The "Prehistories" of Jean Rouaud. 2. The Cave of Ghosts

The Guardian recently published a list of the “top ten historical novels” (http://bit.lyL1v7QU). One of the most encouraging things about it was the number of readers’ comments received, almost all of them complaining about omissions (Tolstoy is included, along with Robert Graves, Hilary Mantel and Andrew Miller, but not William Golding, Gore Vidal or Rosemary Sutcliff…): this hardly suggests a genre untouched by greatness. A common criticism, however, was its Anglophone bias (War and Peace and The Leopard were the only non-English choices).

Jean Rouaud’s Préhistoires is not a novel as such (indeed many of his works defy conventional classification), but it is a vision of the remote past conceived by one of Europe’s leading writers of fiction. It has never been translated into English in its entirety (I might turn my hand to this at some stage). In the second of his three vignettes, “La Caverne Fantome,” he explores the possible motivations of the people who created the world’s first paintings, in the caves of southern France and northern Spain, between 30,000 and 12,000 years ago.

“Even we can read signs in the sky. When rain is threatening, we smell it; we take in our laundry; if we are on a walk, we turn around. When the leaves change colour, we do not need a calendar to tell us that winter is on its way…So for people who spent all their time outdoors, it must have been second nature. They would have learned to read these signs that were before their eyes, to notice any change; a scent on the air; a hoarse cry in a thicket; a white disc around the moon; a haze on the horizon…This learning process cannot have been without its setbacks, nor can it have been without fear. How could such people fail to shudder beneath the onslaught of a storm in which a golden arrow, loosed from the heart of a black cloud, was able to split a tree and set a scrubland ablaze?

Unseen powers lurked behind each of these phenomena. Powers that had to be interpreted, placed in the context of a narrative, a coherent story that would make sense of these strange powers of nature. It was necessary to give a name to these creatures of the shadows, to give them a history, to understand their behaviour…

…They could expect few favours from the sky: snow, rain, hail, storms, it always sent something to fall on their heads. It made sense to protect themselves. Often they found refuge beneath the ground, within the earth that must have seemed to them like a mother…

…To placate the forces of the Earth, which was pregnant with all the things on which they depended: vegetables; fruits; animals; they sought a passage into its very womb, crawling through narrow passages until they reached a larger chamber. In this imagined womb, this cave of the treasures of life, they placed their hands against the wall…The imprints they left on those walls signify their rights of access; they are signs of a transmission of energy; a form of devotion…

…As they explored the veins and arteries of the great body of the Earth, orange flames flickering from the juniper wicks of the stone lamps they held in their hands, stone lamps in their hands, they saw shadows come to life on the walls…In a bulge of stone, like a baby’s foot pressing on the inside of a woman’s belly, they recognised the hoof of a bison; in a groove in the rock, they saw the neck of a horse; in a pebble of flint, protruding from the chalk, someone imagined the eyelid of an old mammoth; and then, in a depression in the rock, they created the image of a cow…And so it was done, and beautifully done: and one might have wondered who had contributed most to this process of reproduction: the Earth herself, or the masters of the caves. Because it really was a matter of reproduction, and they reproduced everything that, to their eyes, represented excellence: power, fertility, vivacity, endurance; whether in the bison, the bull, the horse or the mammoth…The human mastery of the world was beginning…

Image: Peter80.

…These silent acts, which populated the realm of shadows with a fabulous menagerie of spirit-beings; this trembling expression in the face of the mysteries of birth and death, was to continue on the hidden walls of caves for more than twenty thousand years.”[1]

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[1] The translations here are my own.

Historical fiction - "a genre not jammed with greatness"?

Such is the nature of our electronic age that an article which carries tomorrow’s publication date may not only be freely available today, but one may then find, also, that it was already hotly contested yesterday and the day before. This is certainly the case with James Wood’s article (www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/05/07/120507crbo_books_wood), “Invitation to a Beheading,” a review of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and its forthcoming sequel, Bring Up The Bones. This has already drawn responses from, among others, Stuart Kelly (www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/02/what-makes-historical-novel?) and Richard Lee of the Historical Novels Society (http://historicalnovelsociety.org/walter-scott-prize-what-is-literary-historical-fiction). What is at issue in these debates is not Wood’s assessment of Mantel’s writing (which he considers to be very fine indeed, and in which judgement Kelly, Lee and I enthusiastically concur), but his view of historical fiction more generally, which he describes as “…a somewhat gimcrack genre, not exactly jammed with greatness.”

