When Fiction and History Collide

History and historical fiction appear to go hand-in-hand; without the former, certainly there couldn't be the latter. Yet in some cases, these two apparent inseparable allies make for uneasy bedfellows. The truth is, not everyone who loves history is going to love historical fiction and vice versa. Some people are best disposed to the history itself, such as original documents, erudite biographies etc. This is the arena where scholars most often dwell; it's a hallowed place yet not one necessarily conducive to reading historical fiction, which, in the final say, remains a form of entertainment.

While historical fiction can inform and inspire an interest in history, and should of course refrain from blatant disrespect, it was never intended to substitute or even augument history itself. Historical fiction is a form of creative interpretation; it utilizes historical framework to relate a fictionalized story based on the past. The most informed readers will often find anacronisms in a novel that others might never notice and find this disillusioning, even off-putting; but we should remember that to be a working historical fiction writer in today's publishing climate, by and large it's often required to steamline characterizations, simplify complex political, social, and religious situations, modernize dialogue, keep the cast small and the pacing crisp. In sum, most commercial editors at major houses want writers whose books can be enjoyed by all potential readers, regardless of their particular background.

History is not an easy subject; historical fiction, when done well, can help to relieve the most intimidating aspects of history and make it accessible to those who believe the past can't be exciting or fun, with all those pesky dates and titles to remember. A scholar approaches history from an extremely detailed perspective; while such knowledge can inform the reading of historical fiction and even make it enjoyable, it can also by contrast curtail the ability to suspend disbelief, which is an essential requirement for fiction, regardless of the genre.

We read novels because we want to be entertained; we read nonfiction because we want to learn. And while the two may cross and, in the best of cases, even blend, the distinction still exists.

Loaded Questions is Back!

After a long hiatus, Kelly Hewitt's fabulous Loaded Questions is back. If you haven't followed it before, Kelly features marvelous interviews with authors, as well as insider scoop on publishing news and other book-related features. Welcome back, Kelly! We missed you.

You can find my own interview with Kelly here.

The Amazing Jean Taggart

On July 18, Jean Taggart, a fourth-generation Californian and writer, left this world. She was 91 years old and though very well-traveled (she took a cruise to Guatemala in her 80s) she had spent most of her life in San Francisco, a city she revered.

I first met Jean 16 years ago; I was working on my first historical novel and looking for a group to join in the area. I saw an ad in the Noe Valley Voice for a group called the Sunset Writers and called; Jean answered the phone. She had a rough, sexy voice - she was in her 70s at this time but she sounded decades younger and we had almost instant rapport. She told me the group had openings and to come to their next meeting. "They'll have to audition you," she said, "but don't worry. I'm sure you'll do just fine."

That first meeting, I was a bundle of nerves. It was my first live encounter with other writers; I didn't know what to expect. I'd brought a few chapters of my opus-in-progress; as I walked up the steps to Jean's cozy home, shaded by trees on a sunny hillside corner near Noe Valley, I heard laughter coming from within. Jean opened the door, a tall, slightly stoop-shouldered, white haired woman with sparkling blue eyes and an infectious grin. "Good, you're young," she said, motioning me in. "We need young blood here." She offered me coffee - she always had coffee and cookies available at every meeting - in a crowded kitchen where her cats languidly inspected my shoes and over which presided a framed poster of a faerie-like woman holding a broom and the words: F*#K Housework.

Over the next years, myriad group members came and went; we had our internal dramas, controversies, even fights, but Jean remained a constant, her house a place of refuge where we gathered to read aloud from our work and receive criticism and advice. Jean was a gifted writer with a knack for the cut-to-the-chase critique; like many intelligent, quick-witted people she did not suffer fools gladly. She loved youth, and though our younger members arrived like whirlwinds of enthusiasm and invariably moved on, several kept in contact with Jean after they left our group.

Her own writing tended to reflect her chief passion: her love for California. Raised in the Sacramento area, Jean had been through the war and lost a brother overseas; her other brother, also gone by the time I met her, had been a talented novelist whose life had often been difficult. She'd traveled abroad many times; she loved to discover new places and never complained about the hardships that travel must have imposed on a woman of her years, but home was San Francisco - the City by the Bay whose history she had experienced firsthand and was chronicled in her marvelous unpublished series of stories, Taylor Street Tales. Though Jean was married for only a short time, when she spoke of past beaus and of her glamorous, heady life in San Francisco in the 1940s and '50s, you could see in her eyes the secret joy of a woman who had loved often and loved well. Men and cats: each had felt the magnetic pull of her ardor for life. Though men faded eventually, cats remained. Jean always had a cat, or two, frightened creatures she rescued and nurtured back to trust.

