Ricky Swallow and Ah Xian

The exhibition of Ricky Swallow’s work at the NGV  is worth seeing.  It’s pretty small, but includes some really remarkable works. They’re special because Swallow, unlike some much-hyped contemporary artists (Jeff Koons comes to mind) actually knows how to make things. You look at his work and are blown away by the craft and skill involved. The best work in this exhibition is Killing Time, which is a carving in wood of a table overflowing with fish, crustaceans and other sea creatures. Swallow’s dad was a fisherman and the work is a homage to him, as well as a brilliant contribution to the tradition of still life.

There are other interesting works in the show – some carvings inspired  by the Californian music scene (where Swallow, raised in Melbourne, currently lives), intriguing creations like bronze balloons encrusted with barnacles, and a bunch of (not particularly inspired) watercolours. If you want to see more, this guy went to the opening and  took  photos.

One of my pet peeves is the way that galleries like to surround an artist’s work with over-elaborate explanations that instruct you what the work means, rather than letting you interpret it for yourself. The NGV is generally pretty good though I do think some of the information provided about Swallow’s work is a tad pretentious – for example why use a word like ‘quotidian’ to describe his subject matter, rather than ‘everyday’? 

While you are at the NGV you could also check out the finalists of the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award – especially the winning work by Ah Xian, Concrete Forest, which consists of 36 busts made of concrete and overlaid with organic shapes. It’s unsettling close up – reminiscent of the terracotta army.  But the more you look at them, the more differences emerge between the individual busts. Like Swallow, Ah Xian has amazing technical skill. His work is all about craft and detail, and you can spend ages just gazing at it.

Ah Xian is a Sydney-based artist originally from China, who spent five years seeking asylum and eight working as a housepainter. Here’s an article about him from The Australian .

The Wonder of Whiffling

The Wonder of Whiffling by Adam Jacot de Boinod is about the marvellous but unknown words that exist in the English language. It includes dialect words like  ‘crambazzled’, a Yorkshire word meaning ‘prematurely aged through drink and a dissolute life’, and ‘engustration’ which means to stuff one bird into another, presumably to cook. There are apparently 15 or so different definitions of ‘whiffling’, hence the title of the book. The author recently discussed his book on the ABC’s Lingua Franca, you can read or listen to the interview here. (P.S., thanks Bob for the tip).

Book animation

Here’s a wonderful animation from the NZ Book Council of books coming to life …

Things we didn’t see coming

Lately I’ve read a few dystopian novels (though certainly not all the ones on this list) - novels which imagine how things would turn out in the worst of all possible worlds.   As a teenager,  Brave New World and  Nineteen Eighty Four made an impact on me and more recently I’ve enjoyed David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (‘enjoyed’ wasn’t quite the word for that one).  I don’t know if there have been many Australian contributions to the genre, but now we have a new one – Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam.

Dystopias usually reflect the worst fears of the time in which they were written.  In that respect, Things We Didn’t See Coming fits the criteria perfectly. Amsterdam throws in most of the things our culture is scared about right now: epidemics, climate change, bushfires, oppressive governments, mass movements of refugees, cultural clashes, excessive medical technology, even computer malfunctions – and imagines a society in which all of these have gone to hell at once. The event that triggers the catastrophe is a computer meltdown similar to the millennium bug. It feels as if Amsterdam is pressing every possible panic button – rather than focussing on one thing, and taking that to its extreme, as David Mitchell does with genetic engineering in the ‘Orison of Sonmi ~451′ sections of Cloud Atlas.

The novel consists of nine fairly short chapters told from the point of view of a nameless narrator, each chapter separated by a few years. The first sees the narrator and his parents escaping from the city to get away from the the coming apocalypse which his father is the only person to foresee, telling him:

“Picture this: the future is a hospital, packed with sick people, packed with hurt people, people on stretchers in the halls, and suddenly the lights go out, the water shuts off, and you know in your heart that they’re never coming back on. That’s the future.”

In subsequent chapters he helps his grandparents flee from their city homes across the border for one last adventure; gets various administrative jobs with whatever government is in place;  sees people die of plague; eats rats; falls in with a charismatic, pan-sexual, populist politician (an intriguing character who could have been developed further); lives on a commune; and gets a job as tour guide for people experiencing a final adventure before their imminent, genetically predestined death.

