“Her written judgements are known for their clarity and elegant turns-of-phrase… ” His words flowered, became more laudatory.

This description of Teoh Yun Ling, a female Chinese-Malay judge, as she retires from her position as Supreme Court judge in Kuala Lumpur is an interesting one, in that it gives an insight into how she is perceived following a successful career. What quickly becomes apparent is the contrast between the clarity and precision that characterises Yun Ling’s everyday interaction, particularly in her working life, and the deeply troubled undercurrent of her emotional life.

Reviewers of The Garden of Evening Mists are agreed on the beauty and poeticism of Tan Twan Eng’s prose, but disagree on whether the novel is a ‘character novel’ or not.  As Yun Ling is the first party narrator throughout the novel, we are inseparably connected with her from the start, so on first glance, it would appear surprising that the novel could be seen as anything other than an intimate portrait of the primary character. In reality, however close we are to Yun Ling from a narrative perspective, our glimpses of her emotional fragility are oblique.

There are many reasons why a reader may not empathise or ‘like’ Yun Ling. One of these is that the language that she uses to describe different elements of her life makes her appear hardened and unemotional (although she is not), and her interactions with other characters often suggest that she is not a person who smiles often. Yun Ling retires from the Bench following a diagnosis of a degenerative neurological disease. When she talks about her work, her disease, or her imprisonment in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, her sentences are short, with nothing extraneous. When describing the loss of a job earlier in her career, she says

“I lost interest in my work. I insulted my superiors. I quarrelled with my superiors. I made disparaging remarks about the government…..Thinking about it brought back a flood of bitterness.”

Not regret, but bitterness, still raw and negatively charged. Her friend Magnus Pretorius says to her,

“’This hatred in you’ he began a moment later, ‘you can’t let it affect your life.’

She replies,

‘It’s not up to me, Magnus’”

If it is not hatred that dominates her thinking, there is a certainly a wish to control and tame experiences and emotions. The garden is the most obvious metaphor of this. She wants to build a Japanese garden in memory of her sister who died in the prisoner of war camp, but nature is something to be tamed as every other element of her life,

“’What is gardening but the controlling and perfecting of nature?’ I am aware my voice is rising.”

Beneath a façade that is often prickly and abrupt, however, it is the language she uses when unobserved that illustrates the destabilising currents that affect her emotional life. She says herself that one of the reasons for writing down her experiences before her memory fades is,

“When I have forgotten everything else, will I finally have the clarity what Aritomo and I have been to each other?”

But the poetry of the book emerges from her uncertainty and lack of control: the reader’s feeling that the garden, her emotions, her recollections of horrific events cannot be tamed, whatever attempts she makes to do so. When she first enters the garden of Evening Mists,

“I felt I was about to enter a place that existed only in the overlapping of air and water, light and time.”

And of her waning life she says,

“I have become a collapsing star, pulling everything around it, even the light, into an ever-expanding void.”

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Jack Hight

RL: Sharon Penman says that the Plantagenets always claim centre stage when they enter her books. Did you find that with Richard Lionheart?

JH: Yes! In the first draft of Holy War, Richard took over the book. It took me several more drafts to get a handle on him and to ensure that it was still John and Saladin’s book, not Richard’s. The Lionheart is more than just an historical figure. He is a legend, and I had great fun creating my own version of that legend. I wanted, first off, to emphasize that even though he was king of England, Richard was culturally and linguistically French. In fact, he seems to have not much liked England. I also wanted to deflate the myth of Richard a bit. He was a great warrior; there can be no doubt about that. But he was also prone to political blunders that made him his own worst enemy. I am hopeful that I succeeded in showing not only what made Richard great, but also his darker side.

RL: The rise of Saladin (covered in your first two books) is not a well-known story in the West. Did you find it a different task now that your story has moved onto one of the major highways of history and fiction?

JH: I think that the time I put into creating Saladin’s character in the first two books made it easier to navigate the great events of the Third Crusade. Holy War is the story I always wanted to write. Initially, it was to be a stand-alone book, but as I began to research it, I decided that I couldn’t really tell the story of the Third Crusade unless I had established where the Kingdom of Jerusalem and, even more so, Saladin were coming from. There is a tendency in the genre to present great historical actors as born great. I believe that great men are made, not born. I wanted to show how Saladin was made, and that was the task of Eagle and Kingdom. Holy War is the payoff, where I was able to take the characters I had created and set them loose in a better-known historical setting. They bring a unique viewpoint with them, and I like to think that’s enough to make my version of the Third Crusade unique.

RL: What are the things you most admire about the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem? Correspondingly, what is admirable in the similarly internecine world of the Saracens?

JH: When I first considered writing about the Crusades, I was going to take a more traditional approach, with a crusader as my hero. The more research I did, however, the more I felt compelled to shift the focus to the Muslim side. The crusaders were really good at killing people and possessed a military ingenuity that allowed them to adapt quickly to conditions in the Middle East, but they are simply not very easy for us to relate to. Many were what we would call today religious extremists. When compared to their Muslim foes, they were coarse and rather uncivilized.