Jean dabbled in painting, as well - her splashy watercolors were often haphazardly arranged about her house, with and without frames. Her eclectic sense of decor carried over to her taste in books; she was attracted to literary works, but also loved a good mystery. One of the highest compliments she ever paid me was that I'd made her appreciate historical fiction, a genre she'd always associated with "big gowns and hair." When I finally managed to get published after years of disappointments and perseverance, Jean took immense pleasure in my success and rallied her neighborhood bookseller to order in my books.

Some of my favorite moments with Jean were spent at her kitchen table, in the half-hour before the rest of our writing group arrived; over coffee and the occasional furtive cigarette, she'd share with me stories of San Francisco; of the speak-eases in the Tenderloin where she used to go dancing; the clatter of cable cars on Nob Hill where she lived; the busy downtown office where she worked; and of the aura of endless promise shimmering over a time when the end of the war had heralded a burst of optimism in America. Jean lived through it all: the penciled seam up-the-leg stocking of the 40s; the ice-cream crinolines of the 50s; the hedonistic smoky rebellion of the Beat Generation; the sexual napalm of Flower Power; the bra burning and glitter balls of the 70s; the Me-Me 80s, Woe-is-Me 90s, and into the uncertain early years of a troubled new century. She had experienced more history than most of us will ever see and lost most of her contemporaries in the process. Her face would sometimes turn distant as she recalled everyone she had loved and said goodbye to during her remarkable long life; though Jean rarely indulged in self-pity or regret, I could tell that all those goodbyes lived inside her. We had a term for it: 'The Price of Longevity.' She herself had narrowly escaped the shadow of her mortality on various occasions; a breast cancer survivor, she was proud of her scars and matter-of-fact about the horrors she'd undergone as a result of her mastectomies and implants. Still, Jean never wasted time on looking back; she reveled in the present, in the thrill of opportunity, and even took up blogging.

Toward the last few years of her life, after a series of serious health setbacks that curtailed her independence, she expressed to me her aversion to reaching the 100-year mark. She didn't mind being old, she said; she just didn't want to fall apart. The last time I saw her was at our group; though frail, she still chuckled with me in the kitchen as I boiled water for tea and mentioned how much she had enjoyed coming to my book party - a haul for her, which she had insisted on making. I said goodbye at the night's end and told her I'd see her at our next meeting, but I ended up not making it due to conflicts in my schedule. I never saw her again.

Jean Taggart wanted us to say of her that she was a fourth-generation Californian and proud of it. As the song says, 'I know when I die, I will breath my last sigh for sunny California,' but Jean always said, she planned to go out laughing.

I can hear her now.

New This Week: Recommended Fiction

This week, I heartily recommend two books which I endorsed and which captured me from beginning to end.

FOR THE KING by Catherine Delors

Catherine Delors blazed onto the historical fiction scene with her riveting Mistress of the Revolution, about a young woman swept up into the vagaries and savagery of the French Revolution, and her struggle to survive. In FOR THE KING, Ms Delors turns her keen eye for characterization and impeccable sense of period detail to the tumultuous world of Napoleonic Paris, offering us a fascinating account of a conflicted man determined to uncover the truth behind a spectacular crime. With consummate skill, she guides us into a world that is glamorous, barbaric and deceitful, where privilege often trumps guilt and betrayal can exact an unimaginable price. This was one of my favorite endorsement reads of 2010; masterfully written, FOR THE KING offers a vivid portrait of a city caught between its violent past and treacherous present, combining the pulse-pounding suspense of a thriller with the glamour of superbly researched historical fiction.

SHADOW OF THE SWORDS by Kamran Pasha

Forget everything you thought you know about the Crusades. In this gorgeously wrought tale, following his sublime Mother of the Believers, Kamran Pasha depicts the epic struggle for Jerusalem between Christians and Muslims with startling modern relevance. His unexpected portrayal of charismatic Saladin, whose gift for leadership harbors a secret weakness for a woman forbidden to him; tortured Richard the Lionheart, whose blind ambition to conquer the East turns him into a ruthless, fallible foe; and Miriam, the proud healer haunted by the past, is timely and deeply moving. Mr Kamran's vision is rooted in both sensual detail and a sage appreciation for irony; passionate, gilded with the scents of a vanished time, and steeped in the blood and thunder of two antagonistic faiths, SHADOW OF THE SWORDS is a triumph from start to finish.

