The Year's Midnight

“'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,

Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;

The sun is spent, and now his flasks

Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;

The world's whole sap is sunk;

The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,

Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,

Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,

Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.”

John Donne, “A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy’s Day.”

Donne’s poem is dated 13^th December, 1627. The 13^th December was then, and still is, Saint Lucy’s day; but it no longer marks, as it did in 1627, the Winter Solstice. Donne lived his life according to the Julian Calendar, whilst we (post-1752) live ours according to the Gregorian (a fact to be borne in mind by those of us who write historical fiction and care about whether a particular date in a certain year fell on a Sunday or a Tuesday, or whether the moon would have been full on the night our characters set sail from a certain port). The Winter Solstice now falls on 21^st December (same day in solar terms, different position in our human calendar). Donne’s “Nocturnal” is, on the one hand, a lamentation on the human experience of bereavement and, on the other, a meditation on the transience of life and its concerns. Donne draws an explicit link between the low point of the solar year (the Winter Solstice) and the low point in the life of an individual (the death of the person he most loves).

 The Braque Family Triptych, by Rogier van der Weyden, Musee du Louvre, Paris.

In making this connection, Donne is drawing on a much older theme, a link between death and the Winter Solstice. That the Winter Solstice was marked in prehistory has long been understood. The principle axis of Stonehenge, for example, is solsticial, with key alignments based on sunrise at the Summer Solstice and sunset at the Winter Solstice. A team of archaeologists led by Professor Mike Parker-Pearson have recently argued that the Winter Solstice at Stonehenge may have been more significant than the Summer Solstice, linked to their understanding of the site as a funerary monument. The winter sunset would be viewed from the Avenue, almost certainly the ceremonial approach to the monument, whereas the summer sunrise would have to be viewed from the other side of the monument, or from within it.

                                                      Stonehenge in Winter.

In my novel, Undreamed Shores, I depict both a winter and a summer ceremony at Stonehenge. I have more people from a wider area participating in the summer ceremony (in a society without permanent bridges, it would be difficult to travel around a landscape in which the rivers are likely to be in flood), but it is the winter ceremony that I describe in greatest detail (for the simple narrative reason that this is the first ceremony experienced by my protagonist at the site).

 The Lin Brook (a tributary of the Salisbury Avon, which runs past Stonehenge - "the River Elawar" in Undreamed Shores) in flood.

Given that the Stonehenge Avenue connects the monument to the river, it is likely that the Winter Solstice ceremonies involved some form of procession along the river from the settlement of Durrington Walls and, in the novel, my heroine, Nanti, explains this to my protagonist, Amzai:

“All our life is a journey, and death too. We can no more go back to childhood than the dead can come back to the world of the living. Like the river, life has its twists and turns, and we don’t always know where it will take us, except that, one way or another, it will always carry us forwards, never backwards. The river can’t run uphill…Each drop of water flows along the river only once, just as each person lives only one life here…And at the end of the river, each drop of water flows into a new and different world, that of the sea, just as, at the end of our lives here, we are taken into another world…of which we know little.”

 Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon. 

The Age of Bronze in Prehistory, Art and Fiction

In one of the earliest commentaries on world history (c700 BC), the Greek writer, Hesiod, placed the “Age of Bronze” mid-way between the “Age of Gold” and the impoverished “Age of Iron,” in which he considered himself unfortunate enough to live. More than two and a half millennia later, the Danish archaeologist, Christian Jurgensen Thomsen, reinstated the idea of a “Bronze Age,” albeit within a very different conceptual paradigm. Thomsen’s “Three Age System” (Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age) remains the basis for the chronological understanding of European prehistory to this day and, in the British Isles, the Bronze Age can be dated between c2400 BC and c750 BC. I have written, in my biography of Sir John Lubbock (www.mark-patton.co.uk/id1.html), of the process by which this framework was refined and popularised.

The Bronze exhibition currently showing at London’s Royal Academy of Arts (until 9^th December) explores the aesthetic value of bronze as a material from earliest times down to the present day, displaying Bronze Age objects alongside some of the masterpieces of classical antiquity, and sculptures by artists including Cellini, Rodin and Picasso.