The Muslim culture of the period was recognizably modern in a way that the Christians were not. In medicine, the Muslims were nearly a thousand years ahead of the West. That’s right: a thousand. They had blood pressure medication, modern surgical tools, and an early theory of contagion. They had great poets, historians, and philosophers. And they had a complex economy linking Asia and Europe. The greatest weakness of the Saracens was a lack of political stability. The great cities of Cairo, Aleppo, Damascus, and Mosul were competing power centres that were constantly at war with one another. It was this dissension that allowed the first Crusaders to succeed. It was Saladin’s great achievement to unite these disparate emirates into one powerful force.

To the extent that I find the Kingdom of Jerusalem admirable, it is largely because they adopted many of the customs and attitudes of the East, including food, clothes, and most importantly, a rather pragmatic attitude towards other religions. The kings and barons of the Kingdom regularly made treaties with their Muslim neighbours. They fought when it was to their advantage, but these were not wars against the infidel. Rather, they were strategic battles in which Muslims often featured as allies. The arrival of the occasional crusader party was, in this regard, something of a nuisance. The crusaders were waging holy war. They tended to see the Muslims as infidels to be crushed. They were not interested in allies or peace, and they usually did more harm than good. The Third Crusade was made in no small part by the havoc caused by earlier crusaders.

RL: There are terrific written records of the Third Crusade. What sources (primary, secondary, archaeological) have you found most useful? What things did you feel you HAD to include?

We are indeed lucky we have so many sources on the Crusades. That said, as someone who has spent a good deal of time studying the 19th century, I often find the source base for the Crusades frustratingly/delightfully small. It is wonderful that I can easily read all the major primary sources regarding the Third Crusade, but still, many major events – such as the Battle of Hattin – remain very, very hazy.

What were my guides through this hazy past? A full list would run several pages, so I’ll just give the highlights. In reconstructing events, I drew most heavily on Muslim historians who were contemporaries of Saladin: Baha’ ad-Din, Imad ad-Din, and Ibn al-Athir. On the Christian side, I found William of Tyre’s history and its continuation invaluable, and for the Third Crusade, I also drew heavily on the Itinerarium Regis Ricardi. Of all the modern histories I consulted, my favourites are Steven Runciman’s History of the Crusades, Eberhard Mayer’s The Crusades, and R.C. Smail’s Crusading Warfare. Regarding the life of Saladin, Hamilton Gibb’s Life of Saladin is engaging and concise. Anne-Marie Eddé’s Saladin is a bit long and dry, but it is mandatory reading for anyone with a deep interest in Saladin. And of course, James Reston’s Warriors of God is good fun.

I spent most of my research time reading works on the daily life of Kingdom of Jerusalem and the medieval Middle East. Particularly useful were Adrian Boas, Jerusalem in the Time of the Crusades and Joshua Prawer’s Crusader Institutions and The Crusader’s Kingdom. Of the dozens of more obscure articles and books I read, here’s a little taste: Cristina Dondi’s The Liturgy of the Canons Regular of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem; Leena Löfstedt’s “A propos des formules de salutation au moyen âge”; and D. Behrens-Abouseif’s invaluable Islamic Architecture of Cairo.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Josef Meri’s wonderful Medieval Islamic Civilization, An Encylopedia, which provided a handy and informative guide to a culture that was, at the start, completely foreign to me.

RL: How easy do you find it representing the religious aspects of this story, given your audience which is likely to be multi-faith and secular? Siege is also a book written across this particular religious divide. Why do you think you are drawn to it?

JH: It does seem as if I’m becoming That Guy Who Writes About Christian-Muslim Conflict In The Middle Ages. A planned book set during the siege of Granada in Spain isn’t going to help matters. Religious conflict, however, is not what drew me to the story of Siege. I had been fascinated with the fall of Constantinople since university and thought it would make a great story. In fact, in writing Siege, I did not explore the religious side of the conflict as much as I could have. My characters, even the priests, were resolutely secular in their motivations.

With the Crusades, I could hardly avoid religion. Nor would I have wanted to do so. Islam is not particularly well understood in the West, and the war on terror has not helped matters. I saw the Saladin Trilogy as an opportunity to introduce readers to Islam. I particularly wanted to emphasize how similar medieval Islam was to medieval Christianity. Both encouraged pilgrimage. Both had dietary restrictions: no pork or alcohol for Muslims; for Christians, no meat on Fridays or on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday during the four seasonal fasts. Both religions prescribed praying multiple times a day. Observant Christians prayed each morning and evening, and monks who kept the canonical hours prayed seven times a day. Their prayers were even similar, both involving standing and kneeling while facing a certain direction – East for Christians and towards Mecca for Muslims. Most significantly for my purposes, both embraced the idea of holy war. Indeed, some have argued that the Crusaders are the ones who brought the concept – at least in its modern variant, where the goal is conquest and the killing of infidels rather than conversion – to the Middle East.

RL: Have you visited the sites of your books? Tricky in some of these places right now.

JH: Unfortunately, no. Accordingly, most of my research times was spent reading archaeological studies and historical architecture texts to help me recreate the settings in my stories. Of all the places I have written about, I would most love to visit Damascus and Aleppo. One of the sad consequences of the civil war in Syria is the destruction or damage of many of the countries architectural treasures, like the Umayyad Mosque and souqs of Aleppo.

