Women Onstage

From the Times Literary Supplement, a review article on women's roles onstage since the Restoration:

If we are to change the way that theatre women are included in today’s stories, we must attend to how they have been marginalised in the stories of the past.

The article is mainly focused on the business end of the theater, which, frankly, makes it even more interesting.

Clockpunk

(via Warren Ellis)

Clockpunk is the new name for alternate history stories that take place in a world where the Renaissance yielded more technological innovation than ours did. (I'm assuming, from the few writeups I've seen so far, that the soon-to-be-cliched premise of much of this fiction will be "What if we had listened to Da Vinci?")

The term appears to derive from an old role-playing-game manual, and the term may have referred to something else entirely at one point.

The new blog devoted to this Renaissance strain of clockpunk -- The Da Vinci Automata -- seems interesting enough so far. But, so far, it also seems more an attempt to create a subgenre around a label than a recognition of an actual literary movement within either science or historical fiction. (For example, click on the "Bibliography" at DVA, and all you'll see is "To be added soon.")

Still, I'll keep an eye out. Good alternate history can be fascinating, and it's possible the Da Vinci Automata will point out some solid stories that would otherwise get overlooked.

History and Film: 300

The good news is, it was just about what I expected it to be. Awkward hard-boiled bon mots, gloriously over-the-top violence, computer-generated rhinoceri. The trailer did not lie.

Historically, this movie was nowhere close to accurate, but if you're going to a movie about ancient Sparta where the poster looks like it's advertising a heavy metal concert, what were you expecting? Among other things, the movie tries to cast the helot-owning Spartans as the champions of freedom, and has a plot point turn on the queen's alleged adultery, despite the fact that extramarital sex was not particularly scandalous in Sparta.

But the biggest problem, from a storytelling standpoint, was that the script allowed the foregone conclusion (the 300 Spartans die) to rob the story of any tension. Up until the moment they die, none of the Spartans surrender. None of them even consider surrendering. And none of them lose at hand-to-hand combat. Which means that most of the scenes are just a repeat of the Spartans facing a threat, dispatching it handily, and then reaffirming that no, they're still not surrendering. It's too bad, the last thing I expected was that the battle scenes would get boring.

303 ... 302 ... 301 ...

Going to see 300 tonight.

It looks gloriously bad.

There will be a full report later.

(also, Rome reviews to resume shortly)

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.

Sunday at Borders - 1 October 2006

New and reviewed this week in history and historical fiction:

Historical Fiction
House of Meetings, by Martin Amis, reviewed by Bharat Tandon in the Times Literary Supplement, by Tim Martin in the Independent, and by M John Harrison in the Guardian. Martin Amis shifts tone to write about the Soviet gulag -- or does he? Tandon thinks he hit his mark by adopting a more restrained style; Tim Martin thinks it sounds too much like a Martin Amis self-parody; Harrison thinks that the style "opens us into the central irony of most Amis novels, in which the issue of storytelling is always the issue of character, of self-interest and nuanced self-deception - narrative as the filthy Nabokovian stream from which the reader, like a shit-eater at the bottom of the labour camp food chain, must filter moral sustenance," which, I think, puts him in Martin's camp.

Thirteen Moons, by Charles Frazier, reviewed by Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post. Yardley thinks Frazier is overrated, and his latest is "corny" and "will be putting a lot of people to sleep." At that point, does it really matter what it's about?

On Agate Hill, by Lee Smith, reviewed by Donna Rifkind in the Washington Post. Oh look, another post-Civil War novel -- this time, it's about a girl coming of age in 1880s Appalchia. Rifkind singles out the way that Smith has "invented artifacts" to tell the story -- maybe it's the first time she's run across it.

History
"All Governments Lie": The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone, by Myra MacPherson, reviewed by Paul Berman in the New York Times. I.F. Stone was a journalist who debunked press coverage of the Vietnam war; he also may or may not have been a Soviet stooge. Berman thinks MacPherson's zealous defense of the man may have hurt him more than it helped him.