Each chapter works well as a short story in its own right, though I found it frustrating that so many supporting characters appear for a few pages and then are never seen again. Amsterdam doesn’t make the mistake of explaining too much: details about how this post-apocalyptic society is supposed to work are left vague, and in any case it all seems to change from one chapter to the next. Casual references like “I was getting settled in Verification, she had finished training to work in Grief” hint at a plausible idea of how a government might  respond to disaster, rapidly transforming it into bureaucracy.  If anything, I reckon Amsterdam exaggerates how efficient a government is likely to be in such circumstances (see Ed O’Loughlin’s Not Untrue and Not Unkind, set in central Africa,  for an account of what societies are really like when all vestiges of law and government break down.)

The Road by Cormac McCarthy also deals with the aftermath of disaster, but Amsterdam’s novel is far less grim than McCarthy’s. Amsterdam’s society does not appear to have disintegrated totally: some kind of government, if authoritarian, still operates; functioning communities still exist; medical treatment can be had, if only for a fee; and though there are mentions of “Border clashes … friends turning friends in …Small town mayors executed” these events aren’t actually witnessed and we never approach the total anarchy that occurs in The Road, with its bands of marauding cannibals. The Road is far more scary for that reason: McCarthy’s imagination pushes relentlessly into the heart of darkness, whereas in Amsterdam’s world most people become no more horrible, on the whole, than they are in normal circumstances. In fact some of them react to the end of civilisation as we know it with only mild annoyance. “The men all tell me I shouldn’t be doing this job, the women are mostly polite,” our narrator observes when he turns up to kick people out of their houses, as if he was telling them their train was running five minutes late. Country people ordered to leave their homes, mostly polite? Really?

Amsterdam’s hero, too, never reaches the end of his rope: he’s a born survivor, a pragmatist, petty thief and opportunist, who has moments of despondency and near-despair but not to the extent that you really fear for him. He’s mildly appealing if not enormously sympathetic as a protagonist, an everyman who has small revelations and makes small decisions. There’s no Winston Smith-like total collapse, nor any great victory. At the end of the novel he’s still the faintly pessimistic, wry, bumbling character he was at the start.

This novel won The Age Book of the Year Award in 2009 and it’s a good, left of field choice, a first novel published by a small independent publisher, Sleepers. It certainly came as a relief to see something different on the awards lists, most of which have been dominated by the same handful of books this year.  Will it last? I’m not sure. It’s well-written, in a style that aims for punch rather than pyrotechnics, and while Amsterdam’s imagination isn’t as dazzling as David Mitchell’s (but then, whose is?) or as bleak as Cormac McCarthy’s (ditto) it takes the reader to some interesting places. This is one of the more audacious novels I’ve read recently, even if I think Amsterdam could have taken the ideas and the characters a lot further than he ultimately does.

Here’s It’s the End of the World as We Know It  by REM.

Wolf Hall: The West Wing in tights

Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novel Wolf Hall is a very modern take on Tudor England. It takes as its subject one of the most interesting periods of English history – the years 1527-1535, during which Henry VIII ends his marriage to his first wife Katherine of Aragon, takes a new queen, Anne Boleyn, and splits with the Church of Rome. This era has been the setting for many a fictional romance, but because Mantel’s focus is on politics rather than love, and because her treatment of the material and characters is so contemporary, Wolf Hall is nothing like a conventional historical novel -  it’s more like The West Wing in tights (or doublet and hose, if you want to be technical).

Everyone speaks modern English for a start, with only the occasional picturesque oath  (“The people don’t give a fourpenny fuck”) for added colour. I have no problem with this – the effect is to demonstrate how modern these people were, though what is lost is a sense of how different the medieval mind was from our own. Mantel’s main protagonist is Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief political fixer. He’s a man from a humble background – the first chapter shows us the young Thomas being brutalised by his father, a blacksmith, before running off overseas. He spends time as a mercenary in foreign armies before resurfacing as right hand man to Cardinal Wolsey, Archbishop of York. The urbane Wolsey sees potential in the ruthless and quick-witted Cromwell, takes him under his wing and teaches him about court intrigue. But Wolsey falls from grace: he’s unable to achieve what King Henry requires, namely an annulment of his 20-year marriage to Katherine of Aragon, so that the king can marry the new favourite Anne Boleyn.