RL: I gather you’re tackling 1066 next – another fulcrum of history, another bitter and bloody divide – also, possibly, a forerunner of the First Crusade. How is that going?

Wonderfully! I am halfway finished with draft one, and I’m having a great time. I want very much to convey the strangeness to the period. I’ve spent a good deal of time creating a unique and different vocabulary and speech pattern for my English and French characters, or rather, Angelcynn and Norman. There is a tendency in the Anglo-Saxon world to see Harold and his men as English, but they were not, not really. They spoke a language we would not understand, and their England was part of a Scandinavian orbit including Denmark and Norway. As for the Normans, they spoke Old French, but were nevertheless rather unique within France. The Normans were recent descendants of Vikings who were granted Normandy to keep them from raiding down the Seine. It worked, more or less, although William did fight several wars against French kings.

As with the Saladin Trilogy, I’m tackling 1066 from both sides, and I’m starting well in advance of that momentous date. My main characters are Harold and William, but Bastard will feature a much larger cast. This has allowed me to explore the texture of daily life in greater detail. It is great fun. But don’t worry: there’s still plenty of intrigue and fighting!

RL: How did you come to write about the Plague and Fire: I know it’s a Year 2 (6/7 year old) history topic in the UK?

AT: A&C Black contacted my agent and asked if I would be interested. I’d written about the Plague and Fire before in my YA novel Forged in the Fire, so I already had quite a lot of research material. I deliberately did NOT re-read Forged in the Fire as I was afraid of repeating myself!

RL: How do you convey the horror without terrifying your audience?

AT: I suspect that for most children this sort of thing fascinates rather than terrifies them. However, in order to reduce the emotional impact, I decided against having any close family members who die.

RL: What kind of historical fact or artifact most appeals to children? Does this change as they get older?

AT: Children vary, so it’s hard to say. However, dinosaurs and cavemen seem to be universally popular with younger children. When I was young I liked visiting castles and seeing the arrow slit windows and the battlements. I liked knights in armour, swords, bows and arrows, and sailing ships. Of course all these were influenced by what I read. In my teens I was more interested in stories of the lives and loves of queens and princesses.

RL: What engages you most about the story of the Plague?

AT: The thing that most horrifies me (apart from all the deaths) is the thought of being locked up in a plague house – though I had to tone down the horror for this young age group. The thing that most interests me is how people reacted to it and tried to avoid catching it. Most of the methods used – including killing cats and dogs – seem quite rational and sensible given the knowledge they had at the time. And given the scale of the catastrophe, it’s amazing how well the authorities coped with it, and how resilient Londoners were in re-building their lives.

RL: Are there guidelines for what you must or cannot include in a book for this age group?

AT: I wasn’t given any. I was guided by instinct, and obviously worked with an editor. I hope we got it about right.

RL: Are any of your books published outside the UK? What do you think makes a children’s or YA book travel?

AT: Yes, a few. In recent years, the first editions of No Shame, No Fear and Forged in the Fire were published in America, and No Shame, No Fear was also published in a Serbian edition. The Historical House series also sold to America. One of my books, Maroo of the Winter Caves, was ONLY published in America, and has been continuously in print since 1984 – but I’ve never found a British publisher for it. I don’t know what makes a book travel – wish I did!

RL: I loved your Quaker sequence. Do you have anything similar planned? (In time, readership or theme)

AT: I would love to continue writing books of this kind. I have one or two ideas, but haven’t settled on anything yet.

RL: What is your writing day like?

AT: The morning is the best time. If I’m actually writing a book, rather than researching or other activities, I often don’t switch on my computer until after lunch. I write initially by hand, in pencil, then type up a few pages at a time. Then I’ll edit in pencil, and type again when it gets illegible. I’m very slow. In the afternoon, after word-processing and saving, I’ll do emails and check a few blogs. I usually switch off and go out for an hour or so in the afternoon, then do a bit more work in the early evening.

Jean Fullerton

RL: Call the Midwife and you are a natural match. Did the success of the TV show lead directly to your writing Call Nurse Millie, or was this idea already up your sleeve?

JF: It was a bit of both really. I’d read Jennifer Worth’s books when they were first published from a nurse history point of view. I did think they were both a terrific story and a wonderful study of social conditions of the period but it was only when the Head of Fiction at Orion, Susan Lamb, approached me to write Call Nurse Millie that I considered jumping out of the Victorian period into the post-war East London.

RL: To what do you attribute Call the Midwife‘s success?

JF: I think people like the feeling of community that is portrayed in Call the Midwife as well as the nostalgia for a period when the world wasn’t as complicated as it is now. It’s also a chance to relive the stories our grandparents told us when we were children and to perhaps wonder how we would have coped with some of the harsh realities of life then.

RL: Millie is a district nurse, not a midwife – but in what other ways does the world of your novel differ from the world that the TV fans will know?

JF: Well actually, Millie is a district nurse, midwife, school nurse and health visitor. Call Nurse Millie pre-dates Call the Midwife by ten years and the NHS by three. At this time district nurse service were provided by a local District Nurse Association. These were local mutual beneficial societies whose funding came from council contracts, for school nurse services and basic maternity plus public donations. They couldn’t afford to have specialist nurses so pre-NHS nurses had to be jack-of-all-trade. Of course this was perfect for me as a writer as I was able to have Millie treating old and young alike.