Liberty, by Lucy Moore, reviewed by Marianne Brace in the Independent. Moore has written six portraits of women who lived through the French Revolution. Brace calls it a "lively narrative full of pungent details."

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 ...

HistFiction.net

I'm in the middle of revising how I handle this site a little. Expect some small (but, to me, significant) changes come October. But I don't want to leave the blog dead in the meantime. So, a little linkblogging. Today, HistFiction.net, which seems to be a decent collection of links about historical fiction. While I'm not crazy about the lack of diverse categories, I'm willing to chalk that up to two factors:
(1) There may not be that many other historical fiction sites.
(2) These links are not a bad snapshot of how people think of historical fiction.
So click over, and do a little exploring.

Sunday at Borders - 24 September 2006

It's a light week this week. So, without further ado, new and reviewed this week in history and historical fiction:

Historical Fiction
Imperium, by Robert Harris, reviewed by Dennis Drabelle for the Washington Post. "I could have used this book while taking third-year Latin," says the reviewer (halfway through this myself, I know how he feels). Harris hits the high points of Cicero's career, but fills in lots of juicy backstory about just how the conspiracies and prosecutions that led to his great speeches happened -- it's inside baseball for high-school classics students, and I mean that in a good way.

History
Donne: The reformed soul, by John Stubbs, reviewed by Katherine Duncan-Jones in the Times Literary Supplement. Donne has pretty much defied biographers, says Duncan-Jones. Which makes it all the more remarkable that Stubbs has "completed a substantial and lively account of Donne's life and times ..."

Consuming Passions: Leisure and pleasure in Victorian Britain, by Judith Flanders, reviewed by Rosemary Ashton in the Times Literary Supplement. This isn't the first historical account of leisure, but the angle (that increased leisure time and funds were spin-offs from the Industrial Revolution) feels fresh. Of course, since it's a British history, it wouldn't be complete without some account of class conflict; at least this time it's relevant.

The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, by Daniel Mendelsohn, reviewed by Ron Rosenbaum for the New York Times. I have to admit, my first reaction on seeing this review was "not another Holocaust book," but Rosenbaum points out a few things that turned me around. Mendelsohn is an interesting and careful scholar who writes on a number of subjects, and his book appears to eschew a number Holocaust cliches (like "backshadowing" -- making lives seem tragic in light of the coming Holocaust) in favor of reconstructing the fate of a single family.

Graphic History: Chicken with Plums

This is a first, because the English-language version of this graphic novel (the original French edition, Poulet aux Prunes, was published in 2004) hasn't come out yet, and won't until October 2. Pantheon Books sent out advance copies to graphic novel reviewers, and and the fact that I can occasionally be mistaken for one delights me to no end.

[and once again, Blogger Beta is having trouble with images]

Chicken with Plums is by Marjane Satrapi, author of the excellent Persepolis and Persepolis 2. It's the story of her great-uncle Nasser Ali Khan, a musician who, in 1958, suffered the loss of his favorite tar, and died of a broken heart eight days later. The graphic novel covers those eight days. Since it hasn't been released yet, I am going to go really light on anything that might be considered a spoiler. And I'm simply going to say that, while I thought both Persepolis graphic novels were excellent, I thought this surpassed them both. Buy it. You won't regret it.

Small observations:

• The history is worn lightly. Satrapi doesn't shy away from referring to events or people that her Western audience won't know offhand, and that adds to the verisimilitude. Rather than stopping the narrative for explanations, she just drops footnotes, which works better in graphic novels than it does in prose.
  
• Satrapi also plays a lot with chronology. The events of the book take place over eight days, but flashbacks (occasionally repeated) provide context and add layers to interactions we've already witnessed. In many ways, she has structured this like a murder mystery, even though we are watching the death as it happens.
  
