The Season of Economy

No doubt many of you will be wanting to buy copies of The Dog of the North for friends and family; and Amazon.co.uk has taken unscrupulous advantage of this by increasing the price of the paperback from £5.99 to £7.19.  As a service to prospective readers, therefore, I have researched those online retailers who now undercut Amazon.  In the UK the book can be acquired most cheaply at the always competitive Book Depository for £5.98 with free postage.  I suspect that German retailer Hitmeister, charging £26.73 plus postage, will probably not be selling out.  German readers will also find the UK Book Depository site the cheapest, retailing at EUR7.15.  For US readers, postage is again free from Book Depository, with the book selling for $9.43.  (Amazon.com, by contrast, charges $11.66 plus postage).

For those of you with Kindles, this edition is usually the cheapest.  Now you can all get back to your Christmas shopping!

The Dog of the North - now on the Kindle

Tempted by the idea of reading some fantasy fiction but too lazy to prop up a 474-page book?  Or no more room on your groaning bookshelves?  Perhaps you baulk at paying £5.99 for a reading experience but regard £5.69 as entirely reasonable?

If so, the new Kindle edition of The Dog of the North  is just the thing for you.  I've had my Kindle for a couple of months and I'm very taken with it.  My only gripe has been the relatively limited range of books available, a concern I now feel has been entirely addressed by this latest development...

Why Should I Read...?

The King of the World

David Remnick,1998

When people under 40 think of Muhammad Ali, the image that comes to mind is probably the national--or world--treasure, bearing his illness with dignity and commanding universal respect and affection.  Those slightly older may remember his epic boxing matches with Joe Frazier and George Foreman in the 1970s.

Remnick's biography goes back still further, concentrating on his early career, particularly his first world title fight against the seemingly invincible Sonny Liston in 1963.  Sometimes I'm asked whether sports books are important enough, or serious enough, to deserve critical attention.  The King of the World is one example of why they are.  

I'm not really a boxing fan--there's something highly disturbing about watching two invariably black men inflicting brain damage on each other for the entertainment of a predominantly white audience--but this is a compelling book, because it's about much more than boxing.  In the early 1960s, Ali--or Cassius Clay, as he was then--was a hugely reviled figure.  Conservatives despised him for getting above his station (with his ready wit and showman's personality, he just did not know his place), while liberals felt his association with Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam undermined the civil rights movement.  (Ali's commitment to black separatism caused great ill-feeling with the more integrationist Floyd Patterson, culminating in a merciless beating for Patterson in a 1965 world title fight.  Patterson consistently referred to Ali as Clay long after his conversion to Islam). 

If all this were not enough to seal Ali's unpopularity, he then had the temerity to refuse to be drafted to Vietnam, a move which seems more courageous and principled now than it must have looked at the time.  "I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietkong", he memorably said.

Remnick's book, in focusing on the point at which Muhammad Ali invented himself, illuminates not only a fascinating character--more deserving of our admiration than our pity, despite the illness that overtook him as he fought on too long--but a pivotal period in US history.  The final word should go to Ali himself:

I’ll tell you how I’d like to be remembered: as a black man who won the heavyweight title and who was humorous and treated everyone right.  As a man who never looked down on those who looked up to him and who helped as many of his people as he could—financial and also in their fight for freedom, justice and equality.  As a man who wouldn’t embarrass them.  As man who tried to unite his people through the faith of Islam.  And if all that’s too much , then I guess I’d settle for being remembered only as a great boxing champion who became a preacher and a champion of his people.  And I wouldn’t even mind if folks forgot how pretty I was.

Kindle Debut

First it was self-published.  Then it came out in German.  Now Dragonchaser is available on the Kindle.  At £1.71 (the US version retails for $2.71), what do you have to lose?

This is my first foray into the ebook market and it will be interesting to see how it goes.

Trapped in the Present

The decline of history teaching in our schools

There was a fascinating article by Simon Schama in the Guardian about the teaching--or lack thereof--of history in English schools. 

My own anecdotal evidence suggests that right across the secondary school system our children are being short-changed of the patrimony of their story, which is to say the lineaments of the whole story, for there can be no true history that refuses to span the arc, no coherence without chronology. A pedagogy that denies that completeness to children fatally misunderstands the psychology of their receptiveness, patronises their capacity for wanting the epic of long time; the hunger for plenitude. Everything we know about their reading habits – from Harry Potter to The Amber Spyglass and Lord of the Rings suggests exactly the opposite. But they are fiction, you howl? Well, make history – so often more astounding than fiction – just as gripping; reinvent the art and science of storytelling in the classroom and you will hook your students just as tightly.