RL: How difficult was it switching from Victorian times to the post-war period?

JF: Oddly none at all. I’m still writing about my home territory and the same streets in fact. I’ve even revisited locations. When Millie’s mother moves to Wapping I put her in the same house that Ellen O’Casey occupied in No Cure for Love. Alex Nolan, the hero in Call Nurse Millie, is in fact, the great grandson of Patrick Nolan the hero of A Glimpse at Happiness. I’ve also drawn on my parents’ experiences. For example Alex’s backstory of the 8^th Army in North Africa was in fact my dad’s army service and Millie’s friend Connie’s preparations for her wedding was just what my aunt Martha did before her husband-to-be came home. The research is the same too; reading first-hand accounts of the period except this time it’s the Mass Observation Diaries and Family and Kinship in East London rather than Travels in the East by Dickens or Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor.

RL: Have you spoken with nurses who remember those times? How else have you researched?

JF: I have. By one of those lucky happenchances my husband met a couple researching their family history and discovered that the wife’s mother, Doreen Bates, had been a district nurse in East London during and just after the war. I’ve spent several happy hours with Doreen drinking tea and comparing the district nursing now with the way Doreen used to work.

I’ve amassed a huge collection of nursing, midwifery and medical text books, some of which are not for the faint-hearted, I’ve used them to add authenticity the lotions and potions and procedures. I think I’ve also read every 20^th century nurse biography there is including some unpublished oral accounts held in the Queen’s Institute archives.

RL: You will (of course) know the procedural differences for nurses now than for nurses then. Which of these do you choose to show, and why?

JF: Weaving in period details is very difficult and can tie you in knots. I wanted to show how important radio was in everyday life during the late 40s and spent hours searching for the correct timing for programmes like Workers’ Playtime and ITMA. There is always the temptation just to explain the way the war-time rationing worked – instead of showing through dialogue how pregnant and nursing women had green ration cards.

For the nursing detail I have Millie putting old newspaper under the bed sheet to absorb moisture, soaking her glass thermometer in Dettol, re-corking the bottle of iodine and rubbing surgical spirit on a patient’s sacral area to toughen the skin.  I also have her standing up when the matron walks in to the room and worrying if Alex Nolan, who she’s terribly keen on, will think she’s fast if she lets him kiss her on their third date.

If you want your reader to lose themselves in your story you have to wrap it around them like a warm blanket not lecture them.

RL: Aside from the nursing, what other aspects of post-war London did you find it fun to explore?

JF: I love all the social history of the period such as exploring the post-war rationing and how people put their lives back together after the massive upheaval of the war. And it wasn’t just buildings that were destroyed by five years of bombing it was moral certainties and old allegiances, too. The way in which divorce rocketed in the late forties and the landslide Labour victory in the Khaki Election of 1945 showed people weren’t willing to return to the pre-war order of things.

RL: Our enthusiastic reviewer said the book cries out for a sequel. Will there be more of Nurse Millie?

JF: I’m pleased to say there will and I’ve just sent the final draft of All Change for Nurse Millie in to my publishers. It’s out next February and we meet up with Millie on the 5^th July 1948, the day the NHS came into being. We follow her and her fellow nurses around East London as they grapple with the new health system and their changing lives.

Find more about Jean’s novels at http://www.jeanfullerton.com/

RL: Tell us about your hero, Guy Duplessis. Is he modelled on anyone specific? Will English-language readers respond to his Gallic charms?

NW: Guy is an understated hero, rather on the lines of Christopher Foyle in Foyle’s War. I guess there is a lot of me in him (ask my wife Cathy!) – a car enthusiast, good with his hands, a planner who takes care of detail, a people person. He has strengths that only become apparent when the chips are down.

Born of an English father and a French mother, he bridges two cultures, so English readers can easily identify with him. He is totally bilingual French/English.

RL: How did you convey this world avoiding the tropes of ‘Allo ‘Allo?

NW: I just created and moulded a character as I developed the plot. The book never looks on war with rose-tinted glasses and from page 1, makes it clear that it is a nasty business in which everyone suffers. There is even a short section that explains the changes in attitude in France as the war progresses.

RL: Collaboration and Resistance are being very much revisited and re-assessed by historians. Have you tried to show these grey areas?

NW: Yes. Many French collaborated with the Nazis, overtly or covertly, and quite a few made money from producing war material for the Germans or from a rampant black market. The Germans had the wherewithal to pay for luxury or scarce items. Different political groups like the Communists had differing attitudes to the invaders. Some wanted them gone ASAP and worked in the Resistance, some collaborated and denounced their fellow countrymen as Resistance or Jews. That’s why so many old scores were settled at the end of WWII and why even today, the odd case comes up of accusations of collaboration.

RL: You mention Robert Gildea’s books. What have been then best research tools for you?

NW: Mainly books, but the internet has been invaluable. While researching French rural railways – lignes secondaires – during WWII, I found a website in English and French run by an expatriate Brit railway buff who had lived in France for over 40 years. I have a prodigious memory for facts and store useful titbits from newspapers, TV etc for future use. The Imperial War Museum were first-rate.