It would be a mistake for writers (and readers) of historical fiction to be overly defensive in relation to this banderilla. It is part of the function of publications such as The New Yorker (and, closer to home, The Guardian Review, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement etc.) to be provocative. I, for one, would not be so inclined to read them if they were less so, and it is surely no bad thing to start a debate.

From a UK point of view, we must also recognise it for what it is, which is a perspective from the other side of the pond. It is interesting that the Modern Library list of 100 best novels of the 20^th Century (www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels) includes, in the panel’s list (they publish separate lists from an expert panel and from readers), only two works of historical fiction (I, Claudius, and A Passage to India), whilst the readers’ list, which also includes the works of L. Ron Hubbard and Ayn Rand, includes three (Gone with the Wind, The French Lieutenant’s Woman and I, Claudius).

If we look, however, at the awards of the Man Booker Prize from 1980 to the present, we find six works of historical fiction out of a total thirty-three (18%) whilst, for the Whitbread/Costa Novel Award from 2000 to the present, we have three works of historical fiction out of a total of eleven (27%). This suggests, in the British context, a “genre” (if we wish to call it that) liberally salted, if not necessarily “jammed,” with greatness.

Wood refers to Mantel’s “cunning universalism” and to her “novelistic intelligence” and, on both counts, I would agree, but he does her a disservice, I think, when he suggests that she has simply “written a very good modern novel” and then changed the fictional names to historical ones. There is more to writing historical fiction than this, and it starts with assiduous research.

“If you want to know what novelistic intelligence is,” Wood suggests, “you might compare a page or two of Hilary Mantel’s work with worthy historical fiction by…Peter Ackroyd or Susan Sontag.”

Well, yes, you might, but this begins to look to me like a “straw man” type of argument. Whilst both have published historical novels, Ackroyd is better known as a biographer, Sontag as an essayist. Try comparing Mantel’s historical fiction with that of Golding, or Graves, or Yourcenar, or even that of Tolstoy, and I think that you will find that same “novelistic intelligence,” rare, but not unique, in historical, as in other forms of fiction. True greatness is rare, but isn’t that the point?

Undreamed Shores to be launched on May 24th

My debut novel, Undreamed Shores, will be published by Crooked Cat Publications (http://www.crookedcatpublishing.com) on May 24th.

Set in 2400 BC, the dawn of the Bronze Age, the age of Stonehenge, the novel tells the story of a young man's coming of age against the background of a rapidly changing society.

Swept off course by the tides at the end of his first trading voyage, Amzai finds himself washed up on the shores of a land unknown to his people. Cared for by a young woman, Nanti, Amzai must first master her unfamiliar language if he is to have any hope of survival, let alone returning home. With Nanti, Amzai walks to the heart of the strange land in which he has found himself, to the place where her father, Arthmael, is building a shrine to the sun-god, Sawel. Together, they will embark on a journey of discovery that will change not only their lives, but the lives of everyone around them, and perhaps the course of history itself.

The "Prehistories" of Jean Rouaud. 1. "The Paleo-Circus."

Jean Rouaud (b.1952) is one of France’s finest living novelists. His first book, Les Champs d’Honneur (translated as Fields of Glory) won the Prix Goncourt in 1990, and his writing, evocative of the by-ways of the rural west of France, has been compared to that of Flaubert and Faulkner (www.francemagazine.org/articles/issue71/article104.asp?issue_id=71&article_id=104). Most of his works, however, have never been translated into English, among them a small volume of three essays on prehistory entitled, simply, Prehistoires. Rouaud’s writing is deeply personal (Les Champs d’Honneur is part novel, part memoir) and, in focussing on the archaeology of western France (principally the Dordogne and Brittany), he is paying homage to his father, who was fascinated by painted caves and megaliths.