Cromwell’s loyalty to Wolsey is perhaps his best quality. He sticks by him to the end, and never forgives those who persecuted him. But soon Cromwell surpasses his patron. Moving into the inner circles of power, he becomes the king’s most trusted confidant – “you were born to understand me,” Henry says. Cromwell manages to achieve what Wolsey could not – an annulment, followed by the king’s marriage to Anne – through a combination of rat cunning, legalistic manoeuvres and threats. He carefully cultivates an air of ambiguous menace: “It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man’s power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people.”

If that makes Cromwell sound like a vicious bastard, which is how he is traditionally regarded, in Mantel’s version he’s actually rather engaging -  some would claim that Mantel strays far from historical accuracy in painting Cromwell as she does. He’s witty, charming, a loving father and husband, wants the best for the country as well as the king, and isn’t into torturing people – unlike his fanatical adversary Thomas More, who is said to rack heretics personally.  In a flashback we see Cromwell as a boy witnessing the burning of an old woman for saying “the saints are but wooden posts”: the suggestion is that this is the origin of his sympathy for Protestantism. Religious conflicts bubble along in the background: Tyndale has translated the Bible into English, and is holed up in Antwerp, fearing persecution at the hands of the Church; in Munster, a bunch of mad Protestant fanatics have seized the city and instituted polygamy; a fraudulent prophetess is going around England denouncing the king.  Cromwell is no fanatic – he knows “the defensive art of facing both ways “- but it becomes clear that his support for the king’s course is not entirely a matter of pragmatism, but also of principle.

This is a hefty novel – 650 pages – and does not move quickly. It could easily have been cut by 200 pages without affecting the plot. But Mantel writes so well that the length is forgiveable. Every page brings memorable lines: Anne Boleyn’s eyes are “shiny like the beads of an abacus … as she makes calculations to her own advantage”; “the King of England snaps his fingers, for God to change the wind”; “It is fifteen years since Wolsey kicked [Old Warham] out of his post as Lord Chancellor; or, as the cardinal always put it, relieved him of worldly office.”  In one wonderful passage, which does plunge us right back into the medieval mindset, the thoroughly modern Cromwell reflects on the magical inhabitants of the English landscape whose influence is holding back progress:

“There is a buried empire, where he fears his commissioners cannot reach. Who will swear the hobs and boggarts who live in the hedges and in hollow trees, and the wild men who hide in the woods? Who will swear the saints in their niches, and the spirits that cluster at holy wells rustling like fallen leaves, and the miscarried infants dug into unconsecrated ground: all those unseen dead who hover in winter around forges and village hearths, trying to warm their bare bones? For they too are his countrymen: the generations of the uncounted dead, breathing through the living, stealing their light from them, the bloodless ghosts of lord and knave, nun and whore, the ghosts of priest and friar who feed on living England, and suck the substance from the future.”

Wolf Hall isn’t a quick read, and demands the reader follow the movements of a huge cast of characters. I don’t have a great knowledge of Tudor history, though this novel is (besides everything else) a pretty good way to pick up one version of it; but you do need a bit of background knowledge in order to get the point of Mantel’s final plot twist – and the book’s title.  Even for those who don’t know or care much about the Tudors, Wolf Hall is worth reading as a study of a great political operator in a time of upheaval and fanaticism – two things which the Tudors hardly had a monopoly on. But for me it didn’t do enough to bring out the differences between the 1530s and the present – Mantel has criticised writers of historical romances for making their characters too modern, but for me this novel has the same flaw, albeit in a different way.  The second problem is that Cromwell is, well, too nice. Aside from one scene where he bullies Harry Percy (threatening to “bite your bollocks off”) he doesn’t seem particularly menacing and his reputation for ruthless violence is hard to fathom.

P.S. Taking aim at critics who claim that historical fiction is escapist nonsense,  Mantel has published a feisty article in The Guardian.

P.P.S. A video of Mantel reading from and talking about Wolf Hall here.

P.P.S. While on the Tudor theme, here’s the completely ridiculous Tenpole Tudor with one of the silliest, but very catchy, anthems of the 80s, The Swords of a Thousand Men. Enjoy.