Recent works of historical fiction, including J.P. Reedman’s Stone Lord and J.S. Dunn’s Bending the Boyne, as well as my own Undreamed Shores, have set out to imagine the culture and motivations of the very first bronze workers in this part of the world. Those early bronze-smiths could surely not have conceived of a work on the scale of Cellini’s Perseus, which is one of the centrepieces of the exhibition, yet, in a very real sense, their efforts paved the way for this extraordinary grandeur.

 

I was naturally attracted to two of the earliest pieces in the exhibition, which I think have much to say about the real “Age of Bronze.”

The first of these objects is a figurine, believed to be of a tribal chief, from Late Bronze Age Sardinia (7^th or 8^th Century BC). Wherever bronze was first introduced, perhaps especially in communities that did not already have iron, it seems to have been accompanied by fundamental changes in social structure, with the increasing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few individuals. Unlike iron, copper and tin (the components of bronze) are relatively rare elements, and often need to be obtained by trade: those trade routes can be monopolised and defended by a combination of charisma, diplomacy and, where necessary, warfare. Though separated both by hundreds of years and by hundreds of miles, this Bronze Age Sardinian belongs recognisably to the same social milieu as Reedman’s Ardhu, Dunn’s Elcmar and my Gwalchmai.

 

 

The second object is a model chariot, with a gilded disc usually assumed to represent the sun, found at Trundholm in Denmark, and dated to around 1400 BC.  Sun worship may not have begun in the 3^rd Millenium BC, and may not have been universal in the European Bronze Age, but the period certainly provides some striking testaments of it, and this is surely one of them. There are two other points of interest here. The world of Undreamed Shores (set around 2400 BC) includes neither domesticated horses nor wheeled transport; that of Stone Lord (set around five centuries later) includes both. Exactly when either was introduced is difficult to determine, but both seem to have made their appearance during the Bronze Age, and to have been well-established in most parts of Europe by the end of it. The trade and exchange that enabled the first bronze-smiths to obtain their raw materials almost certainly facilitated the spread of other ideas and technologies as well.

 

Undreamed Shores can be purchased from www.amazon.com and www.amazon.co.uk, as well as from www.crookedcatbooks.com.

Island stamps celebrate megalithic heritage

A set of stamps recently issued by the Post Office in Jersey celebrates the island’s megalithic heritage and, in doing so, provides a glimpse of some of the places that lie at the heart of my novel, Undreamed Shores.

The stamps (www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-jersey-20184370) show five megalithic sites: Mont Ubé; Le Couperon; Ville-ès-Noaux; Grantez and Faldouet.

Mont Ubé, which one has to imagine with its original capstones and covering mound, is the 6000 year old site, already ancient when the story opens, that features in Chapter 3 as ‘the Shrine of the Gannet Clan:’ “In his dream, he found himself in a confined space, crouching on the ground. Water dripped onto his shoulder from the crack between the heavy capstones…The quartz and mica crystals of the stones twinkled in the flickering light of his uncle’s lamp. He felt he was falling backwards, being pulled back into the belly of the earth. The signs of the ancestors flashed before his eyes: bindweed tendrils, spirals, whirlpools in the air. Gero…reached into the depths of one of the stone boxes that lined the wall of the shrine and produced a skull, handing it to Amzai…”.

 

Mont Ube (top left), Le Couperon, Ville-es-Nouaux (top right), Grantez & Faldouet

 

The construction of Ville-ès-Nouaux takes place during the story, and is described in Chapter 19: “She pointed to the spot where the magpie had fallen.’Please bury his body separately over there, and cover it with the largest rock you can find, so his spirit cannot walk the Earth. Cover the rock with clay and place a circle of stones around the mound. I will cast a spell on that circle that will contain his poison forever…’”.  

The Faldouet dolmen, already shown on one of the island’s coins, features in my short story, “The Thread that Binds (www.etherbooks.com).”

 

 

 

Undreamed Shores, the paperback edition, is available at £8.09 from www.amazon.co.uk/Undreamed-Shores-Mark-Patton/dp/1908910410/ref=sr_1-1.