In the first of his essays, “The Palaeo-Circus,” Rouaud looks at the Upper Palaeolithic cave paintings of the Dordogne (among them Lascaux, Niaux, Peche-Merle, Le Roc aux Sorcières), a “litany of wonders…which leaves us speechless, as though turned to stone.”[1]

He places these in the context of the hunter-gatherer societies which created them, focussing not only on the developing technology of the hunt, but also on the way in which it must have been represented, the evolution of storytelling, with the best storytellers not necessarily being the best hunters. He imagines a hunting “big-shot,”[2] “…observing his biographer through the flames of a campfire, watching as he captivates the assembly, and feeling the irritation welling up within him…the sense that, somehow, the feat and its narrative are becoming confused…”

He goes further, in imagining “…a little crippled man, prevented by his crooked legs from following the hunt, who remains in the camp and does his best to help the women…fetching firewood, fanning the flames and amusing the children.” This man starts to divine patterns in the clouds, a “celestial menagerie,” the form of a bison in a large cumulus. Later, as he listens to the words of the storyteller, “…he imagines a hand above the flames, glowing in the night, sketching out the skull and neck of a mammoth, and it was as if the animal had briefly emerged from the blaze before melting back into the darkness. When the illusion fled, he found himself repeating the same gesture, until he seemed to feel with his fingers the rough wool of its coat, to remake it again, and again, to experience, through his misshapen body, the heat of the animal, and even its triumphant force.” When he draws a troop of mammoths with his finger in the sand, the chief takes the little man to one side. “He flatters him. ‘You have been hiding your talents from us. We never imagined you capable of such a thing. What good was I, facing the most ferocious of animals, when you had them in your hand all along? Why don’t you join us? You could bear witness in your own way to all that happens in the hunt, for the benefit of those who stay in the camp.”

(Picture by Carla Hufstedler)

It is difficult to imagine a comparable volume of essays being published by an Anglophone writer. Rightly or wrongly, publishers in the British Isles and North America seem to believe that their readers prefer fiction and non-fiction to be clearly demarcated and separate from one another. “The Palaeo-Circus” defies such categorisation: it is an essay, rather than a short story (it starts with a discussion of the evolution of the human brain; it does not have named characters; the “story” does not have a clearly defined beginning or end), but Rouaud uses the sensitivity and craft of the fiction writer to imagine the human dimensions of the remote past, just as William Golding does in The Inheritors, or Elizabeth Marshall Thomas in Reindeer Moon. A similar merging of fiction and non-fiction is seen in Les Champs d’Honneur: is it a novel (it is marketed as such) or a memoir of three generations of the author’s own family? Within the Anglophone publishing world, and within historical fiction specifically, recent years have seen a significant number of established non-fiction authors (Harry Sidebottom, Hallie Rubenhold, Alison Weir, Rebecca Stott) turning their hands to fiction. Perhaps they have discovered, as Rouaud has, that the very different craft of writing fiction allows them to reach into corners of the past that are not directly accessible to the historian or the archaeologist writing in their more traditional mode.

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[1] All translations here are my own.

[2] “Le grand caid.” The word can mean, simply, “boss,” but is sometimes used in the more specific context of a gangster boss.

"The War of Science and Religion," 2012 vs 1860

Last Thursday’s debate[1] in Oxford between the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and Professor Richard Dawkins has inevitably drawn comparisons with the 1860 debate between the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, and “Darwin’s bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley. Boxing metaphors were used in both cases to draw attention to the clash between religious and scientific values: the botanist, Joseph Hooker, claimed, in 1860, to have “...smacked [Wilberforce] amid rounds of applause...hit him in the wind at the first shot in ten...,” whilst Sean Coughlan, reporting for the BBC (www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-17140107), describes last week’s debate as beginning “...with the air of an upmarket version of boxing in the Royal Albert Hall.” Coughlan concluded that “...no real knockout punches were delivered” in the most recent debate, a judgement echoed by The Guardian’s Andrew Brown (www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/feb/23/richard-dawkins-rowan-williams-bout).

