Rome - "Passover"

"Sorry about your uncle."
"I'm made his son, by will."
"Oh, congratulations. You'll be wanting vengeance, then."
Titus Pullo and Octavian.

The new season of Rome is finally here, which makes me a little giddy, since it's one of the few shows that bothers to dramatize history, and since it does it so well. I'd been thinking about how it manages to create an ancient Rome that feels so convincing, without bogging the viewer down in detail. Tonight, at least, two things pop out: violence and ritual.
The violence in Rome is brutal and casual. (As opposed to the violence in Deadwood, which, while brutal and common, was usually accompanied by somber lighting and that plucked-string score that heralded major events.) As a result, it leaves the feeling that violence, while serious, was something that ancient Romans lived with every day. What makes pieces of violence noteworthy on the show are their meanings to the characters. Caesar's death is worth paying attention to because it has an immediate impact on a number of lives. The manner of his death is noteworthy primarily because it occurred in the Senate chamber. Alex Epstein of the screenwriting blog Complications Ensue has already made this point well about the first season, particularly about how the writing frequently makes violence the second most important thing in the scene to the characters.
But the other thing that Rome does well is its use of ritual. Dropping in rituals that advance the story but still seem foreign to modern viewers help to create a different world very effectively without slowing down the story. Sometimes, these rituals are set pieces, like the twin funerals in this episode. Other times, they're just snatches of dialogue or actorly business. Titus Pullo marries his former slave by asking, and then marking her forehead. Attia, when planning to flee the city, barks a quick "Pack the money and the household gods." The script doesn't dwell on the exotic moments, and neither do the actors, and it's that ruthless efficiency that sells the difference so well.

More Emma Darwin

Leaving aside a few fatuous observations by the interviewer (she's just learned about this new "buzz term" historical fiction, "it's so hot right now ..."), another interesting interview with Emma Darwin. I'm going to have to pick up her book soon. If Darwin writes half as well as she thinks about writing, it should be great. For example:

I usually do basic research first, to establish that I can do what I want to do. Then I write the first draft without stopping to find things out more than I absolutely have to. Then I have a manuscript and a pile of notes for more research. That's often when I'll try to travel to places I need to, partly to get that authenticity, and partly because you stumble across things you wouldn't have known to look for. But you have to get beyond the research, or your novel turns into a ghastly kind of history-book-with-dialogue.

Plus, anyone willing to say that Charles Darwin is too well-traveled a historical topic to write about right now gets huge points from me. Redeemable for what, I don't know ...

Philippa Gregory on Historical Fiction

The Boston Globe has a (brief) interview with Philippa Gregory:

The way I write historical novels is that I research and research so that I could write a book of straight history. Then I put my novelist hat on and inhabit the private life of these people until I can convey the feeling to the reader that they are really there. All characters are at one level unknowable, all you can do is look at their actions. But I haven't received any criticism.

Books: True History of the Kelly Gang

• True History of the Kelly Gang won the Mann Booker Prize in 2001. I picked it up off a remainder shelf in San Francisco, ecstatic to find a Peter Carey novel on the cheap. Which tells you something about the sales power of the Mann Booker Prize in the United States.
• Carey uses a neat device here. While the “found papers” novel is nothing unusual (cf. any epistolary novel ever), he goes so far as to include archival notes, describing each set of documents. They make for a naturalistic way to break the novel up into chapters, and even allow for a old-fashioned “summation” of the story in each chapter.
• Which leads to one question. Why doesn’t the summation doesn’t wreck the narrative tension? Probably because the story isn’t really about what it’s supposed to be about. The Kelly boys are well-known in Australia. So what is the novel about?
• It seems, in part, to be about the ways in which outlaws get mythologized. But, more importantly, it’s about why Ned Kelly decided to write his life story. We know early on that he’s writing it for his daughter, but the reason he wants to pass it on stays hidden, which creates the same kind of tension found in the short story “First Defeat.” It seems that maybe, more than in other kinds of fiction, historical fiction can use this question of why the story exists in the first place to great effect.
• The narrative voice is one of the big attractions of the novel. (In the cover blurbs, Janet Maslin calls it one of the great acts of literary ventriloquism.) It’s effective, too, once you get used to it. I was concerned at first that it sounded too contrived, but I found myself considering it normal after about fifty pages. (Before that, it was work, but rewarding work.) It’s far from flowery. Instead, it’s hot-blooded but halting, earthy, but with the restraint of a man who’s trying not to set a bad example for the daughter he barely knew. The more one learns about Kelly, the more the voice in this novel seems a real achievement.
• Not that the novel is flawless. (Brilliant, just not flawless.) One question that bothered me: why does Carey start with the incident where Kelly improvises body armor in a gunfight? It’s an arresting image, but it’s not like the incident drives the story. And it’s not like he plays a whole lot with chronology otherwise. So what purpose does the flashforward serve? As is, it feels kind of like a bad JJ Abrams trick.

Fiction: Quicksilver

So this is the real meat of what I wanted to do with this blog. I've been reading a lot of historical fiction in the past year or so, and I wanted a place where I could think out loud about technique in the stuff I was reading. Why start with Quicksilver? Two reasons. One, for all what I say below may sound critical, I thought it was a great read. And, two, because, while I had read historical fiction before (I mean, who growing up where I did could avoid Johnny Tremaine?), this was the first piece that really made me think consciously about method. And, I think it did, because it’s kind of a crossover piece.

