A bit of a gap

It is some months now since I posted anything on this blog, not because I have given up on it, but because I have put it on the back burner for a while. I submitted extracts of my historical novel to a Fiction in Progress class at Edinburgh University, and received some encouraging feedback, but it also taught me things I still needed to work on. Part of that had to do with aspects of fiction technique, but also I felt I didn't have a clear narrative thrust. I had chapters that were more like jigsaw pieces in search of a bigger picture to fit into. Also, reading the 19th century novel of the period by James Grant gave me a feeling that I really didn't have his understanding of the period to persist without a great deal of further thought. I didn't want to replicate the ground he had already admirably covered. Historical fiction is not something to take on board lightly.
Instead, I did what some primers will tell you not to do: I had another idea for a quite different novel and I have been working on that over recent months. The primers say that if you start a second novel before finishing your first you will end up with two unfinished novels. That does not seem to be the case so far. In November last year I was going to be away from home for 3 weeks with only tenuous connection to a computer and would have time on my hands. I was intrigued by the American NaNoWriMo project (National Novel Writing Month). It was started about a decade ago by a group of Californians as a challenge to write a 50k novel in the 30 days of the 11th month of the year. Initially I thought it was a mad idea. However, I bought 3 A4 notebooks from Sainsbury's, in lime, purple and aqua, their seasonal colours, and decided to see if I could sketch out an idea for a novel over the month. I worked out that handwriting roughly 6 pages of those notebooks would amount to about 1000 words. I had a scenario and a bunch of characters but no plot. But character is plot, of course. By the end of the month I had about 30k words of a murder mystery story, pretty uncouth, sometimes quite silly, but when I looked over it I felt that I had something I could actually work on. So over succeeding months, despite a nasty bout of shingles, a fascinating two-week trip to China and 3 weeks of rather tedious SQA marking of English close-reading exams, I have now almost got a complete first draft, currently standing at just over 60k words. Only the final 3-4 chapters have to be completed. However bad or good this draft is, it certainly feels like an achievement. No one asked me to write this. No one is waiting to receive it or even wanting to read it. I don't know whether I can revise it into the sort of state that I could think might merit considering possibly - you see the hesitation here - thinking of approaching someone like a publisher, an agent or a more established writer in the same field for an opinion. But it's there. A Scottish murder mystery story set in the present day, but with a historical element - 18th century this time, an easier period to research and one that I knew more about before I started. Heigh ho.

Between Fact and Fiction

I have been moving very slowly with this idea for a fiction and in fact have not added much in the past three months. Partly because I have been away for the best part of a month, partly because I have been unwell, partly because I got interested in another less challenging narrative, but mainly because I had got stuck. I had reached a stage where I had absorbed a great many facts about the period, but in relation to the fiction, while I had a small group of characters and ideas of what might happen to them, I had no narrative thrust. I saw them rather static in their respective sets of circumstances, rather than moving on. This is something I have to solve, how to clear the factual ground to allow the fiction plausibly to unfold.

An Intriguing Find

In the process of reading a book called Cromwell's Scotch Campaigns by W. S. Douglas, a Victorian historian - my edition dated 1898, I came across a reference to a 19th century Scottish novelist I had never heard of before called James Grant. Douglas was querying the accuracy of details in a novel called Harry Ogilvie or The Black Dragoons. As I am as interested in fiction about this period as the historical facts I managed to secure a copy - a modestly priced first edition (I think) through Abe Books. Although a mite scuffed by time, it's a lovely object in itself, half red leather with marbled boards, broader and longer than a Blackberry, about an inch deep, 370 pp., published by G. Routledge & Co., London, 1856, and New York, 18 Beekman Street. The opening paragraph of Chapter I reads:

An hour before daylight, on a morning in December, in the year 1632, the bell at the gate of the University of Glasgow was rung furiously, and the despairing cry of a woman was heard echoing among the heavy balconies and dark quadrangles of the edifice; old Nehemiah Spreul, the porter, started in dismay from his box-bed, and undeterred by the energetic warnings of his cosy helpmate, Hannah, threw a plaid over his shoulders, snatched up a broadsword, for the times were perilous, and hastily opened the eyelet hole of the deeply-arched and richly-carved gate, which faces the High-street. 