The Wilberforce-Huxley encounter has become one of the most picked-over quarrels in the history of science: I made my own contribution to the discussion in my biography of Sir John Lubbock[2], who spoke on the evolutionist side. There never was a “debate,” however, between Wilberforce and Huxley in the sense that there was a debate last week between Williams and Dawkins. The man easily forgotten in the context of the 1860 deliberations is John William Draper, of New York University: it was his paper on “The Darwin Hypothesis” that people came to listen to in 1860, the comments by Wilberforce, Huxley and Hooker being incidental to this (Huxley had not even intended to be present).

The audience at last week’s debate politely acceded to the request from the chairman (the philosopher, Sir Anthony Kenny) not to applaud until the very end. The 1860 audience could hardly have been more different. The various contemporary accounts may not agree on much, but they do concur around the fact that some audience members cheered loudly for Wilberforce, and others for Huxley and Hooker. It is suggested that some students in the audience were chanting “Monkey! Monkey!” at one point in the proceedings; that a woman fainted and had to be carried out; and that Darwin’s one-time Captain (by this time, Admiral), Robert Fitzroy, wielded “an immense bible” in anger. At some point the Bishop, attempting, one suspects, to inject some humour into the stifling atmosphere of a hot and crowded room, turned to Huxley and asked whether it was on his grandfather’s or his grandmother’s side that he wished to claim descent from an ape. Huxley retorted that he would rather be descended from an ape than from a man such as the Bishop and, at that point, the history and the mythology of the event become difficult to disentangle.

Nobody suggested in 1860, as Sean Coughlan maintained of last week’s debate, that supporters of God and atheism left “with honours even and without tempers being frayed,” but the outcomes of the two discussions may not have been so very different. Coughlan’s anonymous professional antecedent, writing in The Athenaeum, concluded that the protagonists on each side “...made their charges and countercharges very much to their own satisfaction and the delight of their respective friends.”  

So what, if anything, has changed. Well, for one thing, the only joke that Archbishop Williams made was at his own expense (concerning his lack of familiarity with razors), and at no time did he, or anyone else, deny the non-human origins of our species. Audiences and protagonists alike seem to have become more polite. It seems as natural, in our 21^st Century world, for bishops to respect the point of view of atheists, as it does for Christians, Jews and Muslims to respect one another. That, in itself, is surely no bad thing, but it can lend a certain sterility to debates such as this. Last Thursday’s debate may well have been more edifying, but one has to suspect that the debate of 1860 may well have been more fun.

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[1] A recording of the debate can be viewed at www.archbishopofcanterbury.org

[2] M. Patton 2007, Science, Politics and Business in the Work of Sir John Lubbock: A Man of Universal Mind. Ashgate.

Bronze Age boat to be reconstructed in Cornwall

Archaeologists at the University of Exeter recently announced a project to recreate one the earliest boats ever found in western Europe, dating to around 2000 BC (www.exeter.ac.uk/research/news/title_174558_en.html). The boat will be built using authentic tools, and will form part of the exhibition, 2012 BC: Cornwall and the Sea in the Bronze Age, at the National Maritime Museum, Cornwall. It will be made from oak planks, sewn together with yew fibres and caulked with moss. The exhibition itself will run from April to August and the team, led by Professor Robert Van de Noort, will then experiment with the performance of the vessel in open water.

That our prehistoric ancestors engaged in overseas trade has been known for decades. From jadeite axes, imported to Britain from the Italian Alps more than five thousand years ago, to jewellery made of gold sourced chemically to Central Europe, buried with the dead of four thousand years ago, UK museum collections are full of exotic objects, but it has often been difficult to imagine the details of the journeys that people made to bring those objects to our shores.

J.S. Dunn, in her recent novel, Bending the Boyne,[1] set in Ireland in around 2400 BC, has his protaganist, Cian, travelling from Co. Meath as far south as the Basque country, but she does not describe the voyages themselves, or the craft in which they are undertaken, in any great detail. In my own short story, The Thread that Binds (http://www.etherbooks.com/), set partly in around 3800 BC, I have characters travelling in a skin-covered boat, much like an Irish currach. Such vessels are easy to describe – I can’t claim to have been in a currach, but I have examined them at close quarters in Co. Donegal, and listened to the tales of men who once fished regularly in them.

