When the Old becomes New Again, by Gillian Polack

 

I have been saved from a post I didn’t want to write by an email on 1 January. Today, you see, is a national holiday in Australia. Australia Day embodies so many dreams and so many conflicts and so much hurt that it would be a very good subject to write about. Not this year. This year too many people hurt and I don’t want to write about people hurting. Or I could talk about the Birthday of Trees, which has just finished. Not this year, either. The Birthday of trees is a wonderful day, but it’s Jewish and it’s not that easy to be publicly Jewish in the world right now. Besides, that email changed everything. It gave me something good to write about, where no-one gets hurt. Except trees… some days I cannot win.

That email concerned a novel (Chocolate Redemption) that had been announced a few years ago. It had been delayed by COVID and by crises and by the world being generally Very Difficult. To start my year (literally, on New Year’s Day), I received the edits from the publisher and the knowledge that it’s finally emerging into daylight. I don’t know yet if the title will remain, but until the release date is announced, then I shall refer to it as Chocolate Redemption, because this is its name in my heart of hearts.

Chocolate Redemption is not just any novel. A long time ago, about the time The Middle Ages Unlocked was on its way, my readers asked me “Why don’t you write more fiction that uses your knowledge of the Middle Ages? You have a PhD in Medieval History and we like to read stories set in the Middle Ages. Write them, please.”

I wrote a time travel novel (Langue[dot]doc 1305) and my readers said, “That was great, but we need more. And it should be different to the time travel novel.”

I answered them, “Maybe one day, when I’m ready to explore the Middle Ages from a different direction.”

I had, to be honest, already started writing this novel. I was on a retreat in the Blue Mountains, at the wonderful writer’s house, Varuna. I finished Ms Cellophane, the novel I went there to write, and I began another. I wrote the first chapter there, and did a ll the research, and wrote an outline. After that, it took me a long time, because life kept getting in the way.

I hesitated to talk about it, too. It wasn’t really a proper fantasy novel. It wasn’t really fully a novel about our world, either. It broke so many genre models. I finished it, and then I put it on hold because I was worried about it. I didn’t think it worked. So I sat on it. And I sat on it. And I sat on it some more. I’m one of those writers who doesn’t always trust their own ability to carry a dream through. With this novel, which (just to be really clear) had amazing support from beta readers, I felt I had failed. So I sat on it some more.

While I sat, I refined it. I was worried about the black dye in one section. I’d included dying because of the place it was set (a town that produced much glorious fabric) but also because I wanted to make the same pun I’d made in Poison and Light. If one has a tenterfield and one is Australian, then the tenterfield needs a saddler. There are bad jokes like this in all my novels, little Easter eggs for readers who enjoy spotting them. Except that in Chocolate Redemption, the tenterfield uses the original definition and is for cloth dying. I wanted the black dye to be accurate, so I asked my textile archaeologist friend, Katrin Kania. I did this throughout the novel. I made sure that there was a basis of historical fact underlying all extrapolation and all whimsy. The invented world for the fantasy side of the novel is mostly Medieval rather than mostly invented, and even the inventions are based on extrapolations: that cloth was my reminder of how I had achieved this. I do that with all my novels. I leave reminders in of the path I travelled to get there.

Then I sat on it some more still. Along the way, I wrote a short story about dancing in a churchyard after the Great Plague, then I wrote another that was a finalist for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, so my patient readers were not left without any of my Middle Ages. They were just missing this one novel I had written and about which I was unaccountably shy.

Really, there’s nothing scary about this novel. I should not have put in on hold for years. It’s what a novel would look like if half of it were a fantasy Middle Ages with the fantastical was grounded in our actual knowledge of the Middle Ages, rather than in the Medieval themes we often read in fantasy literature. And yet it wasn’t an historical novel at all.

I had not quite emerged from The Middle Ages Unlocked (a non-fiction guide to Medieval England I wrote with <drumroll> Katrin Kania), so my approach to the history was precise. Where else did I get my knowledge? It helps, sometimes, to work with other writers and learn from them. I was working, at that moment, with Felicity Pulman, a marvellous Australian writer of Young Adult novels. She asked me for advice on Medieval Winchester for a detective series she was writing (the Janna Mysteries), and it was that advice that led me into my own approach. The town in Chocolate Redemption is loosely based on Winchester, as me doffing my hat to Felicity. If you’ve not read her writing before, Ghost Boy is particularly clever in its emotional force and its use of history.

Eventually I got over myself and Odyssey accepted the novel and then COVID hit and life went awry again. On January 1 this year I read the edits. Odyssey’s editor was ecstatic about the story and the characters and especially one particular love scene and… I felt very stupid about my lack of confidence.