Four Books I Recommend: Mini Reviews

THE PASSAGE by Justin Cronin
This is being buzzed as the Big Book of the Year, and with reason: it was bought for a colossal sum at auction by Ballantine Books; film rights sold to Ridley Scott, director of Alien and Gladiator within days, and it's drawn comparisons to the best of Stephen King. Being a fan of King's earlier novels (The Shining is one of my all-time favorites) I was intrigued by Cronin's apocalyptic tale of a scientific experiment gone awry and a world overcome by virological vampires, aptly dubbed "virals." At the center of this huge story spanning over 700 pages is an enigmatic girl named Amy, whose abandonment by her mother propels her into the horrific events leading up to the end of civilization as we know it, and the creation of a much-altered and frightening post-collapse society, where clusters of surviving mortals hide behind enclosed homesteads and banks of battery-powered lights which are slowly but inexorably losing power. The cast is immense, as befitting an epic, though at times this proves challenging both in remembering who everyone is and investing in any single person, particularly as you never know when said person will fall prey to the marauding, tree-leaping, blood-thirsty virals who've quite literally "eaten the world." These virals, however, are more than toothy creatures; and it's their secret, as well as Amy's role in it, that drives the story to its long-winded but ultimately creepy conclusion. THE PASSAGE requires immersion and patience; but for the intrepid reader there are rewards to be had, including the first 250 pages, which are a pitch-perfect icy soak into the terrors of science taken to extreme, and later on, a particularly nasty confrontation with hordes of virals in devastated Las Vegas. Mr Cronin is working on the next book in a proposed trilogy.

THE ILLUMINATOR by Brenda Rickman Vantrese
This is another book that generated serious buzz when it sold to St Martin's Press years ago and I bought a first edition because, frankly, the cover looked like a gold-laminated Faberge egg. Unfortunately, I didn't get around to reading it until recently, though I've faithfully bought the next two books by Ms Vantrese based on reviews. And let me just say for the record: Why did I wait so long?! THE ILLUMINATOR is a magnificent, thought-provoking and defiantly anti-anachronistic plunge into the turmoil and tragedy of 14th century England. The story, on the surface, appears deceptively simple: a widow, Lady Kathyrn - portrayed refreshingly in middle age, rather than the dewy glamour of youth- is fighting to save her estate as inheritance for her sons from the rapacity of the Church and ill-intentioned suitors. Enter a mysterious illuminator named Finn and his evanescent daughter; after a mishap on the road involving a pig and a dwarf, Finn is conscripted into plying his trade as an illuminator of manuscripts for the local bishop and comes to live in Lady Kathyrn's manor, where his presence sets off a chain of life-shattering events. Vantrese's true strengths lie in her superb grasp of the era and understanding of the complex importance of spirituality to people striving to overcome every-day suffering. This is not a romanticized historical recreation; THE ILLUMINATOR transports you into a time both fascinating and repellent in its contradictions. Ms Vantrese is also the author of The Mercy Seller and The Heretic's Wife, which loosely connect with her first book and are now at the top of my TBR list.

DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE by Isabel Allende
Let me say it upfront: I'm a devoted fan of Ms Allende. From her House of the Spirits to Zorro, I have reveled in her quixotic, sensual, unabashedly sprawling explorations of family ties, the toll and joys of love in all its diverse forms, and the independent spirit of the immigrant. DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE was the book selected by Oprah for her book club and of course it garnered enormous acclaim; while I bought it, it was another that sat on my shelf unread, for some inexplicable reason. Nevertheless, the wait was worth it. Infused with Ms Allende's trademark turns of phrase ("fate lashed its tail and changed her life forever") and cast of eccentric characters driven by private obsessions, this novel takes place in the 1800s, starting in Chile with the discovery of a baby in a soap crate, left on the threshold of the very proper but secret-riddled English family of the Sommers. The child, named Eliza, is raised by the delightful wasp-waisted Ms Rose Sommers, indoctrinated in the limited methods a girl can employ to survive in their rarefied society; but when Eliza falls passionately and unexpectedly in love with a common clerk, she flees the safe emptiness of her cloistered existence for feral California, embarking on an adventure that awakens her to life's vast potential and cracks the fragile veneer in which the Sommers themselves have dwelled. Ms Allende's deft pen conjures to vivid, humane life both the hypocrisy of Victorian mores in South America as well as the savage abandon of the Gold Rush; her cast is wide and diverse, ranging from the mourning Chinese physician who accompanies Eliza to a caravan of prostitutes led by a transgender humanitarian. Very few writers today can claim the mastery of color and depth of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's work; I humbly suggest that Ms Allende is definitely one of them.