 I enjoyed history at school in the early 1980s, to the extent of nearly reading it at university, but even then I came away with the sense that I didn't understand the chronology.  I left school having studied history to A level, very well informed about 19th century British and European history and not a whole lot else - a smattering of the Romans and Tudors, perhaps.  It wasn't until I left university that I decided to read myself into history, starting with the ancient Greeks and finishing with the Napoleonic wars.  Twenty years later that project is still not complete to my satisfaction (the more I learn, the more avenues for further exploration open up), but I do have a sense of the continuity of the historical record--even if not gathered at school.

These days, I understand, things are even worse.  Most children study the Tudors and the Nazis, and very little else.  One need not be a knee-jerk little Englander to find this profoundly depressing--future generations growing up with no concept of our past, which gives context to their tomorrows.

It also has interesting implications for genre writers.  Authors of historical fiction in the past might have been able to assume some background knowledge in their readers (Shakespeare probably didn't have to tell his audience who Henry V was), but today that's no longer true.  Everything has to be built from the ground up.  Yet the role of the historical novelist is more important than ever, for if schools are no longer allowed to teach history, writers become the teachers as well as the entertainers.  But children leave school without realising just how thrilling history can be, is there even a long-term market for historical fiction?

Even for fantasy writers, the subject is relevant.  My Mondia novels, in particular The Dog of the North, draw heavily on Renaissance Italy.  Yet for the reader unschooled in history, that connection is never made.  As readers become less and less acquainted with our past, there becomes increasingly little distinction between historically-flavoured fantasy and the freer-wheeling interpretations like Jack Vance's Cugel books.  Does it matter?  After all, any fantasy novel must stand on its own merits, not its inspirations?  Maybe not, but as writers we need to understand our audience--and it's an audience that, year by year, becomes less well versed in its own history, or as Schama puts it:

The generations who will either pass on the memory of our disputatious liberty or be not much bovvered about the doings of obscure ancestors, and go back to Facebook for an hour or four. Unless they can be won to history, their imagination will be held hostage in the cage of eternal Now: the flickering instant that's gone as soon as it has arrived. They will thus remain, as Cicero warned, permanent children, for ever innocent of whence they have come and correspondingly unconcerned or, worse, fatalistic about where they might end up.

Recent Reading

Things have been quiet on the blog lately, not for artistic reasons but because real life is intruding more than the ideal.  (Without burdening the casual reader with excessive detail, it is not the best time to be working in the UK public sector at the moment).

I have also been immersed in Adrian Goldsworthy's monumental biography Caesar, essential reading for anyone interested in the late Roman Republic.  Goldsworthy reviews the sources for the period to synthesise a fascinating account of Caesar's military and political career.  With a supporting cast as vivid as Pompey, Cicero, Crassus and Cato, it's hard to make this dull, and Goldsworthy seizes his opportunity.  I'd have regarded myself as a relatively well-informed general reader on the period, but I learned a huge amount from the book.

I found the political machinations more interesting than Caesar's military campaigns.  The difficulty in writing about the latter is that the only real source is Caesar's own Commentaries, which are simply propaganda written for the Roman Senate.  The various Gaulish tribes are never fully realised, being only legion-fodder for Caesar's conquests.

Caesar is a balanced assessment of Rome's most famous figure, and illuminates by showing him firmly in the context of his times and society.  I highly recommend the book, but make sure you have some time on your hands!

On the Big Screen

The Town

dir. Ben Affleck (2010)

Yesterday I caught the latest Affleck vehicle (he stars as well as directing and co-writing, so if you don't like the film you know who to write to).  In many ways it's wholly formulaic - a heist movie in which Affleck is a bank robber trying to go straight after one last job, which he takes on against his better judgement.  He falls in love with the manager of one the banks he's robbed (played with luminous appeal by Rebecca Hall) and of course this proves to be redemptive*.  The robbery does not, of course, go according to plan, and Affleck is forced to scramble for his life.  The ending, if not exactly happy, is appropriate and gives overtones of a brighter future.

You've seen this a hundred times before and yet--somehow--The Town is a scorching film.  Affleck manages at once to be level-headed, capable and yet vulnerable.  The blue collar Boston environment is vivid and believable.  This being Affleck's film, the audience's sympathy is with him, but unusually for the "villain as hero" genre, the police chasing him are not portrayed as bungling or corrupt: they're professionals with a job to do, and Jon Hamm as the FBI man always has our respect even as we want him to fail.  The action sequences are directed with brio, and the central relationship between Affleck and Hall, while not exactly convincing, is always compelling.

