My Top Historical Novels - Celia Rees

Like many writers, I have a lot of books. They are threatening to take over the house. It is time for some sorting out and that inevitably means some will have to go. How am I going to decide which to keep and which to throw? The shelves need cataloguing. I'm not talking Dewey Decimal but it would be helpful if the books were in some sort of order. Relevant titles would be easier to find and that would save time. 

As I'm a writer of historical fiction, I thought I might begin with those titles, collect them all together and put them in author order.  These are some of the titles I will be keeping. These are books that mean something to me. Books that changed my perceptions of historical fiction, that have stayed with me, some for a very long time. Books that I discovered as a young reader and as an adult long before I even thought of writing, let alone writing historical fiction. Some are books that I simply admire, that I go to when I think my own writing needs a boost, by writers who leave me in awe to wonder:  'How do they do that? I couldn't do that!'

Here are ten of my 'keepers': 

Margaret Atwood - alias grace

Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights

Charles Frazier - Cold Mountain

William Golding - To the Ends of the Earth Trilogy

Cormac McCarthy -  Border Trilogy

Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall, Bringing Up the Bodies and A Place of Greater Safety

Annie Proulx - Accordian Crimes

Mary Renault - The King Must Die, The Bull From The Sea

Rosemary Sutcliff - Eagle of the Ninth

Leo Tolstoy - War And Peace

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Inspired - Celia Rees

I recently found myself in Salisbury, on my way to somewhere else, and I took the opportunity to go and look at the cathedral. It is one of my favourite cathedrals. I love the purity of the Early English architecture. The cathedral is pleasingly all of a piece. It was built by Bishop Richard Poore and completed quickly in only 38 years from its foundation in 1220 to the completion of the main body of the building in 1258. There  have been relatively few additions since then. Except, of course, for the spire. Salisbury has the tallest spire of any British cathedral and it can be seen from miles around. The spire was a later addition, built between 1313 and 1330. 

Like many churches and cathedrals, the siting of Salisbury had been fixed on by a vision rather than more practical considerations. A decision was made to move the church and bishopric from Old Sarum, several miles to the north and the actual site was decided by a bow shot. The arrow hit a deer which died on the spot where the cathedral was to be built. Unfortunately, the deer died on low, marshy ground with a very high water table. Too high for proper foundations, so the cathedral's foundations are only four feet deep. Not ideal for the building of a 404 ft spire which would add 6,397 tons of extra weight. 

The building of the spire was the subject of William Golding's 1964 novel, The Spire. In Golding's novel the fictional Dean Jocelin is gripped by his own vision to build a great spire, despite the seeming impossibility of building such a tall structure on such shallow foundations. The book is one of the reasons that the cathedral has become a special place for me. I first discovered the novel when I was a young teacher, in my second year. The Deputy Head of Department went on sabbatical and I took over his 'A' level teaching. One of his texts was The Spire. I had not read it before and it is not any easy read. It is not a book which gives up its meaning easily. The reader has to work at it. I found Golding's dense, elliptical, metaphorical style intensely rewarding and was fascinated by the pagan elements within the book. Salisbury is set within an ancient landscape and I liked the idea that there could be of a surviving belief system underlying and untouched by Dean Jocelin's Christianity. This is a novel about belief, faith, vision and doubt and does far more than other novels set in this period, and dealing with much the same thing, to describe and define the medieval mind - and in far fewer pages.

One of the most difficult challenges facing any novelist is to get into the minds of those who lived in the past. Golding manages to do just that. If you haven't read The Spire, I urge you to do so. I will certainly be reading it again.