Publicity about this book talks about somebody being sent
back in time to save the Crown of France, but it’s not an actual physical crown
that she is sent to save. Rather, she has to save the life
of one young man whose descendants will eventually become rulers of France.
The plot’s immaterial, really. The book is
mainly an opportunity to explore the world of the 13th century. There’s a bit
of history about the Crusades, but mainly it’s social history. What was it like
to live then? Dull, if the truth be told. If you want to get from A to B you
walk. If you’re lucky and rich, you may ride. There’s a lot of getting from A
to B in this book. Walking or riding, travelling takes a very long time and for
most of that time nothing really happens. According to this story your journey
may be broken by occasional extreme violence and quite a bit of sex, but much
of the sex will be boring too. (A huge shame as Macaire’s other books include
some brilliant sex scenes, both erotic and hilarious.) If your journey takes
you across the sea, you will do it in a boat which, lacking portholes, will
mean being shut up in a small, dark cabin. Inevitably this is, once again, dull
stuff until you are caught in a storm when it is extremely unpleasant and for
many of the travellers, fatal.
Our heroine’s journey takes us to
Tunis, on the Eighth Crusade. There are a couple of battles, but little detail
of the military goings-on. There is rather more detail of the aftermath – the
dead and dying and the general unpleasantness of war. As with most wars at the
time, disease is an even greater threat than the enemy and when the army
returns to Europe (more storms, more dull travelling) it’s a great deal smaller
than it was when it left.
All that sex results in pregnancy. (We
are told that people are very relaxed about sex, but I doubt that that is true
given that the danger of pregnancy – and the terrible consequences if unmarried
– must have discouraged most young women from casual encounters.) Our heroine
ends up with a baby, but no husband. Awkward. Fortunately, love (in the form of
a kind older man) conquers all and we have a happy, if hardly politically
correct, ending.
A Crown in Time is a great introduction
to the 13th century and Macaire is certainly more fun to read than a
school textbook. There’s more than a little school textbook in it, though, the
narrator often commenting on life at the time, with even the odd statistical
snip:
“Childbirth was the main cause of death among women at that time, with one-third of the deaths of adult women due to complications.”
Read it if you’ve always wanted to know more about 13th century France or if you enjoy exploring new worlds in an undemanding story.
A Crown in Time
Publisher: Headline Publishing Group (paperback copy) ISBN: 9781786157768
Here is a question a reader posed to Tom,
who tossed it over to me, and I gladly caught it because it was exactly what I
was trying to decide at that moment. The question was, “How do writers
decide what to write about?” Serendipity, really, because I’ve always been
a writer of daily happenings, circumstances, and daydreams.
Writing is a lonely business. I never minded, because I’ve never been uncomfortable alone with my thoughts. I’m afraid I day-dreamed most of my time in school - and I still tend to do that - I’m lost in thought as I take the train (one of the reasons I love trains!), as I walk or bike to work, and as I lie in bed waiting to fall asleep. And my mind is always making up stories. “What if?” is a favorite game I play with myself - and I can go on for hours. For my Alexander series, it started as a “What if someone went back in time to interview someone famous - let’s say Alexander the Great?” and seven books later, I ended the saga! On science blog, I came across a smilodon skull, and the fact that scientists are not sure how smilodons (sabre-toothed tigers) killed their prey. From that photo, and that idea, I wrote a book (which will be out in August 2020) set in the paleolithic, with smilodons, people from the future, and a lethal virus!
Smilodon at the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits Dallas Krentzel [CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]
My books come from “What if?” games, from a photo and blog article about a skull - and one came from a dream. My YA book, “Horse Passages”, came from a very vivid dream that just wouldn’t leave me alone until I’d finished the book. My latest book is set in the Middle Ages during the ill-fated 8th Crusade. The idea behind the book came from a visit I made to the Saint Chapel in Paris, which had been built by St. Louis to house the crown of thorns.
That got me interested in St Louis, his life
and times, and I ended up thinking the 8th Crusade would make an interesting
background for a story. And so “A Crown in Time” was born. The heroine, Isobel,
is a woman from the future sent back to save a young man who has embarked on
the Crusade and whose actions have drastically changed the course of time. As a
Corrector, Isobel is sent on a one-way trip back - basically a death sentence -
but she accepts, because she was already in prison and doesn’t have anything
left to lose.