• The linework is deceptively simple, and the backgrounds (the set dressing of comics) are minimal. Each detail Satrapi does use is telling enough that the end result is more powerful than if she had laden her backgrounds with endless Easter eggs.
• Like most great historical fiction (and this is historical fiction in the loosest sense -- it's necessarily a fictionalized account of her family, and it takes place before she was born), Chicken with Plums plays with interpretation. We watch the events that lead up to Nasser Ali Khan's death, but she wisely doles out information sparingly, so we don't really understand them until the end of the story. It's the things no one bothers to tell each other that are most important to Nasser Ali Khan's motives.
  

Overall, just an outstanding piece of work. Highly recommended.

And Still More Black Dahlia

Because it's late, and I'm tired ...

Slate's Seth Mnookin on why people seem so fascinated by the Black Dahlia murder. (Hint: It's Ellroy's fault.) A sample:

The Black Dahlia is, with its overlapping themes of obsession, sublimated lust, revenge, trust, and incest, the most personally revealing of Ellroy's novels. It transformed the murky facts surrounding Short's life and death into art, the unknown "dead white woman" becoming a tabula rasa on which the author could wrestle with his anger and affection toward his mother. ... Ellroy's book introduced the paradigm of Short as an unknowable Everywoman to a new generation.

I kind of buy it. The Dahlia murder was kind of a train wreck, and it was amplified by Ellroy's own issues, as well as his ample writing talent.

Sunday at Borders - 17 Sept 2006

New and reviewed this week:

Historical Fiction
The Translation of Dr. Appelles, by David Treuer, reviewed by Brian Hall in the Washington Post. Treuer's novel covers a pair of parallel love stories: a modern one about a forlorn translator and a college librarian and an early 19th-century one about a pair of foundlings rescued by an unnamed (in the review) Indian tribe. The focus on the translator sounds interesting -- if only Hall weren't so convinced the majority of us great unwashed won't like the book as much as he did.

The Fall of Troy, by Peter Ackroyd, reviewed by Sue Gaisford in the Independent. A "lurid and generally entertaining drama" that's "packed full to bursting with extreme and supernatural occurences." Oh yeah, it's about a fictionalized version of Heinrich Schliemann, the man who supposedly discovered Troy.

The Meaning of Night, by Michael Cox, reviewed by Christian House in the Independent. House thinks this "600-page Victorian murder mystery pastiche" is "an unadulterated pleasure." My guess is that people who like this sort of thing will like this particular version of this sort of thing.

Zoli, by Colum McCann, reviewed by Ed Wood in the Independent. A novel about "the rise and decline of a Romani singer and poet" in Iron-Curtain Poland. Wood thinks it's ambitious, but doesn't quite hit.


History
Five Germanies I Have Known, by Fritz Stern, reviewed by Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post. The renowned German Historian (Blood and Iron) tells a more personal history of Germany. Unlike Grass's controversial new memoir, there are no surprise revelations about the Waffen SS, but that doesn't mean there are no surprises.

LBJ: Architect of American Ambition, by Randall Woods, reviewed by Nick Kotz in the Washington Post. I've reviewed this one before, but Kotz seems to like it. He cites its balance and "nuanced sense of Southern politics" as its greatest strengths, and a series of "minor errors" as its biggest weakness.

Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland and Vichy France, by Carmen Callil, reviewed by Christopher Caldwell in the New York Times. Louis Darquier, one of the architects of the Vichy government in France, sounds like a twisted, real-life version of Casablanbca's Captain Renault. But the real story here is apparently why Callil decided to write the book in the first place: when her psychiatrist committed suicide, she turned out to be Darquier's abandoned daughter.

The Lost Men, by Kelly Tyler-Lewis, reviewed by Magnus Mills in the Independent. Another book about Shackleton, who explored Antarctica. This one, though, focuses more on the Ross Sea party, left behind while Shackleton ventured out on the continent.

