Launch: Alison Morton’s Exsilium
INTERVIEW BY DAVID CONNON
Alison Morton writes award-winning thrillers featuring tough but compassionate heroines. In her ten-book Roma Nova series, SUCCESSIO, AURELIA, INSURRECTIO and JULIA PRIMA have been selected as Historical Novel Society’s Editors’ Choices. Her latest, EXSILIUM, plunges us back to the late 4th century, to the foundation of Roma Nova. She blends her fascination for Ancient Rome with six years’ military service and a life of reading historical and thriller fiction. On the way, she collected a BA in modern languages and an MA in history. She now lives in France. Alison Morton is leading a panel on ‘taking the Romans public’ along with Kate Quinn and Ruth Downie at the HNS UK 2024 conference at Dartington in September.
What is your “elevator pitch”?
Exile – a living death to a Roman. But what if it were the only way to survive in the chaos of the dusk of the Roman Empire?
What inspired you to start writing? And how does your occupational background affect your writing?
Throughout my working life I’ve worked with words – government papers, PR copy, corporate documentation, economic analyses, military reports, and lastly, translating foreign documents – but not fiction.
Since I walked on my first Roman mosaic in northern Spain at age eleven, I’ve been a confirmed ‘Roman nut’. At school, I opted to study Latin instead of history because the timetable clashed. In the 2000s, I gained a history MA (with distinction!) via the Open University. Other experience included six years in a UK special communications regiment and a lifelong fascination with crime, thriller and historical fiction.
In 2009, my husband and I watched a beautiful but terribly scripted film. I told him that even I could do better than this. He said, “Why don’t you, then?” Once home, I started tapping on my computer keyboard. To my astonishment, I produced 90,000 words in 90 days. It was a rough manuscript, but a story that had been brewing in my head for decades – a woman hero, Romans, hidden heritage and plenty of plots and twists. After much refinement of the manuscript and me learning the skills of a fiction writer, Inceptio, the first book in the Roma Nova series, was published in 2013.
What is the genesis of the idea for the first book in the series – and the series itself?
The series is set in the 21st and 20th centuries in an imaginary central European country, Roma Nova, which developed from a remnant settlement at the dusk of the Roman Empire. They live by Roman values of toughness, law and technology, but with a difference – women lead in many areas with an imperatrix heading the state.
I had no idea I was writing in the alternative history genre. I had read Robert Harris’s Fatherland and was intrigued at the idea of a split timeline. When I saw the HNS 2012 conference had a session on alternative history, I joined the society and came to my first conference!
Eight more books in the series followed, then my readers started pushing me to write the origin story of Roma Nova, set back in the late 4th century. Intending to write one book, Julia Prima, set in AD 370, I ended up also writing Exsilium.
What is the process of writing like for you? For instance, do you see the action and hear your characters’ voices?
I don’t outline my plots because I like to discover the story as I write it. Exsilium was different; I knew where the end point had to be to fit in with the rest of the series. This is the petard you can hoist yourself with if you’re not careful when writing a prequel.
My mind likes images, so I picture the scenes and write them down. Characters are people, so I like to draw on their thoughts and feelings whether they’re facing challenges or enjoying pleasure. And yes, I hear their voices in my head and hurry to write down what they’re saying.
What is the greatest challenge in researching, writing, and editing historical fiction?
Being authentic. We don’t know how people spoke every day and in every situation in the past, especially in periods where resources are scarce and/or random. Accounts from the Roman period are often written by the usual suspects – elite males – and deal with great events and great men, usually in their military and political environment. The joy of discovering customs lists, dinner invitations from one woman to another, and complaints about bar bills from sites such as Vindolanda can hardly be overstated!
Traps include using anachronistic concepts, for example, dozens and minutes in Roman historical fiction. Food, clothes, transport, values and habits are other areas to take into account. Even if it’s for one sentence, the detail which adds to the setting or plot should be as authentic as possible. But the greatest challenge of all is becoming immersed in the mentality of your characters and not shying away from uncomfortable truths even though we are writing for a 21st-century audience.
What ancient sources did you draw upon as a model for the female warrior Lucilla?
In 21st Roma Nova, the legend runs that women had to help defend their new homeland as there weren’t enough men. Ten years ago in Inceptio, I gave Lucius’s wife Julia a mother from the Alamanni tribes who taught her daughter fighting skills to defend herself. Julia passed on this tribal culture to her daughters. Lucilla turned out to be the most adept and grew into a young woman who found an outlet in sports, riding, and fighting skills.
We know from the Villa Romana del Casale mosaics in Sicily that women of the Roman period practised sports to keep fit and healthy. However, ancient sources only mention women warriors as exceptions and often pejoratively, but notable examples include the familiar Boudica (1st century AD), Zenobia (3rd century AD), Artemisia of Caria (5th century BC), and Mavia (4th century AD). The long-standing legend of the Amazons is one not to forget, either.
Historians disagree about why the Western Roman Empire fell in 476 A.D. What is your opinion?
A huge subject! Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire explores ideas of internal decline (civil wars, the disintegration of political, economic, military, and other social institutions) and of attacks from outside the empire. In 1984, German historian Alexander Demandt enumerated 210 different reasons why Rome fell. Newer theories keep the discussion lively.
I’d suggest three major factors:
- The increasing incursion of barbarians as conquerors and/or settlers. This led to a loss of revenue-producing land and tax for the Roman state machine as well as causing insecurity for local populations due to a lack of presence of a Roman army to keep order.
- The adoption of Christianity as the Roman state religion and its aggressive spread throughout the empire, bringing divisive centres of authority (state and church) and destruction of traditional Roman values and culture.
- A series of weak emperors, strongly influenced by counsellors serving themselves, not the state.
Each factor strongly impacted the wellbeing of the Roman state; taken together, they were a disaster.
In January AD 395, Theodosius I, the last tough military emperor to rule both eastern and western provinces, died. His two young and easily led sons assumed power, and the empire split permanently into east and west. Although weaknesses had been developing over the preceding fifty years, everything went on a downhill trajectory from that point.
What have you learned about the human condition through your research and writing?
Values, habits and laws, along with social systems, change over time, but character traits, both positive and negative, seem to persist throughout history. Corruption, conspiracy and power hunger jostle alongside high art, achievement and altruism even today.
What is your next project?
My next project is firmly 21st century. I’m writing a third book in my Mélisende contemporary ‘Doubles’ thriller series as a change from the 4th century. But I think I’ll go back to Roma Nova afterwards.
What is the last great book you read?
I very much enjoyed Amanda Craig’s The Three Graces.
And if you want to read more about Alison Morton’s research on Romans, see her HNS UK 2024 Blogpost.