RL: Do you have favourite books set in this era? Who would you like your style to be compared to?

Nigel Wild at Waterstones

NW: Operation Zigzag, plus another whose title escapes me and is still in a carton somewhere. This was an autobiography of an SOE agent born in Switzerland of a British father. I quite liked Charlotte Gray, but for me, it lacked a certain something. My style is that of Jeffrey Archer, Dick Francis, Nevile Shute, storytellers all. I am a storyteller.

RL: What would you say is the theme of Nightwalk?

NW: That war is a foul business and that while good usually triumphs over evil, there are no winners.

RL: The SoE seem impossibly brave to us now. Did you find it difficult to make that level of bravery believable?

NW: No, because I found a real empathy with the type of people who could live under cover for months on end, who could still function knowing that the more recruits they found, the more the chances of being blown, that could turn from a nondescript persona deliberately cultivated to a military commander. This was a special kind of bravery.

RL: What are you working on now?

NW: My second novel, Divine Vision, set in Germany in the 1970s.

Thomas Keneally’s Daughters of Mars is the story of two Australian sisters who travel to the Middle East as wartime nurses on a medical ship. The protagonist, Sally, is wracked with guilt over her perceived role in her mother’s euthanasia, but her views are often difficult to dissect from those of the narrator. He achieves this through a number of textual motifs that create an intense, compelling reader experience: framing dialogue; grammatical structures and sudden poetic ‘explosions’.

Dialogue is notably sparse in the novel, and is never surrounded with quotation marks. This blurs the distinction between characters’ speech and the narrator’s opinion,

“Of course, said Mrs Carradine. Naomi seems confident in all things”

Is this Mrs Carradine’s comment? Sally’s (Naomi’s sister, to whom Mrs Carradine is talking) opinion? Or the narrator’s opinion? This ambiguity occurs repeatedly, and serves to create some distance from the characters, but also perhaps shields the reader from their wartime horrors. Furthermore, we are typically treated to only one or two exchanges in a conversation with the narrator summarising or paraphrasing emotions instead,

“The conversation was wearing through its fake-pleasant fabric. Rawness was eating its way out.”

Early in the novel, for example, we are introduced to Matron Mitchie,

“Three matrons sat at the captain’s table, and the third of them – the most junior – drove the pace of talk and caused men to laugh robustly…. The other two matrons – more entitled to capture the conversation – smiled thin-lipped and shook their heads in a tiny, only half-approving way”

Keneally continues,

“When she made men laugh, the laugh was not a concession to quaintness but came gushing up from the area between the sternum and the abdomen.”

We are never treated to her jokes or anecdotes, but we are only advised,

“It was how she told it [the joke] that worked, and their willingness to be amused.”

There are two very apparent exceptions to this fluid and ambiguous dialogue. The first, which is done very sparingly, is where the narrator wishes the reader to witness a conversation very precisely. In these instances, the dialogue is presented in the form of a script for a drama, as with the beginning of this argument between frazzled nurses,

“And then it all developed.

Freud: Tell me what you’re saying

Honora: You choose what to make of it”

The other exception is where we see Sally write to her father in Australia, the first time we hear her voice directly. The language is far more conversational and naïve, more fitting for a young nurse leaving home for the first time than the dialogue paraphrased by the narrator,

“You can’t help thinking, what’s your life like, Mrs Egypt? How does it match up to a farmer’s life in Mcleay?….

Orderlies carry everything for us except our valises. This is pretty flash. They’re like porters but you don’t have to slip them a shilling a bag.”

In many parts of the novel, there is almost a dialogue taking place within the narrative itself. Keneally achieves this through the very frequent use of phrases or clauses that are framed with dashes instead of commas or semicolons:

“Archimedes was estimated by Naomi – on whatever basis – to be sixteen thousand tons.”

The wording caught between the dashes is very often an interjection or an impression of the character, without being at all clear to whose opinion we are being presented.

“…Sally – knowing that she was disqualified from flippancy because of her serious part in the finishing of her mother – failed to apply herself to that business… [making costumes for the crossing the line party]”

Is this Sally’s opinion of herself, or the narrator’s judgement on her?

Although the use of these ‘dashed’ sections is effective, Keneally suddenly switches after long sections written in this way to more poetic, descriptive sections. These extend to paragraphs or pages and the abrupt contrast maximises the effect, as with this mention of crossing the equator,

“Yet now here was the equator – the burning and unconsumed filament that divided the world of southern innocence from the world of northern gravity of intent, and the hemisphere of the owners.”

Similarly, descriptions suddenly shift from the ordinary to the exotic,

“Lemonade on a hotel veranda of the Amangalla Hotel beside a Dutch church was different from McLeay lemonade – redolent of an extra layer of spice and strangeness.”

The characters’ voices in Daughters of Mars are far less important to Keneally than those of the narrator, and our knowledge of the characters is therefore partly shielded, but Keneally’s great quality is his complete control over both character and reader, which is compelling rather than claustrophobic.

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I first encountered Harry Sidebottom two summers ago, at the Kelmarsh Festival of History, where he he had been talking about Rome to an enthralled audience of enthusiasts. He was as charming and erudite then as he is now, and it was with great pleasure that I chatted with him again about his popular Warrior of Rome novels.

