We are the resurrectionists!

Last week’s conference at the Institute of Historical Research explored the links between academic history and historical fiction, in the light of the fact that a significant number of people who have written academic history have gone on to turn their minds to fiction (Alison Weir, Ian Mortimer and Rebecca Stott, who were present at the conference; Harry Sidebottom and Hallie Rubenhold, who were not).

As someone embarked on this path (though starting out as an archaeologist rather than a historian), this held a natural fascination for me. Rebecca Stott (who I hadn’t met, but whose path must have crossed mine on many occasions when she was researching Charles Darwin and I was researching his friend and neighbour, John Lubbock) spoke of the historian “coming to the end of the archive, the limits of what is footnote-able.” This is what led her to write her fascinating novels, Ghostwalk and The Coral Thief (www.rebeccastott.co.uk), and it is what has led me to my interest in writing fiction. Certainly in relation to the Neolithic of the Channel Islands (on which I have published one coffee-table book, three academic monographs and 29 journal articles) I felt that I had reached that point, the point at which, in Stott’s words, “you know something to be true, but cannot prove it.”

So what is missing? In a word, people. Real people who had names and emotions, and faced moral dilemmas. Archaeology can’t give you that, yet these are the people who built the monuments and made the pots and the stone tools that I have spent three decades studying. The search for these people, the desire to conjure them out of the past, is not new: the American archaeologist, Robert Braidwood, was engaged in a search to find “the Indian behind the artefact” long before I was born, but it is perhaps only in fiction that this desire can be fully realised. As Hilary Mantel said on Friday evening, our vocation is as “resurrectionists”!   

Hilary Mantel on History and Fiction

To my mind, Hilary Mantel is one of the finest living writers of historical fiction, combining an exhilarating sense of immediacy with a remarkable fidelity to the reality of history. I have just had the pleasure of hearing her speak on her published novels, A Place of Greater Safety (set during the French Revolution) and Wolf Hall (set in the court of Henry VIII), and its forthcoming sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. She described “the alchemical process through which fact metamorphoses into fiction.”

“I will make up the content of a man’s heart,” she told us, “but I will not make up the colour of his drawing room wall – I would rather move the discussion to his study, where I do know the colour of the wall.”

She went on to talk about the ways in which the novelist, unlike the historian, can explore those conversations that happened “on the back stair,” the conversations which, for very good reasons, were never recorded. Historical novelists, she insisted, are “allowed to be partial.” Wolf Hall is narrated from the point of view of Thomas Cromwell, and the picture it paints, for example, of Thomas More, is not intended to be an objective depiction of the historical figure, but rather an imaginative reconstruction of the way he might have seemed to Cromwell. This, I think, takes us a little further than Marguerite Yourcenar’s attempt to develop a historical voice. It certainly inspired me.

This is part of a conference at the Institute of Historical Research, which continues tomorrow (and I will doubtless have more to say about it). The conference is fully booked, but has a virtual component, accessible at http://www.ihrconference.wordpress.com/. It would be great if you could join me there!

Two Little Ducks From Stonehenge (well, almost...)

The Mail Online (www.bit.ly/pWFjd6) today ran a headline “How two little ducks could transform our understanding of Stonehenge.”

Gavin Allen’s article refers to discoveries made by my Open University colleague, David Jacques, at a site near Stonehenge (actually closer to the Iron Age hillfort known as Vespasian’s Camp – not “Vesper’s Camp” as stated in the article). I would have been delighted if the two stone figures dated to the same period as Stonehenge, since it would fit uncannily well with the plot of my short story, “The Raft and the Waterfall,” available from Ether Books (http://www.etherbooks.com/). The ducks appear, however, to be around 1700 years later than the first stone circle at Stonehenge.

The article goes on to talk about animal bones from the same site, which go back to the Mesolithic period (c6250 BC, around 3850 years before Stonehenge). Since Jacques’s previous finds from the site include Roman artefacts, this suggests activity on the site over a period of at least 6500 years.

The site itself is centred on the bed of a spring in which objects were formally, perhaps ritually, deposited. There is nothing new in the idea that prehistoric people in Britain deposited objects in this way (Richard Bradley and Francis Pryor, to name but two, have written extensively on the subject), nor even in the suggestion that such practices persisted over a very long time period (Bradley points to the tradition of Excalibur being returned to the Lady of the Lake as evidence that they may have survived into post-Roman times), but there are very few individual sites that provide such clear evidence for continuity down the millennia as this one appears to do.

The two little ducks, therefore, may not transform our understanding of Stonehenge, but they do form part of a bigger story which may transform our understanding of the complex ways in which prehistoric communities, over long time periods, established symbolic links between the present and the past, and between themselves and the landscapes they inhabited.