THE SHEEN ON THE SILK by Anne Perry
Anne Perry departs from her bestselling Victorian mysteries for this epic, yet at times uneven, tale of 13th century Byzantium featuring a female physician who disguises herself as a eunuch to uncover the truth about her twin's involvement in the assassination of a politician. Still reeling from a Venetian-led assault that devastated its populace and exiled its imperial family, Byzantium is a city of crumbling secrets, besieged noble families, and labyrinthine intrigues; into this dangerous yet seductive crossroads between East and West enters Anna, a.k.a. Anastasius, determined to prove her brother's innocence. While Anna's story is compelling in and of itself, it is her patroness Zoe, an aging but still beautiful noblewoman intent on revenge, who steals the plot — seductive, lethal, and uncompromising, Zoe has never forgotten the debt that Venice has incurred for destroying the city, even as her own past is haunted by tragedy and violence. Woven throughout the novel's ambitious narrative are various supporting characters, including a conflicted Roman priest whose contact with Byzantium throws his own faith into question; a Venetian sailor seeking his hidden past; and a spiritually pliant bishop of the Orthodox faith determined to prevent ecclesiastical union with Rome. Perry excels in her characterizations and in creating an ambiance that shifts easily between the gilded corridors of Byzantium’s sea-scented palaces to the corrupt intrigues of the Vatican to the arid expanse of the Sinai desert; however, at times her pacing can be challenging both because of the wide cast of characters and the novel's meditations on the meaning of religion in a world overcome by upheaval.

Does the Prize make the Genre?

Hilary Mantel's recent win of The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction is a definite boon for a genre that has suffered more than its fair share of critics. In the days leading up to the award of this prestigious UK-based prize, both author Sarah Dunant – a nominee - and academic Jerome de Groot wrote pieces in the Times and The Scotsman, respectively, which attest to, and attempt to explain, the current popularity of the historical novel. Both pieces offer valid points and rejoice in our genre's resurrection; and no one who has read my blog can deny my own admiration for Dunant’s work, in particular.

However, for me, both pieces exude a slight whiff of troubling elitism prevalent within the genre. It's almost as if historical novelists must justify the reason for their work while being  divided into categories: the literary; the commercially popular; and, well, the rest. While we cannot deny a class status within the genre, as in all forms of writing, I believe there are more deserving novelists working in the arena of historical fiction than just the ubiquitous nominees. There seems to be a general reluctance to acknowledge this fact, as if in doing so we might risk opening the floodgates to a tidal wave of undesirables who will inundate our shelves; as if by paring the list to a few well-heeled and universally acclaimed names, we can restrain  the growth of this rather checkered genre and keep it in its proper place, so to speak.

Surely the time has come to cease casting aspersions based on a tarnished past? Jean Plaidy, Anya Seton, Georgette Heyer, et al are our grand dames, who deserve respect, if nothing else, for popularizing a genre mired in 19th century convention. While few today would deem their books as serious literary endeavors, they remain compulsively readable. Even more important, these hard-working, prolific novelists helped make the genre accessible to thousands of readers who otherwise might never have picked up, much less read, an historical novel.

The archaic confusion between romance novels with historical settings—where the romantic interaction always assumes precedence over history— and the current vogue in novels featuring real historical figures appears to be a partial culprit in our current elitist stance. No one, it seems, wants to be caught dead being dubbed the descendant of a bodice ripper. Nor do some literary-aspiring novelists want to be caught dead doing the “marquee name” while others, conversely, shun stories about ordinary people living in the past, with nary a guttering beeswax candle or flicker of velvet in sight.

But in truth, these divisions are blurring. While it can be said we’re experiencing an overemphasis on queens, which in turn risks exposing the genre to all the historic criticisms leveled against it, such as lack of veracity, distortion of facts, etc., the genre is also more popular than ever— and that in and of itself is a remarkable feat, a testament to the fact that readers love what we write and there is room for variations on a theme.

I’m all for excellence in our craft; indeed, I strive for it. I just feel there is more of it around us than the rest of the world wants to admit and we must celebrate our diversity, rather than merely exalt our loftiest achievements.

Blog Tour Week 4

This is the final week of my tour for The Confessions of Catherine de Medici. I've had a lot of fun visiting the blogs and meeting readers; for me, the time just flew by. I also want to thank all the bloggers who took the time to review the book and host me during this tour; I owe each of them a huge debt of gratitude!

I'll be visiting the following blogs:
June 21 - Cafe of Dreams
June 21 -Bags, Books and Bon Jovi
June 21 - Teresa's Reading Corner
June 22 - Bookgirl's Nightstand
June 22 - One More Paragraph
June 22 - Celtic Lady Reviews
June 22- Medieval Bookworm
June 23 - A Room Without Books Is So Empty
June 23 - So Many Precious Books, So Little Time
June 24 - Epic Rat
June 24 - Review from Here
June 25 - My Friend Amy
June 25 - The Eclectic Reader
June 25 - Tribute Books Reviews