MB: One of the first things I noticed when entering your world of the Warrior of Rome sequence of novels is that you break all the rules of popular or contemporary fiction. Your writing isn’t streamlined to eliminate all but the barest description, the description is there, and some of the writing is just beautiful and I loved it. Also, you’re not writing in the currently popular first person, but using a traditional third person omniscient narrator–and it’s working brilliantly. You’re equally not dumbing anything down–you’re employing the Latin terms for various things and functionaries, you’ve got a glossary in the back as well as a cast of historical characters–but no one could ever accuse you of info-dumping or say that these novels are dragged down by too much arcane history. So how are you getting away with all this? What’s the magic?

HS: Interesting questions. First person narrative first. I thought about using this, but decided to go with a third person voice because while the Warrior series is built around the central character of Ballista, I knew that I wanted readers to experience a lot of scenes through other characters’ POV, and I thought too many first person narratives might be confusing.

I think the recent genre rule that all popular fiction has to be very streamlined with very few if any descriptive passages probably is publisher-led. It might just be that some publishers underestimate what the reading public want and how much effort they are prepared to put into reading a book. I don’t like the idea of genre fiction. I think John Banville said something like there is just good writing and bad.

The Historical Afterwords at the end of my novels are very important to me. It is about honesty. They give me a chance to show, at least in part, where I have played with the history. Some readers say they like them. Others – usually hiding behind the anonymity of silly names on the internet (can they all be sock-puppets?) – get very upset by them. ‘Don’t patronize me! Vanity! Pompous academic!’ Presumably they get upset when the DVD they buy has bonus features. But maybe they have a point. How dare I think that as an Oxford Don I might know more about my subject than them?

MB: Ancient Rome is quite mentally distant for many readers: they know little about it beyond Cecil B DeMille toga dramas and Robert Graves’ I, Claudius novels, but you’re spanning the millenia with ease in these novels and talking about what is essentially a very different culture than ours but without moral judgments and presenting the world they knew, but in a form we can digest. Can you talk about that for a moment?

HS: The key fascination in doing classical history is the strange mixture of similarity to us and difference from us in the Greeks and Romans. The late, great Mary Renault said something on the lines of the pleasure of historical fiction being the interplay of what is universal in the human condition and what was specific to a time and place. It seems to me true of any kind of historical writing and reading.

MB: So many authors choose to look at Rome in its imperial glory, writing about the days of Julius Caesar and Augustus (though they seem to skip Nero…), but you’re writing about essentially the beginning of the end, as the vast empire came under pressure both from within and without. Why did you focus on this segment of the history?

HS: I have been into the third century AD for a long time. We think we know what the Roman empire was like before in the second century, and the same for after in the fourth. The two look very different. In between lies the obscurity of the third. A time of lots of political intrigue and military action, and a time of profound changes – most importantly the rise of Christianity – with difficult and challenging sources, what more could you want?

MB: You are writing at an amazing speed, producing a new Warrior of Rome novel approximately every six months, which is one heck of a writing schedule. How much are you writing every day in order to meet your deadlines? How much research are you needing to do for each novel? And in all that, how are you still finding time to lecture at Oxford, eat, sleep and that sort of thing? Do you have a clone or are you actually just Superman of the Writing World?

HS: Every six months! That would be great. Actually it is the US publishing schedule that gives that impression. It takes me a year to do a novel: six months research, six months writing. I don’t write quickly, 1500 words is a good day. I do work very hard – six days a week, 9am-6.30pm, more when finishing a book. I am very driven. Which is odd. When I was younger I was very feckless.

MB: How closely do you stick to the facts when writing? And how do you weave your fictional characters through this period of immense turmoil and upheaval? Or is it a case of the history gives you the plot and you’re just putting your eye-witness there?

HS: The surface story of Ballista and his familia is completely invented (except for in the third novel, Lion of the Sun). I try to keep the historical underpinning as accurate as I can in every way. It is not enough to get the externals right – the clothes, food, whatever – you have got to attempt the imaginative leap into an alien thought world. Name anything important – sex, death, love, freedom, whatever – and the Romans’ views were very different from ours. It is where bad historical novels fail.

MB: What are the secrets of writing a successful series of novels with one protagonist running throughout? How do you keep it fresh? How do you continue to develop the characters over that many installments?

HS: One way is to develop the characters slowly, only reveal a bit at a time. In Fire in the East Julia is just someone Ballista thinks about. She appears in King of Kings, but does not get a POV until the third novel Lion of the Sun. Also let them grow and change in ways you were not expecting.

Calgacus started off in my imagination as a walk on comedy Scot – if you have ever seen the classic Brit comedy Dad’s Army, think Private Fraser; ‘We are all doomed, doomed I tell you!’ – but while writing he morphed first into Preserved Killick from Patrick O`Brian, and then into Ballista`s moral compass.

Having done six warrior novels in six years, to keep it fresh I am next going to write a different trilogy altogether. Throne of the Caesars is set in AD235-8. I am writing the first one now. Iron and Rust should be out summer 2014. Fans of Warrior can be reassured the new series has something of the prequel about it.

MB: What’s next for Ballista? Is there ever going to be a happy ending for him? [Tell me this isn't going to end like that downer, Gladiator, because that was just the laziest ending ever filmed.]