One writer I know gets her ideas from he
headlines in the press. Another writer uses photos or paintings for
inspiration, and yet another uses objects for her stories: an old watch, a
ring, or a teacup, for example. I admit that when I write a historical novel it
is very helpful for me to actually see objects used during the time period I’m
writing about, which is why you can find me peering at displays in museums and
poring over old maps. We have a nymphorium nearby and when I pass by I often
stop and visit - the ancient Roman temple dedicated to a nymph has been rebuilt
to what it must have looked like over two thousand years ago, and I love trying
to see past the mists of time to imagine people leaving offerings to the nymph
- what did they pray for? What did they leave? What were they like?
Once an idea has taken hold and the story
begun, it’s just a matter of writing - one word after the other. Ideas are easy
to come by. The hard part is writing it all down. It’s a lonely job, often
without reward, but it’s one I love with all my heart! Thank you, Tom, for
giving me a chance to write about how I find my ideas - I hope this is helpful
to aspiring writers! Try the “What if?” game, and see what you can
come up with! But above all - have fun!
A Crown in Time
Publisher: Headline Publishing Group (paperback copy) ISBN: 9781786157768
Jennifer is an American living in Paris. She likes to read, eat
chocolate, and plays a mean game of golf. She grew up in upstate New York,
Samoa, and the Virgin Islands. She graduated from St Peter and Paul High School
in St Thomas and moved to NYC where she modelled for five years for Elite. She
went to France and met her husband at the polo club. All that is true. But she
mostly likes to make up stories.
Something different this Tuesday: instead of a book review, I’m doing a short review of a play I went to see last week.
‘Autoreverse’ is a one woman play looking at how we make sense of the world and our memories. Told by an Argentinian whose family fled to Chile during the Dirty War and who now lives in London, her personal story takes in questions of disruption and loss, migration and belonging.
The staging uses recorded speech, song, video, projected text subtitling foreign language recordings, a tiny bit of dance and even a snatch of live music. It’s imaginative and makes what could be a self-indulgent monologue into something that demands (and gets) our attention. Sometimes funny, sometimes heart-breakingly sad, it’s an evening that sticks in the mind.
It’s on until the end of next week at Battersea Arts Centre, a lovely building close to Clapham Junction station. ‘Autoreverse’ gives you a good excuse to visit.
A blog post about the 2nd Earl of Chatham and the book Jacqueline Reiter wrote about him.
I read an awful lot of books of historical non-fiction. The
occasional one is excellent. I read a fair number of
contemporary documents about the siege of Cawnpore for my book, Cawnpore, but honestly there was hardly
anything that wasn’t included in Andrew Ward’s astonishing Our Bones Are Scattered. It read like a novel too. In fact, I’d
recommend it over my own book but at more than 700 pages it’s maybe a bit heavy
for a holiday read.
Most of the historical stuff I labour
through, though, is beyond awful. I hate saying this, especially when I’ve met
some of the authors, but they really can’t write, which is sad seeing that
history is essentially about telling stories. (The clue is in the name.)
So let’s hear it for the amazing and
amusing Jacqueline Reiter (a clear case of nominative determinism if ever there
was one). This is a woman who writes so well that I even read (and mainly
enjoyed) her PhD thesis. I haven’t even read my wife’s PhD thesis. (It’s also
historical and, in fairness, I’ve read most of it in bits and she is also a
brilliant writer – possibly not unconnected to the fact that she didn’t train
in history.)
Jacqueline is an excellent speaker, a decent writer of short stories, and publishes an intermittent but stellar blog, but The Late Lord is (as far as I know) her only published book.
It is a biography of the 2nd
Earl of Chatham, the son of the Elder Pitt and the brother of the Younger.
I’ve met people born into a family of
over-achievers and it’s a terrible thing to happen to anyone. The poor guy
can’t make a speech or hold an opinion without somebody comparing it
unfavourably to his father or his brother. Painfully shy to start off with,
this drove him to become a virtual recluse, which meant everybody attacking him
as a stand-offish snob on top of everything else.