Mixed metaphors

The Herald Sun’s headline writers came up with a fantastic mixed metaphor last Friday for a story about bureaucrats’ perks. Under the headline “Snouts in the trough” they had the sub-head “Fat cats feather their nests”. That’s three species in two lines. Great effort guys.

I can’t remember which newspaper it was that used to have an annual competition for the best mixed metaphor of the year. It was called The Light at the End of the Tightrope award.

Inspiration and novels

There’s a fine essay by Alex Miller in the October edition of the Australian Literary Review (which unfortunately is not available online unless you pay for it). Titled ‘Waxing wiser than oneself’, it is about the process of becoming a novelist as experienced by Miller. It makes some points which hit the spot for me.

Miller writes that as a young man he was certain that he wanted to be a writer but didn’t know what to write about. So he attempted to write novels on themes that he thought he should be writing about – important social issues – but none of these works was successful. “I felt a sense of failure and dismay”, Miller says, from which he was rescued by a friend who asked him “Why don’t you write about something you love?” Inspired by these words, Miller wrote his first published story – which wasn’t, interestingly, based on his own experiences, but on those of his friend, a Polish Jew, during the early days of World War Two. It wasn’t his story – but for some reason which he barely understood, it was a story that deeply moved him.

Miller’s main point is that to be successful a work of fiction must get beyond the author’s conscious intentions and reach into the writer’s private obsessions. He quotes a great line from Simone de Beauvoir: “We cannot arbitrarily invent projects for ourselves: they have to be written in our past as requirements.”  What writers are looking for, waiting for, praying for, is the moment when they see in their work something which goes beyond what they have consciously planned, because only then do they know that they are getting somewhere. I like this quote from Miller: “Beginning the writing of a novel is entering a puzzle, a maze whose centre is unknown to the author … with a novel it is not a matter of reaching a conclusion, but of finding the centre.”

At writers’ festivals and the like I’m sometimes asked if my novel was planned in advance or if I invented it as I went along. While this question seems to be about process, it really goes to the heart of how the  imagination works. What fiction writers try to do is to discover what they are really writing about. While you can plan and plot as much as you like, what is most valuable turns out to be the elements that the writer didn’t know would be there at the start – they had to be discovered. And in the end where these things come from is inside ourselves – “The novel may be about everything else as well as us, but at its heart it is about us and the trivial intricacies of our private lives.”

Of course, the problem is that this stuff isn’t dispensed from machines when you put your dollar in. It takes a lot of effort and false starts to uncover it. But once you see it, which God knows is rarely enough, you recognise it  – and hopefully some of your readers will too. 

Inspiration is a tricky concept to define but Miller’s is one of the best I’ve come across. “Inspiration, that igniting of the imagination which enables us to write beyond ourselves, so that our work shines for us with a light that is not our own, is most often an inner response to a stimulus from outside, some trivial event that triggers memory and alters our mood … But when we consciously go in search of inspiration, it stubbornly eludes us.” 

I’ve written a more detailed account of my experience of writing a novel here.

Hardy and violence

I’ve recently reread Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, which overall is a grim, depressing and tiresome novel. But one scene that impressed me was the pig-killing episode early in the book. Hardy isn’t really noted as a writer about violence but I found this more powerful than many supposedly shocking scenes in novels of our own day. It occurs early in the novel when Jude and his wife Arabella have to kill the pig they have been raising. The pig-killing man doesn’t turn up, so Jude does the job. Don’t read on if you’re squeamish.

 

By this time Arabella had joined her husband, and Jude, rope in hand, got into the sty, and noosed the affrighted animal, who, beginning with a squeak of surprise, rose to repeated cries of rage. Arabella opened the sty-door, and together they hoisted the victim on to the stool, legs upward, and while Jude held him Arabella bound him down, looping the cord over his legs to keep him from struggling.

    The animal’s note changed its quality. It was not now rage, but the cry of despair; long-drawn, slow and hopeless.

    “Upon my soul I would sooner have gone without the pig than have had this to do!” said Jude. “A creature I have fed with my own hands.”

    “Don’t be such a tender-hearted fool! There’s the sticking-knife — the one with the point. Now whatever you do, don’t stick un too deep.”

    “I’ll stick him effectually, so as to make short work of it. That’s the chief thing.”

    “You must not!” she cried. “The meat must be well bled, and to do that he must die slow. We shall lose a shilling a score if the meat is red and bloody! Just touch the vein, that’s all. I was brought up to it, and I know. Every good butcher keeps un bleeding long. He ought to be eight or ten minutes dying, at least.”