How could one not read on?

It's an adventure story, set in the turbulent times of the mid-17th century, which chronicles the early life of a foundling called Harry Ogilvie, adopted by the University principal, who, bored by student life, joins a regiment of the Black Dragoons in the Scots army at the time of Cromwell's invasion of Scotland in 1650. The main part of the novel describes Harry's involvement in the Scots army's vain attempt to repel the invaders. The hero is present at the defeats of Dunbar in 1650, Inverkeithing in 1651 and the sack of Dundee by troops under General Monk when Cromwell left Scotland to pursue Charles II to the Battle of Worcester. I do not have the expert historical knowledge to quibble about the accuracy of military details - the only definite inaccuracy I picked up was a statement saying that Charles II landed at Leith, which he did not - but all I can say is that the experience of reading the book feels authentic. From the opening chapter the author plunges you into another era. Harry's own story is one of finding the truth about his origins, not to mention true love and happiness, and if he survives all the trials and tribulations the author places in his path with almost superhuman implausibility, so be it. There is pathos, loss, betrayal and there is triumph. He portrays the grimness of a battlefield after a rout and in the later pages plague casts a shadow upon a friend. The denouement is perhaps rather hastily wrapped up against the background of the dreadful sack of Dundee, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. If it has none of Scott's philosophical analysis it has none of that writer's longeurs. There's plenty of action, evocative atmosphere, some memorable minor characters and vignettes of historical figures. The Earl of Argyle figures as the arch villain and the author, like his hero, has no time for the canting of the Covenanting ministers.

I think we should know more about James Grant.

Apparently Grant was a popular and prolific writer of historical novels with a military slant in his time, but is now quite obscure. His grandfather was apparently an Edinburgh advocate, his father was a military man and he himself served as a soldier for a few years before taking up writing as his profession.  This novel was of particular interest to me because I have now done a fair bit of reading up of this period, but I still felt it held up as a historical novel of some more general interest.

Looking at the Ruins

Early this summer I spent a few days looking at landscape and ruins in Morayshire, where some of my novel would be set. One very sunny afternoon I visited the ruins of Spynie Palace, once the residence of the powerful bishops of the region before they moved to Elgin. Very little remains now except the shell of the building, a narrow tower you can enter and a castle keep, which I couldn't get into because of building work going on. I sat on the remains of the stone walls and read through my Historic Scotland brochure, which provided several illustrations of what the place might have looked like in its heyday.

At one time the palace looked out on an extensive sea loch and was therefore a centre of trade as well as 'spirituality'. In time the loch silted up and shrank, its access to the sea blocked. There is still a small loch there, but no longer near the ruins of the palace. You look down on a wood and a jungle of vegetation. As I wandered about trying to make sense of what the ruins represented I thought that they did constitute a metaphor for the history I was trying to reconstruct. All we have from history are ruins - bits of stonework, battered weaponry, manuscripts written in to the layman impenetrable holograph, tombstones, fragments of clothing, domestic implements, etc. etc. To the historian these items are eloquent, but only to a certain degree. I was fascinated watching a television documentary recently in which forensic specialists examined four skeletons from a naval cemetery at Portsmouth (I think) and full of admiration for what they were able to tell us about the individuals these skeletons once inhabited. I found their commentary astonishing in its detail. But for all that we cannot wholly reconstruct the past. There are always gaps. We can only come at a tentative understanding through speculation, attempts to empathise, imagination.

Trying to do what I have set myself to do isn't easy. It feels at times like chipping away at a forbidding rock face. I can't make it move fast. I want to be sure of my context and the more I discover the less I feel I know. I don't want to play fast and loose with indisputable facts. I had a look at one of Nigel Tranter's novels that deals with this period - Honours Even, it's called - and he does exactly that. He has Charles II crowned at Scone before the Battle of Dunbar and has the Scottish regalia placed in Edinburgh Castle after it had been taken over by the Cromwellian forces. Both are wrong. Tranter was very knowledgeable about Scottish history. He must have known these facts were wrong, but maybe thought that changing things round a bit made for a tighter fiction e.g. allowing for a daring raid on Edinburgh Castle to get the regalia away to Dunnottar. But that raid isn't so daring because it passes off without much tension. So the book ends up being neither good history nor, for that and other reasons, good fiction. Hm.

