Spanish Brothel to Deserted British Town: Sparrow by James Hynes
BY LISA REDMOND
James Hynes’ latest novel, Sparrow (Abrams, 2023), opens a window onto the last years of the Roman Empire. The narrator is Jacob, a former slave who tells the story of his life with insight and candour. He grew up living in a brothel in Spain and eventually finds himself the only resident of a town in Britain at a time of chaos and uncertainty.
Sparrow emerged in an unlikely way. Many years ago, the author began to work on a story set in the period – only it wasn’t Sparrow.
“The very first novel I ever tried to write, in my early 20s, was a historical novel about Roman Britain… in 2010, I decided to revive a version of [it],” Hynes explains. “I started writing about a family of Irish Christian heretics …who flee to Britain in the mid-fifth century CE and find themselves in an abandoned Roman town. Here they discover, living alone in the town, an elderly man …who later turns out to be an old slave.
“I had drafted about 140 pages of that book when I decided I needed to know the old man’s backstory, so I started to write one, intending it to be only 20 or 30 pages. One hundred pages later, I realized that the story of Jacob’s life as a slave was much richer, more interesting, and more unusual than my original idea, and that 100 pages became the start of Sparrow.
“In the course of researching slavery in the ancient world, I learned that there are no surviving first-person accounts from the point of view of an enslaved person, as there are for American slavery (Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Solomon Northup, etc.), and I decided to write one. So…the character came first, and I discovered his story as I gradually broadened the horizons of his world.”
Hynes gives us some insight into his research and the reasons behind it. “I did a great deal of reading for Sparrow, and I list the more important books in my author’s note at the back of the book. Not only did I want to write from the point of view of a slave, I also wanted to write about ordinary life on the Roman street, which is often ignored in historical fiction. Many of the best known novels set during the Roman empire are about famous figures such as Caesar or Cicero or Hadrian, or about famous events such as the fall of the Republic, the Spartacus revolt, or the destruction of Pompeii. I wanted to see if I could write a compelling narrative about ordinary Romans trying to survive and endure, with no senators, emperors, gladiators, or erupting volcanoes. As a result, much of my research was in Roman social history and material culture, and because the book is set in a brothel, I also did a lot of reading in the history of sexuality and gender in the Roman world, as well as reading about the psychology of trauma.
“Over the years, I’ve been to many Roman sites in Britain, including Hadrian’s Wall and the town of Calleva Atrebatum in Hampshire, which is the model for the town where Jacob is living at the end of his life. For Sparrow specifically, I spent several days in the book’s location, the Roman port city of Carthago Nova, which is now the modern city of Cartagena on the Mediterranean coast of Spain.”
author James Hynes
Although the author’s research has been meticulous, he admits he is a little less organized in his writing methods. “There’s nothing meticulous about the way I write novels,” he says. “I have a rough idea from the start how the story will end, but I never do outlines. I just blunder ahead, scene by scene, and hope for the best. Apart from my first book, The Wild Colonial Boy, I don’t do complete drafts of novels. Instead, I do draft after draft of each section as I go, until I get it more or less where I want it, then I move on to the next section and do the same thing, so that by time I get to the end of what is essentially my first draft, I’m done. This means that the earlier sections of the novel, as I’m figuring out what I’m doing, are written over and over again—I probably took two years on the first 150 pages of Sparrow—but the further I get into the story, the faster it goes. The earliest parts of the book were rewritten dozens of times, while the final scenes, where the plot is rolling downhill, so to speak, are essentially first drafts.”
Hynes – who teaches creative writing – has some sage advice for writers of historical fiction. “My chief bit of advice is to do the writing and research simultaneously. In other words, I found it helpful to start writing even before I knew what I was talking about. I didn’t know what I needed to research until I started creating scenes, and the research would give me ideas for scenes, situations, and characters that I would never have come up with on my own. It’s a very messy and inefficient process, with a lot of backtracking, and lots of material ending up on the cutting-room floor, but it was also tremendously productive, because the research and the writing amplified each other in an incredibly rich and complicated feedback loop.”
Readers who enjoy Jacob’s story will be happy to hear that Hynes is working on a sequel. “Sparrow is meant to be the first of four novels which will tell the whole story of Jacob’s life. As he moves through the late Roman Empire, each book will be set in a different location, with a new milieu and a new cast of characters. I’m already well into the second book, which picks up the story only a couple of days after the end of Sparrow. It’s the most ambitious project of my career, and I’m writing these answers on my 68th birthday, so the clock is ticking, to put it mildly. For better or worse, I will be working on these books for the rest of my career, if not my life. I’m looking forward to Jacob and I laying down our pens together.”
About the contributor: Lisa Redmond blogs at The Madwoman in the Attic about women writers and historical fiction. She is currently working on a novel based on the 17th-century Scottish witch trials.