HS: There may be, but not for some time. Warrior 7-9 are all plotted out. A lot of bad things are going to happen in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy.

Thank you for the questions.

MB: And thank you for giving so many thoughtful responses. Because you’ve certainly given me a great deal to mull over. So thank you for that…And I’ll look forward to the new Warriors with every kind of anticipation.

“Barker has never been a thrilling stylist, and can often sound ordinary: “thoughts floated to the surface of her mind and burst like bubbles”; “the ache of his absence was like nothing she’d ever experienced before”. But you don’t go to her for fine language, you go to her for plain truths, a driving storyline and a clear eye, steadily facing the history of our world.”

This comment on Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room appeared in The Guardian in August 2012 and while it is true that Barker does not serve up rich language, the unflinching plainness of her writing is at the heart of the novel’s central theme and concern.

In Toby’s Room, three artists – Elinor Brooke, Paul Tennant and Kit Neville – struggle to find visual expression for the devastation of the times in which they live: a clear parallel to Barker’s own serial endeavours to convey in literature the realities of World War One.

Kit Neville, horribly injured and always outspoken, asks Paul Tarrant how he plans to paint about the War:

“It’s all fairly straightforward. No bodies. You can show the wounded, but only if they’re receiving treatment. I think in practice that means bandages.”

“So no wounds, either?”

Paul shrugged. “I don’t know. It hardly applies to me.”

“Well, I intend to push it as far as I can.”

“Why, what’s the point? If you push it too far they won’t let you show it. Besides, you can get round it…”

“You can. Your landscapes are bodies.”

“Yes, I know. Don’t worry, it’s intended. I know what I’m doing. It’s the Fisher King. The wound in his thigh?”

“Balls.”

Paul looked surprised. Even by Neville’s standards that was forceful.

“That’s where the wound is. Idiot. He was castrated.”

“Oh, all right, then, balls. The point is, the wound and the wasteland are the same thing. They aren’t metaphors for each other, it’s closer than that.”

Neville is an advocate for honesty and truth. His own sentences are short and to the point. And in turn, Barker is as blunt and plain as her character would wish her to be. Paul, a more reserved character, may not voice his thoughts as Neville would, but when he sees first Kit’s injuries, the description is stark.

“Paul had seen head wounds that left the brain exposed, missing jaws, eyes dangling on to cheeks – the lot. And yet, when Neville finally turned to face him, his heart thumped. Neville joked about the Elephant Man, but he didn’t look anything like an elephant. He looked like a man with a penis where his face should be: obscene, grotesque, ridiculous.”

Like the wounded in Paul’s paintings, Kit must be bandaged. When he is able to leave hospital he must wear a mask, ironically, with the face of Rupert Brooke.

But it is Elinor’s experiences, visiting Neville in hospital to try and find out the details of her brother Toby’s death, that speak most directly to the challenges of expressing the realities of war in art. Her old tutor is drawing facial injuries to assist surgeons with their attempts at reconstruction and she agrees to work with him. Of the man she is drawing, Elinor notes:

“As he spoke, you could see his tongue through a hole in his cheek, muscular and hideously long, threshing up and down as he struggled to form the words.

Tonks started to draw. Elinor forced herself to keep looking from the face to the drawing and back again, but she found meeting the man’s left eye difficult, not because it was damaged but because it was intact and full of fear. This was a complete waste of time: she already knew she couldn’t do it. Confronted by this mess of torn muscle and splintered bone, nothing she’d learned about anatomy, whether at Slade or in the Dissecting Room, was the slightest use. “Drawing,” as Professor Tonks never tired of telling his students, “is and explication of the form.” Well, you can’t explicate what you don’t understand.”

Barker, like the artists in her novel, is a skilled and talented writer with an arsenal of literary flourishes and linguistic furbelows in her toolbox. But just as oil paints will not serve Tonks and Elinor, rich language would not serve in Toby’s Room. Barker is seeking the truth, trying to explicate World War One, and she choses to do so unflinchingly and bravely. Tonks describes drawing as “the least forgiving medium an artist could work in, calculated to expose every flaw in draughtsmanship” and by choosing to keep her language simple, Barker might open herself up to criticism.

But she also brings us as close to the realities of war as any writer ever as. In Elinor’s words, she gives us, “the truth, I think, or as close as I can get it.”

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This year’s shortlist is interestingly different from last year’s. There are three female authors, three male. Three of the books are sequels, or continuations (Bring Up the Bodies, Merivel and Toby’s Room). The authors as a group are more garlanded than last time: between them they must hold every literary accolade, including four Booker Prizes. Several of their books have been made into films – most successfully Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, filmed by Stephen Spielberg as Schindler’s List.

The varied settings of these novels give their authors different opportunities with language. Thomas Cromwell’s witty precision in Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies; Sir Robert’s poetic grit in Rose Tremain’s Merivel; the raw, personal informality of Thomas Keneally’s The Daughters of Mars; the poise of Anthony Quinn’s The Streets; the lyrical grace of Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists; the unflinching candour of Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room.

The Historical Novel Society will be looking at each of the novels in turn, assessing these approaches – so please mark these dates in your diaries. Following on from this series the authors will describe in their own words the choices they make.

