglected classics: The Monk by Matthew Lewis

Matthew Lewis

Since it's summer, I was tempted to subtitle this, "Beach reading for nerds."  If the Twilight saga and its offspring have left you wondering what's with teenagers today, get some perspective by reading The Monk by Matthew Lewis.  The Monk (published 1796) is one of the novels alluded to (and satirized) by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey.  Published when Lewis was only nineteen, this racy novel earned him the nickname “Monk Lewis.”

If you ever have those yearnings to read a trashy novel but fear being caught in the act, then pick up The Monk, and, with a clear conscience, you can boast to everyone that you’re reading a neglected classic.  Ever wondered what really goes on behind the closed doors of monasteries or nunneries?  Well, you won’t after reading this.  Lust, incest, rape and necromancy swirl through the pages like the fantasies of a …well, a nineteen year-old male.  I’ve read reviews that see the novel as addressing the horrors of religious oppression, but to be honest, I feel that Lewis’s ‘exposé’ of the Catholic church is so outrageous that not even a devout Catholic could take it seriously- it certainly had this Anglo-Catholic laughing out loud. 

Recommended for sheer entertainment value with the added bonus of pretending you’re in fact being a literary snob.

P.S. and yes, I do see the irony of posting this next to an ad for Mystic Monk coffee, but I think they're too busy roasting a darn good cup of java to get up to all the things Lewis writes about!

Even more historical lessons in how (not) to write a novel

Continuing my musings inspired by The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne (see here for an overview of the novel).

One of many diversions in the novel

Point of view, primary and secondary characters: no-one told Tristram Shandy about these things.  The poor man can’t even manage to maintain his status as the hero of his own memoirs.  Almost as soon as a character appears, Tristram is obliged to stop and tell us his or her personal story, with no regard to flow of the plot.  At the very beginning, we have a digression into the life of the midwife who helps deliver him; the ninth volume ends with a story of another minor character, the servant Obadiah.  Tristram can barely make a point at times, let alone a point of view.

              

Even real-life authors have difficulties with characters getting out of hand.  In fact, a recent discussion among my critique group led to comments and suggestions on this dilemma.  Which leads me, in a truly Shandean line of reasoning, to the question, what particular dilemmas can plague historical writers when it comes to character?

Who said that? 

Giving different characters distinct voices can be hard if we’re simultaneously attempting to make the characters sound Elizabethan, Jacobean, Neanderthal etc., regardless of the fact that not even Shakespeare made everyone sound Shakespearean.  People from different classes or regions have particular characteristics to their speech, so go ahead and make that lower class Londoner sound like a cockney, whatever the time period.

In The Boleyn Inheritance by Elizabeth Chadwick, Katherine Howard, one of three (yes, three) first person narrators, becomes obsessed by French phrases, both a pathetic and humorous attempt at sophistication, but also a help in defining her voice. 

Say that again?

 That accent thing is a tightrope.  Unless you’re a powerful or famous writer, giving a character an almost untranslatable dialect for the sake of authenticity is a bad idea.  On the other hand, ye canna make every Highlander sound like Scotty from Star Trek (did I date myself with that reference?!). 

Someone who succeeded admirably, in my opinion, is Judith Lindbergh, who transposed the voice of Medieval immigrants to Greenland in The Thrall’s Tale.  Most of us will have to settle for some sort of compromise.

Lost in translation.

I touched on this in a previous post.  Writing in English about a character who speaks another language causes the problems listed above, plus more.  Depending on your familiarity with the original language, you could try to echo syntax, or throw in a few key words or phrases.  Actually, if you’ve got practically no familiarity, you could grab a dictionary and do the same anyway.  Or throw caution to the wind and use Google translator because platypus dances under blue clouds Monday please. Tristram assumes everyone is as polylingual as he is and thinks nothing of inserting several pages of Latin in a chapter.  But do you use modern French for the average reader or eighteenth century French to be accurate? Where does the line between a natural and contrived language fall?  Mon Dieu, c’est impossibile!

Where did that Queen come from?

Jean Plaidy

Another dilemma occurs when, despite your endeavours to keep everything fictional, a real historical person insists on turning up in your story.  This happened to Tristram – the Queen of Navarre turns up in a discourse on whiskers (V.i).   You have three major options.  1. Spend countless hours of research getting the character right for one scene; 2.  Steal the character from Elizabeth Chadwick, or better still, Jean Plaidy because she wrote about every historical character on the planet and she’s dead; 3. Create a caricature à la Timothy Spall’s Winston Churchill in The King’s Speech (I’m still wondering why he did that, by the way).

And if you want some real help, check out the following:

Vicky English has some hints on using POV to layer your scenes in her latest blog entry.

Kathy Lynn Emerson has a good discussion on the language question in her book How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries (see my earlier review).

The Inkwell Inspirations blog has a comprehensive section on writing resources, including several pertaining to character.

Guest blogger: author Anne Whitfield

I'm delighted that author Anne Whitfield is guest blogging today on the release of her new novel, The House of Women.  Anne writes women's fiction and is a great storyteller.  I'll get right out of the way and let Anne introduce her work to you!

The House of Women

    Leeds. 1870. Lonely and brokenhearted, Grace Woodruff fights for her sisters’ rights to happiness while sacrificing any chance for her own.