The
Earl should have hidden away in the country and bred horses, which seems
pretty well what he was put on the earth to do, but he had an enormous sense of
duty: to his country (which never appreciated him) and to his brother (who
knifed him in the back when it became politically convenient). Unable to star
in politics and unfitted for a professional career, he took what was
traditionally the role of the third son and tried to make a career in the army.
He was conscientious and personally quite brave (a key attribute for early
19th-century commanders), being wounded in action. His brother though, saw him
as more valuable as political cannon fodder than the traditional sort, so after
being wounded he wasn’t allowed to serve in action again until the Younger had
ended his political career. At this point, he was given command of a doomed
expedition to the Low Countries which was supposed to be a joint naval-military
operation. The venture failed spectacularly with the army blaming the navy, the
navy blaming the army and the politicians (who bore a significant amount of the
responsibility) blaming the most convenient scapegoat, which turned out to be
him. Unable to quite believe how completely he was being stitched up, he made a
totally inadequate defence and retired in public disgrace.
Failed politician and failed
general, the poor man’s main solace was his personal life until his wife went
mad and died after a long illness, leaving him distressed beyond measure. At this point the King (as far as I can see his only staunch
supporter in his life) made him governor of Gibraltar, in an attempt to give
him both an income (it goes without saying that he was broke) and a reason for
getting out of bed in the morning (which, as it happens, he very often didn’t
do, being a particular enthusiast for long lie-ins).
North View of Gibraltar from Spanish Lines: John Mace (1782)
He hated Gibraltar, but as with
almost everything else in his life, he persevered with a sense of duty and was a
solidly, if unspectacularly, good governor. The posting,
though, broke his health (he was already 65 when he arrived there) and he
returned to England after four years. For ten years he lived quietly with his
health continuing to deteriorate although, paradoxically, with the man himself
away from the public gaze his reputation began to recover. His funeral, after a
stroke in 1835, was, Reiter assures us, “in grand style” at Westminster
Abbey.
Reiter narrates the Earl’s life with
genuine sympathy and makes the politics of the early 19th century
much clearer than anybody else I’ve read. She doesn’t condescend to the
readers, but neither does she assume knowledge that most amateurs like me will
not possess. The book is indexed and annotated to within an inch of its life
(possibly more than the non-academic reader really wants) but it remains lively
and well written and a thoroughly enjoyable read. If only more history books
were written like this, more people would be interested in history.
Entertaining Mr Pepys is the third and, probably final, book in Deborah Swift’s series about Mr Pepys’ women. Although the protagonist, Mrs Knepp is an actual historical character who Pepys knew, the man himself is only incidental to the story. In fact, all the scenes featuring him could be removed without affecting the story arc at all.
In the second in the series, A Plague on Mr Pepys, Swift had moved away from the privileged world of the Pepys household in order to explore the poverty and misery of the artisanal class. This time the focus is on the world of the theatre, but again we see the way in which the mid-17th century trapped and exploited women. Mrs Knepp has been cast adrift by her uncaring father into an unloving marriage. Mr Knepp is a brute, using his wife as an unpaid servant. All that keeps her going is that she has one servant of her own who, being black, is even lower down the pecking order than she is.
Other women have more incidental roles, exchanging sexual favours for better parts in the theatre or driven mad by cruel husbands (in a scene of full-on Dickens-esque madness, she stands in the street as London burns, “her arms waving like a crazy statue”). Even Mrs Pepys complains of the cruelty and meanness of her husband though, by the standards of the time, Pepys seems to have been quite a good husband and her life was comfortable, verging on luxurious.
Samuel Pepys by John Hayls (1666)
If the first three quarters of the book reads, at times, like a feminist tract, does it give a fair picture of the position of women in the world of the period? I’m not sure that it does. We meet an orange girl whose mother was a prostitute and who is, at 14 years old, already little better than a whore herself. Bright and sassy, she still seems doomed to a miserable, and probably short, life, but this is Nell Gwynne, who is to become the King’s mistress. We hear lots about the present hardships of the characters but little about their future success.
We get a rather one-sided version of their married lives, too. We are assured that, though Mrs Knepp spends a lot of time with Pepys, they are not lovers. This is the Pepys who, we know from his diaries, will literally bend a serving girl over in a corridor and have his way with barely a break of step as he passes. But Mrs Knepp is unsullied by Pepys (though an excellent Historical Note suggests at least two lovers). Poor Mr Knepp: brute as he is, he is at least a faithful brute.