Oral Tradition and Historical Fiction

However far back in time a historical novel may be set, the characters that feature in it must have an awareness and an understanding of times that came before them. Their narratives about those times will, almost invariably, be different from ours. They will frequently be based on oral tradition rather than written sources, raising the fascinating question of how long an oral tradition might survive.

One of the turning points in my novel, Undreamed Shores, comes when an old man recites a poem that tells of a voyage made by ancestors more than a thousand years before his own time. The book’s ending (which I do not intend to give away here) is loosely based on a legend, first written down in the 16^th Century, and bearing all the stylistic hallmarks of a Medieval romance (a gallant knight, a dragon, a treacherous betrayal; a noble and constant lady). By adapting this legend in a story set in 2400 BC, I explore the possibility that the story itself might be based on a tradition that goes back millennia, rather than merely centuries. J.P. Reedman, in her recently published novel, Stone Lord, goes even further, in taking the familiar legends of the Arthurian cycle back to the age of Stonehenge. Neither Reedman nor I has evidence, of the sort that would convince a historian, to support such a contention but that, in a sense, is the point about writing historical fiction:  it enables us to explore aspects of the past that historians and archaeologists have no means of reaching.

So how far back might oral traditions go? Some of the descriptions of weapons and armour in Homer’s Iliad seem to predate the poem itself by four or five centuries. Among the folk songs collected by Cecil Sharp are some that appear to go back as far as the Hundred Years War. The French archaeologist, José Garanger, working on the Pacific island of Vanuatu, found material evidence in support of a legend concerning a powerful chief, Roy Mata, who had lived seven hundred years earlier. Is this a truly exceptional case, or just one of many stories that endured?

The grave-marker of Roy Mata on Vanuatu, evidence that the precise details of a historical event can survive in oral tradition for many centuries.

 

Our own “collective memory,” as Europeans, goes back around 2500 years: Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great and Socrates all have a place within it. Going back beyond this, we may still have names (Achilles, Odysseus, Jason), but it becomes increasingly difficult to separate out the fact from the fiction. Perhaps, indeed, it is the fictional element, the fantastical, that has allowed these stories to survive at all? All of these stories, of course, have survived with the aid of written records. If we imagine, however, that oral traditions might have allowed a British contemporary of Julius Caesar to see back into the past as far as we can: that person might be connected by these traditions to the builders of Stonehenge; and they, in turn, to the first farmers in this part of the world.  

Undreamed Shores, the paperback edition, is available at £8.09 from www.amazon.co.uk/Undreamed-Shores-Mark-Patton/dp/1908910410/ref=sr_1-1. Further information, including two short stories linked to the novel, is available from my website: www.mark-patton.co.uk.

Launch of Undreamed Shores - The Paperback Edition

The paperback edition of my novel, Undreamed Shores, is published today by Crooked Cat Publications (www.crookedcatpublishing.com).

 

Set in 2400 BC, and ranging over southern England, Northern France and the Channel Islands, Stonehenge features prominently in the novel. Coincidentally, just as the paperback edition went to print, English Heritage announced the results of new research using 3D laser scanning technology (http://blog.stonehenge-stone-circle.co.uk/2012/10/8/the-solstice-connection-laser-scanning-uncovers-new-stonehenge-evidence/), including a detailed analysis of the way in which the stones were shaped by the builders of the monument. Whilst previous research on Stonehenge has emphasised the monument’s alignment towards the rising sun on the day of the Summer Solstice, the new research suggests an equally important focus on the setting sun on the day of the Winter Solstice.

Stonehenge at Sunset, by John Constable (Yale Center for British Art). 

 

Whilst Undreamed Shores includes both a summer and a winter ceremony, it is the winter ceremony that I have chosen to imagine in greater detail, because this is the first ceremony that my protagonist, a stranger to British shores, witnesses at Stonehenge. This ceremony is likely to have involved a boat journey along the River Avon from Durrington Walls (the closest large settlement), followed by a procession along the Stonehenge Avenue, with the sunset being observed from the north-east, and this is precisely what I describe. The following extracts are from Chapter 9.