The Long Exile, by Melanie McGrath, reviewed by Edward Marriott in the Guardian. In the 1950s, Canada convinced a number of Inuit to resettle from the Hudson Bay to Ellesmere Island in the Polar Arctic -- when they found out they'd been lured to a dark, barren land under falser pretenses, the Inuit asked to return, and were refused. I'll be seeking this one out.

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.

Black Dahlia - Followup

An interview with Ellroy and Friedman. There's one bit that caught my attention:

His language is so lush. Josh was a very good barometer of what you could and couldn’t do with his work. He lived and breathed Ellroy’s complex, dark material for a decade, forcing the material into Ellroy-ese, never taking the simple route.

That explains one of the things that felt wrong to me. Too much voice-over, which led to that ponderous, choreographed feel. (LA Confidential had some of it, but it was punchier, playing as cribbed newspaper copy.)

Also, despite Ellroy's protests here, he has propounded at least one theory before. It was in an documentary. Pretty sure this was the one.

History and Film: The Black Dahlia

Just came back from watching. Overall, I liked it better than I was expecting to. If you forget the studio is trying to market it as a star-studded epic followup to LA Confidential and just treat it on its own terms, it works reasonably well. A few quick comments:

• Ellroy (and Friedman) were smart. The Dahlia murder (an actual event) is a framework, but this does not purport to be the "real" explanation of how it happened. (I saw a documentary last year on Ellroy, in which he -- drunk and BSing with some off-duty cops -- lays out what he thinks actually happened. This isn't it.) As a result, the writers can get away with a lot more dramatic tightness. For example, Ebert's Law of Economy of Characters winds up applying, without feeling overly forced. If this were more docudrama in feel, that might not have worked.
  
• In fact, DePalma and Friedman (and maybe Ellroy as well, I have to confess, I haven't read the book yet) go to great effort to make The Black Dahlia feel like a modern, historical version of The Big Sleep.
  
• The writers were also smart enough to avoid making the real story about the Dahlia murder. Yeah, it's there in the background, and it serves as a great MacGuffin, but the real story is more of a twisted love polygon (it would be spoiling to say how many sides, not to mention damned difficult).
  
• There's some deft expository work in the beginning, tying in a bond issue, which you would expect to be dry, and making it a catalyst for the rest of the story. Side note: what is it about Los Angeles-based noir and municipal policy? Chinatown has water policy at its heart, this has a bond issue for policemen. You wouldn't think these would work, but they do.
  
• Not really a storytelling point, but: Aaron Eckhart is great in this. Intense, haunted, full of rough energy. He makes the scenes he's in. Sadly, Hartnett, Johanssen and Swank seem to know they're in a Hollywood film. And that's really the problem with the movie overall -- it knows it's a big studio film. DePalma tries too hard to be serious and elegiac, and more often comes off as choreographed. Eckhart, though, knows enough to not quite keep the beat. Next to the rest of the performances, he feels almost syncopated, and that works well for him.
  

Other Folks on Historical Fiction

Rambling, kind of self-involved essay in a Boston-area paper about how to read historical fiction, but one that poses a couple of interesting questions, and makes a few interesting points. Namely:

• The Historical Novel Society (didn't know that existed) has a definition for historical fiction -- anything set more than fifty years in the past, or written before the author's lifetime. So Updike writing about his boyhood in the forties? Historical fiction. But so's a twenty-five year old writing about Watergate. I can accept that.
  
• And, this point is pretty useful: "What good is historical fiction then? It probably puts more non-historians in touch with history than non-fiction does. It's far better than traditional textbooks or stale historical accounts in giving history a 'neighborhood.'" What follows from there is a pretty good discussion of one man's reading habits that rings pretty true.
  
• One thing I would love to see less of: using (1) The Da Vinci Code, (2) The Historian, or (3) 9/11 or the War in Iraq as a reason why people are reading more historical fiction. Each is kind of easy, kind of cliched, and kind of wrong.
  
• And, one other useful clearinghouse link: Historical Fiction at Squidoo.
  