"Formulaic" is often thrown up as a criticism of films--and indeed books.  But what some see as a formula might more accurately be described as blending together elements which have been proven to work in the past.  What matters is the skill and vigour with which the ingredients are combined.  The Town might be formulaic--but so is Pride and Prejudice, so is The Big Sleep, so are Patrick O'Brian and Richard Stark.  If you don't like your dinner, blame the chef, not the ingredients.

I expected popcorn entertainment from The Town.  I found something rather better.  Highly recommended!

* I am no relationship expert, but this is not a dating strategy I would recommend

Why Should I Read...?


Bomber
Len Deighton, 1970

In my teens I read a lot about the Second World War, a phase I'm sure most bookish boys go through.  Until re-reading it this week, I haven't read Bomber for at least 25 years, but it always remained in my mind as a remarkable book, even once I had long forgotten the details. Reading it again now I can see why I remembered, and why judges as good as Kingsley Amis and Anthony Burgess rated it among the great novels of the 2oth century.

Bomber  is set in one single day ("31 June" 1943) and tells the story, in clinical "docudrama" style, of a bombing raid against a German industrial city.  The novel uses multiple viewpoints and perspectives, both from the British and German sides.  The raid is a disaster on every level: the light Mosquito bomber, in a precisely choreographed scene, drops its marker bombs by accident on a sleepy market town, with the result that the 700 heavy bombers following carpet-bomb the town instead of the target.  Most of the inhabitants we see are killed, as are many of the German fighter pilots and the British bomber crews.  Deighton doesn't take sides; instead, with chilling detachment he chronicles the varying fates of the characters, who die heroically, farcically, gruesomely (one plane is downed by a bird strike, another from friendly fire).  Of those who survive, one German pilot is arrested on landing and subsequently executed for protesting against concentration camps; the star British pilot is taken off flying duties for refusing to play in a regimental cricket match.  For all the crisp precision of the prose, this is an angry book, showing up the horror of mechanised warfare.

Technically the book is also a tremendous achievement.  Deighton makes us care about the characters despite the pared-back prose (and also allows us to differentiate a large cast in our mind), and to admire the bravery of both the bombed and the bombers.  I suspect that 40 years ago the book was even more revolutionary, both stylistically and in the way in which all the characters are portrayed as victims.  (I suspect that Alastair McLean's action stories like The Guns of Navarone or Where Eagles Dare are more typical of the period).

Bomber is not an easy read, but it is a bleak masterpiece.   

How has it influenced me?

Bomber was probably one of the first novels I read that dispensed with any pretence of happy endings.  The novel is a gruelling read but the reader recognises the rightness of the downbeat conclusions.  If the bomber crews had all come back safe, if the German pilots had all survived to collect their Knight's Cross, we might have been pleased for men we had come to care about, but it would have been the wrong ending for the novel.  It also shows that the writer can create sympathy for the characters without purple prose.  Deighton's ability to create memorable characters in a couple of paragraphs--one or two telling details can do it--is also something we can all learn from.

On World-building - Less is More

Tim Stretton may be one of the best fantasy world builders ever.  It's all done through the story, not lengthy explication.

So says fellow writer CN Nevets.  Is he right?  Probably not, in truth, although I appreciate the sentiment, and it does give me the chance to outline my theories on the business of world-building, probably at tedious length.

What do we mean by world-building?  According to Wikipedia, 

Worldbuilding is the process of constructing an imaginary world, sometimes associated with a fictional universe. The result may sometimes be called a constructed world, conworld or sub-creation. The term world-building was popularized at science fiction writer's workshops during the 1970s. It describes a key role in the task of a fantasy writer: that of developing an imaginary setting that is coherent and possesses a history, geography, ecology, and so forth. The process usually involves the creation of maps, listing the back-story of the world and the people of the world, amongst other features.

Swallow that undigested and you've already fallen into a hole so deep you can't climb back out.  You may, as a writer, want to flesh out your world to give it a "history, geography, ecology, and so forth" (the "so forth" gives me the shivers); you can't, though, expect your readers to have the same level of interest.  The more of this kind of work you do, the harder it is to resist bringing it into the story--almost always to the detriment of the text.  Few readers will be engaged by a travelogue--reader engagement is created by character and plot.

Many readers have praised the world-building of the Mondia series (no, really, they have), but if I reference back to the Wikipedia definition, I could tell you nothing about its ecology; less about its history than the reader might imagine; and the geography arises entirely from the maps I created before I started.  I need to know more than the reader in all of these areas, but to be convincing and engaging I need to emphasise elements other than world-building.