Weaponry

My story involves war, 17th century warfare. I went first to the internet to look up information about the two main weapons ordinary foot soldiers of the period would have used: the musket and the pike. The flintlock musket wasn't generally used before the 18th century, so my focus was on the matchlock. There are plenty of sites, British and American, with videos, which show how these muskets were fired. In addition to your weapon you carried your powder in a bandolier across your chest or in a powder horn attached to a belt at your waist. First, you would ram a powder charge into the long muzzle of your gun, followed by a lead bullet. Then you would tip a further pinch of powder into the firing plate and set it alight by a piece of cordlike material that you had to keep smouldering during a battle. Lots of things could go wrong. Use too much powder and your weapon could explode. If it rained you would not be able to keep your powder dry or your matchlight lit, so your musket would be useless as a firing mechanism. Reloading could be slow, although, all things being well, skilled musketeers could fire several rounds a minute. The most effective musketry came from the Scandinavian (Gustavus Adolphus) model of soldiers lined three deep, the first kneeling, the second stooping, the third standing. Alternatively rows of musketeers six deep would fire in sequence, thus allowing each row time to reprime their weapons.

Historic Scotland holds re-enactments of battles past throughout the year. One wet Sunday in August I went down to Dirleton Castle in East Lothian to meet a Scottish soldier of the period, who demonstrated the musket firing in a dark damp vault out of the unrelenting rain. I could never fire a musket at all, let alone with any degree of accuracy, but it was useful to handle one and to feel the weight. For men marching a great distance carrying one would have been quite a heavy load. The soldier said that often on campaign they would have waggons carrying the weapons. I also learned that in a battle the closer you came to your adversaries the order would be given to 'Club muskets', at which point you stopped attempting to fire it and would turn it round so that you could club your enemy with the butt, and as it was reinforced with brass you could deliver a pretty lethal dunt.

Now the pikes were something else, anything from 12 to 18 feet long with a heavy iron point at the end. In battle a pikeman's life expectancy was about 12 minutes, half of that being a matter of getting ready. You aimed your pike first at the eyes of your adversary. Failing that you aimed for the mouth. Otherwise you aimed for the nearest most vulnerable part of him you could find. Once the pike had penetrated you gave it a twist and a drag, leaving your unfortunate victim a bleeding eviscerated wreck. When groups of pikemen clashed together they struggled in a formation known as 'push of pike', a sort of porcupine scrum, till one side or the other gained the advantage.

Is any of this more destructive than a Kalashnikov or stepping on a land mine? It's certainly more up close and personal and soldiers died in their hundreds and thousands during the wars of the period. There was no heroic return of the coffins that we have seen in our recent and current wars, where every death is mourned as an individual tragedy. Often ordinary families did not know what happened to their menfolk who went a-soldiering. They just never came home, and after a time, years probably, would simply be presumed dead. In a kirk session record for Colinton Church in the early 1650s a couple were summoned to account for their adultery. It transpired that they were very attached and intended to marry if they could, but the woman's husband had fought at the Battle of Dunbar in 1650 and since he had left home nothing further had been heard from him or of him. It was not known whether he had been killed in the battle or captured and taken south as a prisoner and might be still alive, although it was unlikely.

A Warning

A friend of mine told me a story about the famous writer Georgette Heyer, very prolific and popular in her day, especially with her Regency novels. Despite their success, apparently her real interest was in the medieval period and she planned three novels to be set at this time and embarked on years of extremely detailed research to ensure that she would get the historical details correct. She died before completing more than one of these projected novels and that one was published, as far as I can gather, posthumously. My friend's view was that the novel, in spite of all her careful work, was unreadable.