The eldest of seven daughters, Grace is the core of strength around which the unhappy members of the Woodruff family revolve. As her disenchanted mother withdraws to her rooms, Grace must act as a buffer between her violent, ambitious father and the sisters who depend upon her. Rejected by her first love and facing a spinster’s future, she struggles to hold the broken family together through her father’s infidelity, one sister’s alcoholism, and another’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy by an unsuitable match.

Caring for an illegitimate half-brother affords Grace an escape, though short-lived. Forced home by illness and burdened with dwindling finances, Grace faces fresh anguish –and murder– when her first love returns to wreck havoc in her life.  All is not lost, however. In the midst of tragedy, the fires of her heart are rekindled by another. Will the possibility of true love lead Grace to relinquish her responsibilities in the house of women and embrace her own right to happiness?

Excerpt 

Grace blinked to clear her frozen mind as her mother and Verity climbed the staircase. If Verity was here then was William here too? Movement at the door caused Grace to close her eyes. She couldn’t bring herself to open them and see the one man she’d longed for since she was sixteen.

‘Miss Woodruff?’ Doyle inquired at her shoulder.

Startled, she spun to face him, but she was blind to him, blind to everything but the sensation of having William here. Crazily, she wondered if she would swoon like a maiden aunt.

Doyle’s hand reached out, but he quickly tucked it behind his back. ‘What is it, Miss Woodruff?’

Grace swallowed, feeling the fine hairs on her arms and nape prickle. He is here.

‘Good evening, Grace.’

At the sound of William’s deep velvety voice, her heart stopped beating, only to start again at a rapid pace. Her stomach clenched and her legs felt unable to support her anymore. Slowly, she swivelled to gaze into William’s blue-green eyes and knew she was lost again. William smiled his captivating smile. He had aged, no, matured since their last meeting. He looked leaner, but broader in the shoulders. There was an aura about him, something that females of any age wanted. He made all other men around him seem insignificant. A magnetism, a mystical air surrounded him, catching Grace in its clutches once more.

Pre-order The House of Women from Amazon.com, or The Book Depository, which has free postage and currently on discount.

http://www.bookdepository.com/House-Women-Anne-Whitfield/9780956790187

For more information about Anne Whitfield, please visit her website.

http://www.annewhitfield.com

More historical lessons on how (not) to write a novel

Here is the second of my attempts to use Lawrence Sterne’s The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy as a guide to writing historical novels.  See my previous post for an introduction to the book itself.

History: a digression?

Modern editors tell us that diversions are a ‘killer’ to the novel; many declare you should have no backstory at all in the first few chapters.  Tristram Shandy, on the other hand, declares, “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;—they are the life, the soul of reading;—take them out of this book for instance,–you might as well take the book along with them” (I.xxii).  He is quite unable to plot out a linear storyline, a fact he illustrates in his summary in Volume VI, Chapter xl:

Now, 

These were the four lines I moved in through my first, second, third, and fourth volumes.—in the fifth volume I have been very good,—the precise line I have described in it being thus:

 I thought I’d try to avoid a similar Shandyism and concentrate on a type of digression historical authors have to wrestle with: the backstory of history in novels.

From: Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

How and when should an author best inform the reader of the historical background to his/her novel, especially when the main characters are not the makers of textbook history?  When you’ve waded your way through a four-feet-high pile of research books and logged up several weeks online to ‘get into’ your historical world, it’s tempting to offer all your wisdom up to the reader, if only to make them realise what you went through.  But as I know from writing and critiquing, it’s pretty obvious when you begin to sound like a history book.  A few techniques authors have used to avoid their novel looking like the plot line of Tristram Shandy are:

In the beginning -   Occasionally an author will fill in the background with a foreword.  This avoids having to insert necessary facts in an unnatural way, and eases the reader from history to historical fiction.  I favour a brief sub-heading to the opening chapter e.g. “Florence, 1293,” which gives the author at least a baseline of expectation to work from. 

The neophyte POV – have your POV character undergo a new experience or travel to a new place, and show the reader the information through his eyes.  In Carrie Vaughn’s YA time-travel novel, Steel, her teenage protagonist ends up on an eighteenth century pirate ship where, as a new member of the crew and a landlubber, she gets to explain the workings of a ship without sounding like a sailing manual.

It’s all French to me – use a few words from the original period/culture/language in context so that the reader can easily figure out the meaning.  For example, “The roll cost only a few denarii,” immediately conveys the sense this is a coin of low value (and has the bonus of giving the reader the beginnings of a price guide to the period). 

On the other hand, it’s best to avoid giving the reader minute details your character wouldn’t notice or draw attention to.  “’I’ll be downstairs as soon as I put on my green baize hat with three pheasant feathers’,” sticks out far more than, “The green baize hat would set off her dress to full advantage, and the pheasant feathers she’d sewn on it last week made it look almost good as new.”

What to do with all that other knowledge you gained?  This is where the afterword shines.  A recent article in the Historical Novel Society's magazine, Solander, revealed that the majority of readers of historical fiction enjoy the afterword, both for contextualizing the story and for a chance to learn about nonfiction sources for further reading; after all, people read historical fiction because they love history.  But the bottom line is that details should add to the story, plunging the reader into a world that can know and care about, so that the author can say with Tristram Shandy, “my work is digressive, and it is progressive too,—and at the same time” (I.xxii).