I never pretended to be the only one out there thinking about this stuff. So I'm glad forcing myself to think about this daily is showing me what else is out there.

Blame vampires.

Ugh, historical fiction is now a publishing trend:

The colossal success last year of Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, a novel that imagined the life of Dracula set against the background of numerous world events, has publishers hoping that book-buying consumers are hungry for more historical fiction.

Leaving aside the bad sociology in this article, it's just a little depressing that an overhyped vampire thriller is getting credited with the resurgence. Don't get me wrong. I like the genre, and I even find the occaional vampire novel amusing. But really, why do so many people flock to this subgenre?

Historical Fiction Reviews

Danny Yee does a bunch of two-paragraph reviews of various historical novels. Worth checking out, in that "wonder what appeals to the audience" kind of way.

Frost/Nixon in the West End

From the TLS's review of Frost/Nixon, playing in London's West End:

History as an account of past events is sometimes not enough for us: we are trained as an audience that likes to see dramas made out of crises. The Donmar’s production of Frost/Nixon revisits not the original Watergate political mini-series itself, but the attempt a few years afterward to bring closure to it with a series of interviews featuring the disgraced male lead.

The premise sounds interesting. David Frost's career is slumping, so is Richard Nixon's pocketbook. Fate, and $600,000, brings them together for a series of interviews ...

Sunday at Borders - Too Tired Edition

Back from wedding in Nantucket, exhausted, and yet still I get this up. Wonder at me. New and reviewed this week:

Historical Fiction
The Ruby in her Navel, by Barry Unsworth, reviewed by Richard Mason for the Independent and Alex Butterworth for the Guardian. 1149, and Thurstan, Sicily's first metrosexual, is playing Muslims against Christians. Mason's not sure Unsworth gets the tone right, but still enjoys this "riotous period soap opera," and Butterworth thinks it's a "conspiracy thirller to shame lesser talents."

Restless, by William Boyd, reviewed by David Martin for the Independent. A single mother meets a former WWII spy: what could possibly go wrong? Apparently some of the writing, but Martin still thinks this is "a spy thriller from a first-rate narrative intelligence."

Imperium, by Richard Harris, reviewed by Andrew Rawnsley for the Guardian. Rawnsley thinks that folks who like "history dressed as fiction" will like this tale of Roman intrigue by a blockbuster author. He just wishes he'd write something more -- well, modern.

History
Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, by Nicholas Lemann, reviewed by Jonathan Yardley for the Washington Post, and Sean Wilentz for the New York Times. Yardley's too caught up in looking smart about the period to really review the book itself. But Wilentz thinks this "story of Reconstruction's demise ... is an arresting piece of popular history."

Will You Die With Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party, by Flores A. Forbes, reviewed by Stanley Crouch for the New York Times. Crouch thinks that Forbes's memoir makes Huey Newton look like Jesse James -- and not in a good way. Flores was the a onetime military leader of the Panthers, and he gives "the inside story of a left-wing group of 'revolutionaries' whose organization evolved into a lucrative criminal enterprise."

The Conquest of Nature: Water, landscape and the making of modern Germany, by David Blackbourn, reviewed by Christopher Clark for the Times Literary Supplement. It's a grand story, "mythopoeic," even: a century of rectifications of the Rhine river in central Europe led to the Germany we know today. Blackbourne goes for the necessary labor porn (so many workers! so much time!), but also traces through the consequences of the rectifications.

Leonard Woolf, by Victoria Glendinning, reviewed by Vanessa Curtis for the Independent. Ignore "the many errors scattered throughout the book" - who really cares whether there's such a thing as a Bach "cello partita?" Glendinning's biography of that guy who married Virginia Woolf is "an absorbing read," even if it never explains why he took her name.

The Private Lives of the Impressionists, by Sue Roe, reviewed by Tom Rosenthal for the Independent. Oh look, another book about Impressionists! This one doesn't have as many pictures, but Rosenthal thinks that this "relatively slight but diverting book" has "a certain charm."