    “He shall not be half a minute if I can help it, however the meat may look,” said Jude determinedly. Scraping the bristles from the pig’s upturned throat, as he had seen the butchers do, he slit the fat; then plunged in the knife with all his might.

    “‘Od damn it all!” she cried, “that ever I should say it! You’ve over-stuck un! And I telling you all the time — – “

    “Do be quiet, Arabella, and have a little pity on the creature!”

    “Hold up the pail to catch the blood, and don’t talk!”

    However unworkmanlike the deed, it had been mercifully done. The blood flowed out in a torrent instead of in the trickling stream she had desired. The dying animal’s cry assumed its third and final tone, the shriek of agony; his glazing eyes riveting themselves on Arabella with the eloquently keen reproach of a creature recognizing at last the treachery of those who had seemed his only friends.

    “Make un stop that!” said Arabella. “Such a noise will bring somebody or other up here, and I don’t want people to know we are doing it ourselves.” Picking up the knife from the ground whereon Jude had flung it, she slipped it into the gash, and slit the windpipe. The pig was instantly silent, his dying breath coming through the hole

    “That’s better,” she said.

    “It is a hateful business!” said he.

    “Pigs must be killed.”

(Text online here) 

What makes this passage so effective? The way it is simultaneously seen as both appalling and matter-of-fact. The description of the binding of the pig, the plunging in of the knife, the pig’s “shriek of agony” and the way the blood pours out, invites the reader to share the full horror. At the same time, it is a normal farm job – “I’ll stick him effectually” “however unworkmanlike the deed”.  

The violence is not there for its own sake, but to shed light on character – Jude is either merciful or a tender-hearted fool, depending on one’s point of view; Arabella seems callous, but isn’t she simply a practical butcher’s daughter? Hardy takes us into the point of view of each of the protagonists: he makes the pig like a human victim, ”recognizing the treachery of those who had seemed his only friends” – but this is rhetoric, for how can we or Hardy know what conception a pig has of treachery?

At the same time as we are invited to identify with Jude’s merciful approach, we can also respect Arabella’s point of view – they are poor people and the meat has to be in good condition for sale.  How skilfully Hardy introduces Arabella’s concern for social position – she has no interest in the pig’s suffering, what bothers her is that “I don’t want people to know we are doing it ourselves.”  Then there’s the moral ambiguity of the passage – Arabella’s “he must die slow” sounds appallingly sadistic, the sort of thing that any run-of-the-mill serial killer today might say, but her final words “pigs must be killed” are simply realistic. Why bother raising a pig, if you are not going to kill it?   

In one scene of less than a page we’ve learned a vast amount about the characters, and Hardy has dramatised the themes that he explores throughout the novel.  It’s an immense piece of writing – I feel like I’ve hardly touched the surface of it.

Alas, poor Doggies

Bob Murphy is gutted ... we all feel the same way, Bob

We went to the MCG last Friday evening for the first preliminary final to cheer on our beloved Bulldogs. Not having won a flag since 1954, they are surely due a taste of glory, and this year’s team – fast, skilful and, yes, dogged - promised real hope of achieving it. After a first quarter in which the Dogs dominated possession, keeping St Kilda’s much-vaunted attack  goalless, we dared to dream. But we failed to kick enough goals in that opening quarter – ending up with only a couple for all our control of the game. At half time we led 4.7 (31) to 3.6 (24), which didn’t feel like enough, and that inaccuracy ultimately cost us.

The third quarter started with an utterly ridiculous free kick paid to Nick Riewoldt, who went down like an Italian soccer player under a firm but fair elbow from Brian Lake. (Riewoldt scored a few points in the Brownlow medal the following Monday: it should have been an Emmy for comedy acting.) The  Saints hit us hard in the third quarter and nerves jangled in the Doggies cheer squad – they led by a couple of goals and it looked as if we might get blown away, but through sheer guts the Dogs hung on and even kicked a couple of goals at the end of the quarter. During the final quarter we felt pretty optimistic – the Doggies are famous for finishing well – and for much of the time there was only a point or two in it. But as it turned out a couple of shots went agonisingly wide, Riewoldt toe-poked one through (though it was touched off the boot, my greengrocer informed me the next day) and we lost by seven points. (The final agonising moments). It was apparently the lowest-scoring preliminary final in 35 years – for all that it was a defensive game it was utterly compelling.