“When the day came for the Winter Sun Ceremony, Amzai emerged from the house into a world transformed by snow. It was only a light dusting, but the sun’s rays reflecting off the clean snow created a brilliance of light that made the land itself seem to vibrate, like a low musical humming…”

“…On the riverside, a large ceremonial boat was moored, close to the village gate…On either side of the river, the white snow of the hillsides gleamed and glistened like quartz dust…They alighted by the carved posts…and…processed along the avenue, their shoes crunching the crisp but shallow snow…The sun was already low in the sky ahead of them, casting long shadows on the snow, as the shrine came into view…In the entrance to the shrine, just in front of the large, bulky stone that stood there, a small fire burned. Beside it, on the snow, lay a thick blanket of fox-pelts…”

“…Only when the gathering night had extinguished the tiny puddle of red light that lingered on the horizon, did the drumming and the ululating cease, leaving the shrine in silence once again…”

The Stonehenge that Amzai visits is not the monument we see today. The bluestones, transported from west Wales, are present as a double circle, with a monolith at its centre, but the larger sarsens, including the great trilithons, exist, at this stage, only as an idea in the mind of one of the characters, Amzai’s brother-in-law, Gwalchmai. There is scope, here, for a sequel, but that is far into the future!

Undreamed Shores, the paperback edition, is available at £8.09 from www.amazon.co.uk/Undreamed-Shores-Mark-Patton/dp/1908910410/ref=sr_1-1. Further information, including two short stories linked to the novel, is available from my website: www.mark-patton.co.uk.

"The Next Big Thing"

This questionnaire, entitled “The Next Big Thing,” seems to be doing the rounds on the internet (it was brought to my attention by fellow writer Nancy Bilyeau – http://nancybilyeau.blogspot.com), so I thought it would be interesting to answer the questions and introduce my next major writing project.

What is your working title of your book?

An Accidental King.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

When I was a child, growing up in Jersey, we used to take a two week holiday most years, spending the first week in the New Forest and the second week with my grandfather in East Sussex. My parents did everything they could to encourage my interest in archaeology and history and, since Fishbourne Roman Palace (near Chichester) was roughly midway on our journey, we generally stopped there. I must have been 8 years old when I first saw it, and immediately wanted to know more about it: why it was built, and who lived there. Since then I have studied and taught archaeology, but those questions have kept coming back to my mind.

What genre does your book fall under?

Historical fiction.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Difficult to answer, since the book covers the events of four decades (43 AD-80 AD). Essentially, my protagonist, the client King, Tiberius Claudius Cogidubnus, looks back on his life from his late 60’s, so I’d love for that role to be played by Sir Ian McKellan. We might need to find someone else to play him in his younger days. It would be great for Sir Derek Jacobi to return to his earlier role as the Emperor Claudius, and for Sir Patrick Stewart to play Vespasian.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Tiberius Claudius Cogidubnus, the pro-Roman client King of Southern Britain, looks back on his life and reign; at his friendship with the Emperor Claudius, and the future Emperor, Vespasian; at his attempts to maintain peace & prosperity in his kingdom, to prevent the Boudican Revolt (and, later, to limit its extent and deal with its aftermath); and at the shifting nature of the relationship between Britain and Rome.  

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I don’t intend to self-publish. Whether or not it will be represented by an agency is subject to on-going discussions.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I think it took about a year (working full-time for around half of this) to write the first draft. It has taken me a further three years (working part-time) to get it to its current point (i.e. the submission stage – Draft 12), with professional assistance from The Literary Consultancy (www.literaryconsultancy.co.uk) and help, also, from an online critique group.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

It is written in the first person, so the obvious points of comparison are Robert Graves’s Claudius novels and Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, both of which I love. It is written, however, for a 21st Century readership, so the writing style is quite different. Also, the focus is specifically on Britain and, in this sense, it comes closer to Manda Scott’s Boudica Dreaming series, though told, of course, from the completely opposite point of view.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Apart from my early visits to Fishbourne (which many archaeologists and historians believe to have been built for Cogidubnus by Vespasian), my subsequent academic studies and countless conversations with colleagues and students, I have frequently made connections with more recent events.