Stephenson started out as a science fiction writer. (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age.) He had a mainstream hit with Cryptonomicon. After that, he started on the Baroque Cycle, of which this is the first volume. And he’s pretty transparent about taking some of the obsessions and techniques of science fiction and using them in his historical fiction. There is no doubt that this is historical fiction, but it feels different than something that Bernard Cromwell, or Dorothy Dunnett, or Phillippa Gregory might write. So, we’ll start here. (And, needless to say, some SPOILERS below.)

• There’s crossover with Cryptonomicon (among other things, the main characters are Shaftoes and Waterhouses), which is a nice marketing technique. It pulls in people who otherwise might have been turned off by the length or the historical period. Remember that last really long book you read and loved? Here’s more of the same. Sort of.
• In fact he starts the book with Enoch Root, who one assumes is a predecessor of the Enoch Root in Cryptonomicon. ("Enoch rounds the corner just as the executioner raises the noose above the woman's head.") Why another Enoch Root? Now that I’ve finished, I think I know, but, I have to admit, this one bugged the hell out of me for nigh-on 2,700 pages.
• And the length is an issue. In hardcover, this book is a whopping 916 pages of narrative, and there is no question that, with something this long, there can be vast stretches where the thing drags. I was talking to a work colleague about this, and he mentioned that he likes long books like this because he can skim past the stuff he finds less interesting to get to the stuff that appeals to him. I can understand some of that impulse, but in a market already saturated with books, do you really need to throw three 300 page books into one? (You think I'm kidding? Stephenson has now released the Baroque Cycle as an eight-volume series, of which the first three volumes are titled Quicksilver, King of the Vagabonds, and Odalisque -- the three "books" in the Quicksilver I read.)
• One other issue is that, for all its length, this is definitely the first of a trilogy. It doesn’t really have its own beginning, middle and end. While the Waterhouse operation makes for a nice cliffhanger, it makes it tougher to read the Confusion, because you know that you won’t get a satisfying chapter out of it.
• Another reason for the occasional drag is that Stephenson does love his exposition. Granted, that's part of the hook here. He's good at exposition. But it works much better when he’s doing it as part of the narration than when he does it as dialogue (of which there are long stretches). His voice works well as narration. His dialogue, while not bad, can get didactic. (More on this in the later volumes.)
• He does take great pains to keep the plot moving, just in case you thought it was all going to be long historical lectures. So he starts off early getting you to the King of the Vagabonds -- a character that promises tours of the seedy underbelly of Europe.
  
• One thing Stephenson does a great job of in here is playing with language. Some of it is minor variations in spelling, "mathematick," "philosophick." But then occasionally he'll switch it up even more, using “phant’sy” for “fancy,” giving you an idea of the etymology. And then he will introduce as if it were a new concept the hotel, a French word for "private compound of nobles." The language is in a state of flux during this period, and Stephenson goes to pains to show that. At times it borders on the overly cute, but for the most part, it allows him to strike a colloquial tone while still maintaining that this the past is a foreign country. THIS is the stuff that gets me excited about Stephenson.
  

Not Just Fancy Dress

Oddly meandering and inconsquential column, but the last paragraphs include the result of a quick interview with Sarah Waters, who wrote The Night Watch, a book that is on my to-buy-and-read list. The following small bit hits some of the stuff I'm struggling with myself:

Taking her cue from novelist Mary Renault, who said that "the past isn't just
full of us in fancy dress", she believes that good historical fiction should
take you back into a different mentality.

That's it for now.

Playing with Time

The beginning and end of this article are too cute by half, but the general idea -- that time is just another tool in fiction writing, and that certain genres handle it better than others because of the expectations people have of them -- well, that bears some further thinking.

(There'll be more about Life on Mars at some point. Great show.)

HistFic Follies: Dialogue

From an article in last week's Independent flogging Tim Willocks's latest:

It was very freeing to work in a different time, to work with language in a different way. Modern dialogue is a bit stunted - it has to be. It's nice with historical fiction to be a little more flowery.

Now, I know it's unfair to grab a soundbite from an interview that really exists only sell the author's latest and then rant and rave against it, but this is one of those constantly repeated truths about historical fiction that drastically oversimplifies what the genre (to the extent that it is a genre) can do.

Yes, there is no question that historical fiction allows you to get flowery with language. David Milch has been doing it on TV with the excellent Deadwood, and writers as good and diverse as William Shakespeare (Henry V) and Atturo Perez Reverte (The Fencing Master) have been doing it on the stage and the page. But other writers, like Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose) and Neal Stephenson (Quicksilver) have done well with blunter or simpler dialogue in historical fiction. And Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49) and Peter Carey (My Life as a Fake) have certain shown that you can use ornate, or "flowerly," dialogue to great effect in fiction with a modern setting.

I'm going to come back to this one a lot, but I thought I'd get it out there as soon as possible. Historical dialogue does not have to be flowery. Not if it's accurate, and not if it's designed to let you know that something happened in the past. There are valid reasons to make dialogue -- past or present -- either blunt or ornate. But writing flowery dialogue for no other reason than to make it sound "historical" is misinformed and lazy.

Playing History

From yesterday's New York Times, an article by Ed Leibowitz on actors who play historical figures.

Leibowitz focuses mostly on physical resemblance and voice pattern, but it's a larger question for historical fiction, and one that no doubt will recur. (And make no mistake, biopics are historical fiction. They dramatize rather than report.) How true do you stay to people who really existed? Do you report details faithfully, or change those things you need to to make a story more interesting? Do you glamorize your lead character, or try to make them seem as real as possible? And which of those requires the most invention?