Of Druids, Bones and Historical Fiction

The High Court today rejected the demand from druid, King Arthur Pendragon, for the immediate reburial of human remains excavated at Stonehenge in 2008 (www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14629536). That they will, eventually, have to be reburied strikes me as a massive and unacceptable blow against science (I remember writing my PhD more than 20 years ago, bemoaning the fact that a Victorian excavator had reburied human remains that could have informed the chapter that I never got to write), but at least they will first be thoroughly studied.

Archaeologist Mike Pitts said in a BBC interview this afternoon that such study makes it possible to “recreate and retell” the stories of these people who lived 4400 years ago, “to bring them into the present,” and thereby "show them respect."

Of these particular people, as yet we know little. That’s why it’s so important that archaeologists have the chance to complete their research. But Pendragon has been arguing for years that other remains should be reburied. The “Amesbury Archer” is a case in point. We know rather more about him: that he lived around 2400 BC (broadly speaking, the period during which the bluestone circle at Stonehenge was built) and was an immigrant from central Europe; that he was one of the first users of copper and gold in Britain; and that he was sufficiently important to merit one of the most elaborate burials of his age.

Coincidentally, I am just reading J.S. Dunn’s debut novel, Bending the Boyne (Seriously Good Books, 2011), in which he features. A character based loosely on him features, also, as a character in my short story, “The Raft and the Waterfall,” available from Ether Books (http://www.etherbooks.com/). I say “based loosely on” because I think that for a writer to tie him/herself to the specific details of the archaeological record would make it hard to write good fiction. My character gets to live rather longer than the real “archer” did, for example, because this suits my narrative purpose. I wouldn’t do this, of course, with a fully historical figure, such as Julius Caesar or Henry V, but somehow it seems more acceptable to do so in the case of a man whose name and full life-story we can never know, to use him as the inspiration for a character rather than turning him directly into one.

In doing so, I hope to recreate, on an imaginary plane, a society and a way of life which the real man would recognise, a world in which people did travel between central Europe and southern England, pioneer the use of technologies that we now take for granted and build some of our most iconic monuments. And yes, in doing so, I believe that I show more respect than disrespect for our distant ancestors, none of which would be possible if we found excuses to discard their remains.

The remains of the “Amesbury Archer,” together with the objects buried with him, are displayed in the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum. The photograph is reproduced courtesy of Wessex Archaeology.

Tone and Language in Fictionalised Prehistory (Part 4)

A prior training as a scientist (or a historian) neither qualifies nor disqualifies a person from writing fiction. Great fiction has been written by people from almost every imaginable background. To my mind, however, the writer who has, after Golding, been most successful in bringing these remote periods to vivid, irrepressible life, is the American social anthropologist, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.

In Reindeer Moon, Marshall Thomas’s first parson narrator, Yanan, unlike Golding’s viewpoint character, Lok, is a fully modern human and, as such, has no structural limitations in her use of language. Because she is narrating in the first person, however, Marshall Thomas denies herself the opportunity, which Golding and Auel both take, of stepping out of character to explain things from the perspective of the reader’s world. All of her metaphors, similes, jokes and figures of speech must be drawn from the lived reality of Yanan’s world, and it is precisely this which makes that world come alive for the reader.

“The rest of the people fed the fire and got ready to cook the meat...everyone waited for me to divide the carcass. Timu helped me, since making a division was something new to me. I had to be sure that my in-laws got the best parts – the hind-parts – while making sure that my kin got even shares of the front parts. And Timu didn’t act as though the carcass was his...he nicely covered the only real mistake I made – treating White Fox as Meri’s betrothed and Swift merely as my co-wife’s kinsman – by apologising as if he had made the mistake himself” (Reindeer Moon, Chapter 11).

One might, perhaps, question the use of the term “in-laws,” with its modern legalistic connotations, but it is difficult to know what one would put in its place, other than an invented word which would make the text less readable. One might question, also, Marshall Thomas’s use of Latin-derived medical/anatomical terms to describe bodily functions (her characters have “coitus” rather than sex, and they “defecate” and “urinate” rather than shitting and pissing). Perhaps Marshall Thomas (or her editors) had in mind the sensitivities of her readership, but it is difficult to respect these sensitivities whilst taking the reader into a world as visceral as Yanan’s.

These, however, are minor quibbles in relation to a novel that really does take the reader into a long-vanished world:

“Yoi...began to sing. Meri and I joined – it was Yoi’s fire-river song, to be sung by at least two people, since the idea for this song came from wolves’ songs with two parts. Yoi began, and Meri and I followed, singing strongly, although the song seemed to be drawn away from us by the huge sky...When the sun was low, we got hungry...Yoi took from her bag a long strip of meat from the dead mammoth, lightly cooked and bad smelling. A small piece of it was enough” (Reindeer Moon, Chapter 11).