Monday May 20th: Kate Braithwaite on Toby’s Room by Pat Barker

Wednesday May 22nd: Helen Boyd on Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally

Friday May 24th: Helen Boyd on The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

Monday May 27th: Helen Boyd on The Streets by Anthony Quinn

Wednesday May 29th: Kate Braithwaite on Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Friday May 31st: Helen Boyd on Merivel by Rose Tremain

Friday June 14th: Prize winner announced at the Borders Book Festival.

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AF: Congrats on the release of your third novel, Call Me Zelda. Like Hemingway’s Girl, Call Me Zelda is getting rave reviews from critics and readers alike. Now that it’s out, how do you feel?

ER: Thank you! This book release has been more emotional for me than the others, so it’s a relief to have it in the world. I think that the combination of how intensely personal this novel felt, writing in the first person point of view for the first time, and the amount of Fitzgerald interest in film and in fiction made me anxious. Now that Call Me Zelda is in the world, I can let her go and hope my version of the events finds the right readers.

AF: Your last two novels, and your work in progress, are biographical in nature. What about biographical fiction most appeals to you as a writer?

ER: I’m fascinated by the lives of writers, particularly those from the Lost Generation, but I’m no biographer. The biographies of Zelda, in particular, are so well done that rather than approach the subject that way, I wanted to do so through a fictional character’s eyes. This appeals to me because it gives the reader a reliable narrator to tell the story of those who might or might not be reliable. I wanted to explore the psychology of the time in the Fitzgeralds’ lives, after the elegance and excitement of the twenties.

AF: Your novels tell stories of famed historical figures through figures from decidedly different social and economic classes (in Hemingway’s Girl, a maid, and in Call Me Zelda, a nurse). Why?

ER: The social hierarchy of culture appeals to me, particularly when those of stature interact with every day people. I think it provides a ripe environment for revealing character, and also allows the reader to connect emotionally with a trustworthy person. Biographies are peopled by shadowy every day figures — maids, nurses, secretaries, seamstresses—people with intimate knowledge of their employers but who rarely get recognized. It is these people on the edge of the photograph that interest me every bit as much as those the camera meant to capture.

AF: You’ve focused on novelists for your two most recent novels; is that a coincidence? As a novelist yourself, are you inspired by the writings of these authors?

ER: It’s no coincidence, and I’m beginning to notice a troubling pattern in the emotional lives of creative types the more I study. I hope I’m immune! In all seriousness, I have to love the work of my subject to write about him or her. I am obsessed by the idea of art as a means to connect people through time and space. When I look at a painting, I share a moment with the artist and subject, whether they are dead or alive. When I read a work of fiction, I share mental space with the writer to get a glimpse of his or her world view to expand my own. I find this endlessly fascinating, and I’ll continue to write about it.

AF: Call Me Zelda begins in 1932, when Zelda Fitzgerald is 32 years old and has been married for 12 years. Some of her wildest years have passed. Did you always intend this novel to begin so late in Zelda Fitzgerald’s life, and if so, why?

Erika Robuck

ER: I chose this time and place for three main reasons. First, I live just outside of Baltimore, where most of the story is set, so I’m connected to the area. It is important to my process to be able to walk the streets of my subjects and visit their haunts to animate the setting. Second, I have known many nurses, and their loyalty to their patients beyond the call of duty inspires me. Finally, I’m sympathetic to those who suffer mental illness, and wanted to explore the psychology of life lived after… I want to disprove Scott Fitzgerald’s notion that “there are no second acts in American lives.”

AF: Why did you choose to write in first person for this novel?

ER: Because the novel is about the intimate relationship of a nurse and patient, I needed to get as close to the subject matter as possible. First person point of view was the only way for me to do so.

AF: As you were writing Call Me Zelda, was there a particular scene or character that surprised you?

ER: There is a scene in Bermuda when the Fitzgeralds take an ill-fated trip in search of rest and relaxation, and to reconnect in their marriage. I was surprised that a scene there became pivotal to my fictional nurse’s understanding of Zelda’s state of mind when my nurse nearly drowns. I didn’t realize how like drowning mental illness was until I wrote the scene.

AF: Your next novel will focus on Edna St. Vincent Millay. Why her?

ER: Two of Fitzgerald’s Princeton friends brought me to Millay. Edmund Wilson and John Bishop were obsessed with her, and I wanted to know why, especially since I had always admired her poetry. What I found was quite shocking…

AF: How much time do you take between writing novels? Do you have other writing projects or creative endeavors you’re working on?

ER: Now that I’m on deadline, I write and edit continuously. My publisher would like a book a year if possible so I am always researching one novel, writing another, and promoting what has most recently been released. It is wonderfully exhausting.

I do have another project in the works: a short story set in Grand Central Terminal in 1945, after the war has ended, for an anthology with nine other historical fiction writers. That collection will come out in 2014.

AF: Read any good books recently?

ER: Always. My most recent favorites: The Secret Lives of People in Love: Stories, by Simon Van Booy, Jillian Cantor’s forthcoming novel fictionalizing what might have happened if Anne Frank’s sister had survived, called Margot, and Superzelda, a graphic biographical novel about Scott and Zelda, by Tiziana Lo Porto and Daniele Marotta.