It's important to realise why we are world-building.  If you are writing a novel, the setting is not an end in itself; it's one component of a multi-faceted work of art.  Here, as in so much else, Tolkien clones often miss the point: The Lord of the Rings does not succeed because of the author's obsessive documenting of Middle Earth, but because of the epic scope of the narrative.

However much world-building you do as preparatory work, you only need to show the reader enough to give the story texture and credibility.

Glount had been the seat of the Dukes of Lynnoc for a thousand years.  One of the oldest cities of Mondia, squeezed between the Penitent Hills and the sea, it had long been a centre of commerce.  If Croad was a poor cousin to Emmen, Glount was an older uncle, steeped in every vice and abomination concealed under a veneer of urbanity.  The Dukes of Lynnoc embodied the essence of their city, and could trace their lineage back to its foundation with only a minimum of creative genealogy.  A powerful independent city for six centuries until its fall to the first King Jehan, it had taken its absorption into the Emmenrule with scarcely a blink.  Things went on as they had always done, and while the King away in Emmen might wield a nominal authority, to the folk and rulers of Glount, matters went on as they had always done.

--The Dog of the North

In the passage above, I am trying as economically as possible to give the reader a flavour of one of the story's minor locations.  I resist the temptation, therefore, to list the lineage of the Dukes of Lynnoc for the thousand years in question (and indeed, never felt the need to compile one in my preparations).  In mentioning "the first King Jehan", my aim is to create a texture of history (there must be at least two Jehans) without overcooking it.

The paragraph above is simple exposition, and this is important too.  It's all too easy to convey information to readers solely through dialogue, which is frequently takes place for no identifiable dramatic reason.  If you want the reader to know something, the best way is often just to tell them in simple declarative prose.

I also try to make my exposition short.  "Little and often" is the best policy here.  In The Dog of the North, the idea of separate Winter and Summer Kings is critical to one of the plot strands, but the reader would be poorly served if I set out all the details up front.  Piece by piece, the reader learns (much of it alongside Lady Isola and Lady Cosetta, who as outsiders are well-placed to be fed the information I need the reader to have).

Lady Cosetta let out a gasp.  “I had heard Mettingloom was remarkable,” she said.  “But I never imagined this.”

“‘The City in the Sea’,” said Beauceron.  Allow me to point out the main features.  You see the little cluster of islets ahead, through the neck of the bay?  That is where the customs men, or Pellagiers, conduct themselves.  Then, rising from the sea itself, you see the ‘Metropoli’:  a cluster of closely-packed islets.  They are linked by bridges, and instead of roads, there are waterways – the famous ‘aquavias’. That is where we find the King’s palace, the Occonero.  Over to the left you see Hiverno, the Winter King’s residence.  The Summer King’s retreat Printempi is behind the Occonero and not visible.”

That is the first we hear of the Winter and Summer Kings.  For now, it's enough: it's time to get on with the story again.  The reader will not understand everything at once.  That's not a bad thing, because it helps foster the curiosity which will draw them into the story.  A few pages on, I'll feed them a bit more.

Those are my general principles for world-building.  I can summarise them in two precepts.  First, respect your reader, who has come to you for a compelling story, not a display of your cleverness; and trust your reader, who doesn't need to be told everything on page one to remain interested in your story.

I'm interested in other writers' views too.  How do you go about it? (And, since all writer must establish their credible fictional worlds, I'm addressing a wider audience than the fantasy community here).

Back on the scene

I've been away in Turkey for a late summer holiday--hot and sunny, since you ask--but sadly that's all now in the past.  Summer holidays are great reading opportunities for me, and the best book I read was RJ Ellory's A Quiet Vendetta.  Ellory has become a crime writer of the finest class: challenging plots, beautiful prose and a superb control of voice.  Highly commended too was Sharon Penman's Here Be Dragons, which after a slow start grew into a powerful and moving political and personal drama.  I'll be reading the others in the series.  On a less exalted level, Robert Harris's Lustrum marked a welcome return to form.  The late Roman republic is well-tilled soil, but Harris finds something new in giving us Cicero's unmasking of the Catiline conspiracy.

I had hoped too to think through some questions on The Fall of the Fireduke, and although I made some progress here it was less than I had hoped.  Instead, my mind found itself perversely exploring a different novel idea entirely, the result being that I now have an almost complete novel outline in my head.  If the idea's good enough, it will keep, so this one's filed away for future use.

I probably won't get much writing done for the next couple of weeks: it's the Chichester Writing Festival this weekend, and I am presenting training courses at work--something I enjoy, but which leaves me too enervated to write.

At the weekend I will also be taking delivery of the long-awaited Kindle.  Next year's summer holiday, I hope, will not be accompanied by a bag filled entirely with books...