Tone and Language in Fictionalised Prehistory (Part 3)

The theme of conflict between groups provides a fast-moving plot for Bjorn Kurten’s The Dance of the Tiger, but this otherwise convincing storyline is undermined by the use of modern military terminologies that can surely have had no place in the thought processes of hunter-gatherers living 35,000 years ago:

“Wolf...described the situation. Shelk had put garrisons at Big Lake, Blue Lake, Swidden Moor, and doubtless other places too...’We have divided into three groups, and we harass Shelk’s lines of communication...He’s sent many troops against us, but we always avoid them. Meanwhile, we’re gathering strength to assault his headquarters at Caribou Lake...There will be an enemy patrol before long’” (The Dance of the Tiger, Part 3).

Kurten also has a lake described as “...a festive mirror for the sun,” the laughter of hyenas described as a “...shrill falsetto,” and a drunken character emptying his “wine-cellar.” We don’t know what language was spoken in Palaeolithic Scandinavia, but it seems unlikely that it would have included words for “mirror,” “falsetto” or “cellar,” let alone “troops,” “headquarters” or “patrols.”

Kurten was a palaeontologist, an expert on fossil bears, and his novel was published to great acclaim by his fellow scientists, Richard Leakey and Stephen Jay Gould. Jean Auel may have had this in mind when she criticised the attempts of scientists to write fiction about their subject material.

“When I have read fiction written by scientists,” she wrote recently, in the Historical Novels Review, “I am often disappointed. Although it is assumed that they do, they don’t always research their fiction as well as they research their own science. After all, it’s only fiction.”

Tone and Language in Fictionalised Prehistory (Part 2)

If Golding’s Nobel Prize winning masterpiece is the literary “form” of the genre, it is Jean M. Auel’s Earth’s Children series (starting with The Clan of the Cave Bear and culminating, more than thirty years later, with The Land of Painted Caves) that has set the tone in commercial terms, selling more than 45 million copies.

Language, in Auel’s text, is less prominent than plot and characterisation, both of which are a good deal more complex than they are in Golding’s. Auel’s central character, Ayla, is a fully modern human, separated from her parents at an early stage and raised by Neanderthals. The language that she learns from them (described in some detail in The Clan of the Cave Bear) is more nuanced than that of Golding’s Neanderthals, a mixture of words and an elaborate system of signs. Ayla is eventually forced to leave her adopted family, and it is only after she encounters an injured man, Jondalar, and nurses him back to health, that she learns from him a language that more closely resembles our own. Later, in The Mammoth Hunters, she travels with Jondalar among peoples whose languages he can speak, but she cannot. Here, the distinction between her rudimentary dialogue, as she struggles to master a strange language, contrasts with the sophisticated verbal reasoning of her internal thoughts (presumably, though not explicitly, in the language she has only recently learned from Jondalar).

“You like touch horse?” Ayla asks a child, amazed by the fact that she (Ayla) has a tame animal.

Yet only a few pages later, Ayla is musing about the relationship between sex and reproduction:

“Ayla was puzzled again about a question that had bothered her since Durc was born. How did life begin?...Jondalar thought the Great Earth Mother mixed the spirits of a man and a woman together and put them inside the woman when she became pregnant. But Ayla had formed her own opinion. When she noticed that her son had some of her characteristics, and some of the Clan’s, she realised that no life started to grow inside her until after Broud forced his penetration into her...” (The Mammoth Hunters, Chapter 1).

There is little attempt here to imagine the language in which Ayla and Jondalar speak and think. It would surely be difficult to sustain such a linguistic experiment through all the twists and turns of a plot that fills eighteen times as many pages (taking the six volumes of Earth’s Children as a whole) as Golding’s short novel. Instead, Ayla and Jondalar speak, and think, much as we do. A novel succeeds, perhaps, as much because of what it does not attempt to do as of what it does. A novel that tries to do too many things at the same time will place too heavy a burden on the reader.

Auel’s story is not told from a single viewpoint. Instead, the third person narration alternates between Ayla’s and Jondalar’s perspective (a device introduced in The Valley of the Horses,” in which Ayla’s and Jondalar’s stories are told separately up until the point at which they meet), but takes in, also, the viewpoints of the strangers that they encounter along the way. The reader is shown Ayla’s world in quite some detail, but never really enters it. Then again, we never truly enter Lok’s world, either, because the dialogue passages are interspersed with Golding’s third person narration, very much in the literary register of the mid-twentieth century.