I went to Amazon and checked through their list of her novels and came across what I think must be that novel. It's called My Lord John. It's set in the 14th century and deals with the children of Henry IV, especially Henry V's younger brother, John. I read both her husband's introduction to the novel, where he describes all the research she undertook, and the first two or three pages of the novel itself. I can see what my friend meant. I would not on the basis of these pages be encouraged to read on, which might be unfair because she was a highly experienced writer and sometimes an ability to write a page-turner does not necessarily equate with a particularly good writing style. But it seemed to me that she had fallen into the trap of trying to write the novel in a style that might reflect the speech and language of the time. According to her husband she had immersed herself in the writings of the period, and there is a flavour of this in what I read. It does not entice.

So the language of a historical novel is a tricky area. You don't want to write impenetrable dialogue. At the same time you can't quite employ contemporary informality and slang. You have to pitch it somewhere in between. Since my novel is set in Scotland in the 17th century all my Scottish characters, educated as well as uneducated, would have spoken Scots, and the less educated would have used local dialect forms that I would not be able to access, let alone understand. But even if I were to cast all my dialogue in an educated form of Scots it would be considered unreadable. So I have to find a compromise, using different registers for different occasions. English would predominate, but there would definitely be situations where I would happily use a form of Scots that I would hope would not be too difficult to understand.

Historians

Had I chosen to research the English Civil War there are loads of authors to consult, from the high-powered philosophic analyses of the greatest of English historians to the graphic book accounts of battles designed for young people. You might think that everything that could be said about that war has now been discovered and written up. It has also been well covered by novelists. However, however brilliant the historian there is a tendency to take an eye off the detail when it comes to referring to the Scottish dimension. One example I found was on reading Diane Purkiss's otherwise absolutely brilliant book, The English Civil War: A People's History. It's a vast and absorbing read and covers so much, from how Charles I's childhood probably affected his attitude to kingship, to accounts of the leading Parliamentarians of Cromwell's regime, the early socialist ideologies of the Diggers and Levellers, the horrors of battle wounds, the trials of musketry, the pillaging, massacring, devastation of people's homes and the countryside, the activities of spies and witchfinders - an absolute mine of information for anyone contemplating writing a fiction based in that period. However, towards the end she makes two brief comments that made me cross. One was that the Marquis of Hamilton 'delayed' his invasion of England in support of Charles I in 1648, and the other was that Charles II 'invaded' Scotland in 1650. The first point is much more complex than her statement would suggest and I won't go into it here. However, the second statement is plain wrong. Charles II came to Scotland at the invitation of its Covenanting government, who promised him support to regain his lost throne, subject to his satisfying their religious demands and abjuring the 'sins' of his forebears. He came in one ship, a frigate lent to him by his brother-in-law, the Prince of Orange, and had a small retinue of friends and courtiers, most of whom he was almost immediately required to disband at the orders of the Scots when he arrived. It's just a detail, but it's kind of telling. It suggests that whatever happened in Scotland is not important enough to be precise enough about. Or that's my impression.

Combing the library shelves, however, took me to David Stevenson, Emeritus Professor of History at St. Andrews University. I started with a book of his called King or Covenant? Voices from Civil War. It contains profiles of 13 individuals who lived through this turbulent period in Scotland and who left records of their experiences in the form of letters, journals or just brief chronicles of events. This opened up a series of portraits of people who are perhaps less well known now unless you know the period well. It includes soldiers of fortune, lawyers, politicians, ministers of the kirk, a Catholic priest and one woman, Anne, Lady Halkett, whose main claim to fame is that she helped the young James, Duke of York, escape Cromwell's clutches by disguising him as a girl. Through Stevenson's biliographical references I could now follow up these individuals and broaden my impressions of the period through their preoccupations.

Later I got hold of Stevenson's Revolution and Counter Revolution 1644-51, an invaluable account of what was happening in Scotland during those years, the second of a two volume account of the history of the Covenant. I found it so useful I was constantly renewing it at the library, but it is otherwise out of print and therefore difficult to get hold of a personal copy.

But my main point here is that even secondary historical material on this period of Scottish history is not easy to come by. At the recent Edinburgh Book Festival I attended a session about Scottish history and one of the participants, the author of a new book called The Killing Time, said that he had written it because he could not find the kind of book he wanted on the subject.