The problem that I have is not so much that the women have miserable lives but that Swift clearly believes that they are miserable mainly on account of their being women. You don’t have to be a committed Marxist to interpret the exploitation of women as an example of the general exploitation of the weak by the strong. Mrs Pepys, as we have seen in earlier books in the series, is not above casual cruelty to servants and the book does not dwell on the hardships faced by the labouring man of the period. In fact, Knepp’s business (he hires carriage horses) requires a yard full of lads who, one suspects do hard work fetching and carrying for rather more kicks than ha’pence. Even so, Mrs Knepp is quite happy to see them go without food when she spends the meat money on theatre tickets, demonstrating that the rule that the strong will exploit the weak applies across both genders.
Sadly (and uncharacteristically), Swift allows the requirements of the plot elements to over-ride the characterisation at the beginning of the story. Mrs Knepp has apparently had a very happy childhood with a father whom she loves and who seems to have loved her back. With her mother’s death, her father marries a wicked step-mother and the poor girl is foisted off on a clearly unsuitable husband after which her father cuts off all contact. It doesn’t ring true and sticks out as an obvious plot device in a book in which most of the other relationships are lovingly and credibly delineated. Even the ghastly Mr Knepp is given a back-story that makes him a sympathetic character despite his frequent cruelty.
Even with these reservations, the book demonstrates Swift’s fine grasp of her period. It’s full of convincing detail: the use of limes to avoid pregnancy; the actor-manager’s insistence on women playing roles where they are disguised as men because “Killigrew likes you in breeches so they can see your bum”; the casual prejudice against Catholics. She takes you into that world and makes it real. You hear the noises and smell the smells (and how revolting many of those smells are). If the miserable domestic life of Mrs Knepp sometimes acts as a bit of a drag on the plot we, like her, can at least escape to the theatre and the world of the King’s Players is as lively as the world of Knepp’s stable yard is dull.
The book, like the theatrical performances that are such an important part of the story, is divided into three acts. Act Three sees a dramatic change of pace. Domestic drama and sexual politics give way to the horror that is the Great Fire of London. Here Swift comes into her own. She has a flair for melodrama and, with the fire, melodrama is clearly appropriate. Swift first describes the fire as we see it in Pepys’ diary.
Elisabeth peered over Janey’s shoulder. There was an orange glow a little way off on Marke Lane.
“Fancy you waking us up for that,” Elisabeth said. ”It’s just someone’s bonfire. Someone could piss it out.”
By the morning more than three hundred houses have been burned down and the Thames is clogged with the boats of refugees fleeing the flames. We see the disaster from the point of view of several of the characters: Pepys burying his parmesan cheese in his garden; a Frenchman returning up the River from a trip across the Channel; Knepp with a stable full of straw and horses terrified by the smell of burning. We move from the detail of horses trapped in their stalls and people staring in dismay at the wreckage of their houses pulled down to make firebreaks, to a broader view of the impact of the fire on the city.
Burning of old St. Paul’s, by Wenceslaus Hollar Engraving (Yale Center for British Art)
The landscape of London was like mouth with missing teeth, full of blackened stumps and gaps. The view was alien; unrecognisable. Half-burned joists and rafters stuck out from church steeples, in the distance something exploded.
By the time the fire is burned out, relationships have been changed for ever. “It’s a purification,” one character says. “London needed it.” There is talk of how the city cannot survive, though we know, of course, that it did. Out of the fire, came a better London and, in this book, better people. Even Knepp is redeemed and, at last, Swift allows that some men do try to be decent people, even prepared to sacrifice themselves for the women they love. (No more details because spoilers!)
In the end, the fire redeems not only the characters but the book. Any criticisms that the reader has in the earlier chapters are likely to be burned away in the flames. If some of the reconciliations seem a little pat, well, it worked for Dickens, so I don’t see why Swift shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it too. She has, once again, produced a gripping and convincing tale of the Restoration. If you enjoy this period (and books like M J Logue’s An Abiding Fire) you should definitely read this one.
[This is an extended version of a review that first appeared in Historia, the on-line magazine of the Historical Writers’ Association: http://www.historiamag.com/ ]