The feeling among the Doggies fans afterwards was that our fatal flaw is the lack of a big forward – Johnno does his best but we had no one who could win the ball in the air regularly against the Saints defenders. The unfortunate Will Minson came in for his fair share of abuse from our supporters – “Just mark one, Minson! One for the game! That’s all I ask!” the lady behind us kept yelling, every time he dropped another one.

So it’s on to next year – our reputation as honest but ultimately unsuccessful battlers confirmed once again, while the glamour boys of St Kilda and Geelong will run around on Saturday in the grand final.

PS Read about Riewoldt’s dastardly antics.

MWF: ‘Digging up the past’ – Marshall Browne, Robert Wilson and Glen David Gold

Not a bad place for research. Duke Humfreys Library, part of the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

I first came across Marshall Browne a few years ago when I read The Wooden Leg of Inspector Anders, about a one-legged detective investigating the Mafia in the south of Italy. Having once lived in a southern Italian town I was impressed by Browne’s ability to portray that society, and I liked his investigator, Anders – an eccentric, introspective elderly cop with a false leg.  A few years later Browne created Franz Schmidt, a German investigator with some similarities to Anders – he’s a very correct, scrupulous man, with an unexpected capacity for bravery, but instead of a false leg he has a glass eye (hmm, what is it with Browne and prostheses?) Schmidt is a bank auditor – an unlikely hero, seemingly – whose innate decency sees him involving himself in dangerous activities as Nazism takes hold in the years preceding the Second World War (The Eye of the Abyss). Clearly, one of Browne’s themes is the capacity of the individual to take action in the midst of a hostile and deadly environment.

Browne was a member of a panel (on Sunday 30 August) that included Robert Wilson and Glen David Gold. Like Browne, Wilson has written several novels  that draw on modern history, among them The Blind Man of Seville, featuring detective Javier Falcon, which is set partly in the present and partly, through a series of diary entries by Falcon’s father, during the Second World War.  Glen David Gold’s latest novel is Sunnyside, about Charlie Chaplin and the rise of Hollywood. Interviewed by Alan Attwood at MWF, the three discussed the process of creating fiction set in the past.

The topic interests me because a few years ago I attempted  to write a novel set in 1920s Paris, and failed quite spectacularly – partly because the research took over, swamping both characters and narrative. But I am still interested in finding ways to construct narratives in which the past is in dialogue with the present.  So I was interested to hear about the ways these guys approached their research.

Browne said that research is a two-stage process for him – first he reads very broadly, to get an in-depth knowledge of the period, then his reading becomes more specific as he seeks to learn specific pieces of information. It’s in that early stage that “you can go up blind alleys”. With the Schmidt novels, Browne began from a position of knowledge – having been a banker for many years he had a good grasp of how the industry worked, and had even visited some of the old private German banks that had been around since the 1930s. He was fascinated by their history, and saw their potential for fiction.

Research, for Browne, is largely but not entirely a matter of reading – I particularly liked his idea of using old editions of Hansard to help him get the language right for his trilogy of historical Melbourne novels (The Gilded Cage, The Burnt City, and The Trumpeting Angel). Wilson also reads very extensively before writing a new novel – never on the internet, always in books (he’s lucky enough to have access to The Bodleian Library). But he also makes use of interviews, and in order to get the character of Javier Falcon right, Wilson dropped in on a working chief inspector of the Seville police, whom he found surprisingly keen to answer the English writer’s questions. Gold, in talking about how he got Chaplin’s language right, referred to the many magazines that carried verbatim interviews with the man, whose fame coincided with the rise of the cult of the celebrity.

Having said all this about the importance of research, it was good to hear the panellists assert that in a novel, the most important things are the characters and the narrative. “The biggest technical problem is being faithful to history, while maintaining narrative drive,” Wilson said. At the end of the day, what makes a novel successful are its characters and its narrative, not the accuracy or otherwise of the historical background. So, while these writers are all careful to get their facts right, they are quite clear that their books belong in the fiction section, not history. As Gold put it, the object of research is “to help the writer capture the spirit of the times – not dry archaeological pedantry.”