This, in one sense, is my response to 9/11. I can so easily imagine someone like Cogidubnus being seduced by elements of Roman culture (the architecture of the Forum – which my fictional Cogidubnus sees as a young man, the beauty of the written word in the poetry of Virgil & Ovid) in much the same way that, all over the world, people of my parents’ generation were seduced by aspects of American culture (Jazz, Rock & Roll, Hollywood, not to mention the charisma of politicians such as FDR and JFK).

A Mosaic floor at Fishbourne, probably from Cogidubnus's time (photo: Immanuel Guel).

 

 The Roman Forum, through which my fictional Cogidubnus rides alongside Vespasian, in the Triumph of the Emperor Claudius (photo: Carla Tavares).

 

The ancient mine-shaft on Iceni territory, where the protagonist is held hostage in the aftermath of the Boudican Revolt (photo: Ashley Dace).

 

The realisation of the unequal nature of the “special relationships” that arise from such a seduction comes later, and draws a variety of responses, which are not easy to reconcile.

 
What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?
 
The central part of the book gives a graphic account of the Boudican Revolt, from the perspective of its victims (most of whom would have been British, rather than “Roman” in the strict sense), and in a way which, I hope, has strong contemporary resonances.

Historical Fiction and the 2012 Man Booker Prize

Here is the 2012 long-list for the Man Booker Prize. Those high-lighted in blue are those that have made it onto the short-list. The final result will be announced on 16^th October.

 

Bring Up The Bodies                                      Hilary Mantel

Narcopolis                                                       Jeet Thayil

Swimming Home                                             Deborah Levy

The Garden of Evening Mists                         Tan Twan Eng

Umbrella                                                         Will Self

The Lighthouse                                                Alison Moore

Communion Town                                           Sam Thompson

Philida                                                             André Brink

Skios                                                                Michael Frayn

The Teleportation Accident                             Ned Beauman

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry          Rachel Joyce

The Yips                                                           Nicola Barker.

 

Of the twelve books on the long-list, three can be considered as historical fiction (Bring Up The Bodies, The Garden of Evening Mists and Philida), and two of these have been short-listed. To return to an earlier discussion (my blog post of 6^th May), this does not quite suggest “a somewhat gimcrack genre, not exactly jammed with greatness.”

 

Of the books on the short-list, one of the historical novels, Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up The Bodies seems to be emerging as the hot favourite to win the prize. My money was on this book from the start. To my mind, it is a worthy sequel to Wolf Hall, and I can’t wait to read the third book in the series. Mantel pulls off brilliantly the difficult task of getting the reader to see a past world through the eyes of someone who could so easily be seen (and so often has been seen) as a villain. She does not make Thomas Cromwell a hero: his ruthlessness and vindictiveness are not glossed over by any means; but she also shows another side to him – a caring family man; loyal to his true friends; capable of pity and compassion as well as cruelty; in short, a three dimensional human character. The reader is continually confronted with the question (as I have heard the author herself remark) “if you were Thomas Cromwell, what would you have done in this situation?” The easy answer might be to say that I would never have become the kind of person that Thomas Cromwell was; but this is a 21^st Century response, and Mantel does not allow her readers to get away so easily. This is historical fiction at its challenging best.

 

 

 

The judges, of course, might prefer to back a less well-established writer (Mantel has already won the award for Wolf Hall and is, I suspect, set for yet more exalted heights of international literary recognition in the future). If there is one author on the short-list who could give her a run for her money, I think it is probably Tan Twan Eng, with his second published novel, The Garden of Evening Mists, set against the background of the Japanese occupation of Malaya.

As a recent reviewer in The Guardian pointed out, it is “impossible to resist” a book which begins: “On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan." That same reviewer, however, describes the book as “bland,” a sentiment with which I cannot possibly agree. It charts the growing relationship between this old man and a retired Malayan woman judge, Teoh Yun Ling, as they build a garden together amid the mists of the mountain. It is a book with an almost magical sense of place. I don’t envy the judges their task of choosing between such different books (not to mention the contemporary fiction works on the list, not all of which I have read), but I look forward to hearing the result, and am glad to see historical fiction holding its own amid such a wealth of diverse literary offerings. 

Are there books on the long-list that you think deserved to be on the short-list but aren't? Are there other books that you think should have been on the long-list (mine might include Andrew Miller's Pure and Katie Ward's Girl Reading).