The archaeological evidence from England, however, suggests that prehistoric communities here may have used a different type of vessel. When the first sewn-plank boats were discovered, at Brigg in Lincolnshire, and North Ferriby in Yorkshire, it was assumed that they were inland vessels for use on rivers and fens. More recent discoveries, for example at Dover, have led to suggestions that they may, in fact, have been seagoing vessels[2]. The reconstruction of an essentially similar, but much later boat from Hjortspring, Denmark, shows that vessels of this type would be perfectly capable of sea voyages (http://www.hjortspring.dk/). The Exeter project and exhibition now provides an opportunity, for the first time, to see the construction, and then the use, of what may have been a distinctly British form of wooden boat of the 2^nd Millennium BC.

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[1] 2011, Seriously Good Books.

[2] R. Van de Noort 2006 “Argonauts of the North Sea: A Social Maritime Archaeology for the 2^nd Millennium BC. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 72, 267-287.

Islands and the Historical Imagination

Having grown up on a small island (Jersey), and lived there for almost half of my life, I have often had occasion to pause and reflect on what it is that makes island life “special” and “different,” what it is that gives islands a particular character. My book. Islands in Time (www.mark-patton.co.uk/id1.html) was an attempt to explore these questions through archaeological evidence. The book focussed on a range of issues including the development of human communities in island ecosystems; the establishment of exchange networks linking islands with one another, and with adjacent mainlands; and the flourishing of unique monumental traditions in isolated communities. It was a fascinating exercise, but it always seemed to me that something was missing. That something, I now realise, was the emotional dimension of island life.

With the Autumn Term now finished, I have started on my holiday reading, discovering, in the process, three works of fiction which illuminate this dimension of island societies, rather as Italo Calvino shone a light on urban cultures with Invisible Cities.

From the Mouth of the Whale, by the Icelandic writer, Sjon (Telegram, 2011) is a work of “pure” historical fiction, set in 17^th Century Iceland. Accused of sorcery and necromancy, the poet, naturalist and healer, Jónas Palmason, is exiled to the remote Gullbjorn’s Island. Ancient myths mingle with beautifully observed evocations of the natural world as Jónas struggles to save his family, dreams of leaving his island prison, and finally takes solace in nature as he comes to see the solitary life of the sandpiper as a metaphor for his own predicament.

Darrell Kastin’s The Undiscovered Island (University of Massachussetts Dartmouth, 2009) is set in the Azores, and begins with a mystery set in the present day. Julia Castro, a naturalised American, returns to the islands in search of her father, a local historian who has disappeared without trace. She is soon caught up in a surreal kaleidoscope of past and present; myth and reality; with tales of an enchanted island that appears periodically from the depths of the sea; ghostly sirens emerging from the mist; talking skulls; and threads of ancestry and tradition that bind the people of the present to the murderous intrigues of the royal courts of the 16^th and 17^th Centuries.

Hy Brasil, by Margaret Elphinstone (Canongate, 2002) is set entirely in the present, and on an imaginary mid-Atlantic island. Sidony Redruth, a young Englishwoman, has been commissioned to write a tourist guide to the island. Her researches uncover a number of mysteries, behind which lie dark truths about the island’s recent past and the 20^th Century revolution in which the island won its independence. Elphinstone has the political and social intrigues of a small island community spot-on (uncannily so for this reader) but she also draws on the connections between the present and the past, with modern institutions rooted in the Age of Piracy and the island’s identity forged in relation to its ever-shifting volcanic landscape.

The themes that unite these three books all relate to the nature of human communities in environments that are geographically (and perhaps also genetically) circumscribed: the ways in which this “boundedness” draws people into a closer relationship with the rocks, plants and animals that make up their miniature universe; and draws the present into a more intimate relationship with both the recent and the more distant past. Myth, likewise, enters into a more enduring compact with reality in a setting with fixed and tightly drawn boundaries.