The novel is about women’s lives. Small lives. Lives that the rest of the world fails to see properly. I love the richness of women’s lives. It was a lot of fun to write about an apothecary in a Medieval town and her Jewish best friend and her love and all her professional concerns, and her kitten, and floods and fury and all the stuff a town goes through in a year.

The Medieval section is about the lives of younger women. Old enough to be independent, but young enough to have big decisions in their immediate future. The Katoomba (modern Australian) section is about an older woman, whose daughter is in the middle of the big decisions and whose life has reached a quietly impossible point.

The novel includes chocolate, and it’s about mapping our streets and our lives.  

For me, it’s a bit of an oddity. It falls between genres. Lives of women do this, all the time. The mapping others do of our lives doesn’t actually match with the way we live. That’s the heart of the story.

I’ll put out an announcement on social media when Odyssey settles the release dates. In the meantime, if anyone wants to be included on the review copy list, send me a note and I’ll forward it to my publisher. Because Odyssey (the publisher) is in New Zealand review copies will be ebooks only. New Zealand is a long way from anywhere other than Australia and islands in the very south Pacific. Postage costs and time for the post to reach far-distant places are other aspects of those small lives I so enjoy writing about.

In the meantime, my January gift to myself is finally being able to talk openly about Chocolate Redemption. Bringing it out of hiding was a difficult thing. Watching others read it and form opinions is going to be exciting, but even more difficult. I shall buttress the emotions with chocolate.

Is there history in your fiction? by Gillian Polack

 

So...I’m a fiction writer, but I also wrote a book called History and Fiction. A lot of this blogpost comes from the research I did for that. If you want ‘aha’ moments for when I borrow from myself, History and Fiction is the book to call up. The rest comes from more recent research. My new study of writers and writing is called Story Matrices. 

 

First, my background. I am an ethnohistorian as well as a fiction writer. For History and Fiction I analysed novels using my background in historiography, but I also interviewed writers. Writers are wonderful people to ask probing questions of. I have 80,000 words of answers to prove this.

What was I researching? Different types of novelists hold different types of conversations with history. Also, most novelists hold different types of conversations with history to historians. Today I’ll focus on speculative fiction, with a lot of the Middle Ages, because I was, am, and always will be, a Medieval historian.

When I talk with writers about history, writers reply intimately, personally. Their answers give us amazing insights into how they work and think. The personal is the passion of the history in our fiction. These emotions are important for successful writers: many writers I’ve spoken to who don’t carry that emotion move onto other things or leave historical writing behind. This passion is not a question of ability or of writing skills, because those writers who moved on had short stories published and some have written novels not besotted with history. All the writers who had this passion for history, however, have had successful careers as writers of historical fiction, fantasy, time travel, young adult fiction, period mystery and more. I suspect that the passion for history carries emotion into the novel and helps connect with readers.

Quite simply, any novel where the writer is at a distance from their subject is going to carry a different emotional burden from the same type of novel written by someone who cares.

Before I go any further, I need to define the past and history. I would like us to be on the same page, rather than me on a page of vellum and you on a computer screen. It’s possible to communicate across vellum and a screen but it’s much easier if we use the same words. The past and history, those words, shift in definition so much that I’m going to choose one among many possibilities.

The past, then, here and now, is the temporal opposite to the future. The events in the past are gone. They are out of reach. They cannot be reconstructed in the exact shape they occurred. They cannot be revived. They are not a narrative. History is all narrative. It draws on evidence of the past and it interprets the past. Story is essential to it and fiction writers are some of the creators of this story. When we think about anything historical, we are thinking about the history, not the past. Mediated narrative. Story. The word ‘historia’ in fact, is the Latin word for story, and that’s no coincidence.

History in fiction is part of the world building and it’s essential to the story. I used this satirically in my own novel Poison and Light, where I had my planetary inhabitants re-invent the 18^th century. They weren’t living in the past. They were living in their stories about the past. Not everyone told the same story. One character wants power, for example. Another wants the French Revolution. 

 

One of the most perfect examples of where the history is integral both to the world building and to the story is when Connie Willis pays homage to a work by Jerome K Jerome in To Say Nothing of the Dog. The novel is a delightful frivol in our imagined England and it holds together because of the way Willis depicts that imagined England using stuff many readers already recognise. The Thames of the story is not in a real place or time.

To Say Nothing of the Dog is a near-perfect demonstration of the fact that our invented worlds rest on what we know of history, how we see history, what games we want to play with history. When we write using a known bit of history, for instance, a new tale about Richard and the Princes in the Tower, we validate that. When we invent something that argues against common historical constructs, that’s different. We pull our opinions about history into story.

How novelists do this through using history is by bringing readers into a narrative based on an invented world that rests upon their own interpretation of history. This is partly the role of story, taking readers with it on a journey. A novel that doesn’t bring readers into its journey is very hard to read.

When a novelist chooses something familiar to readers, as Michael Crichton’s Timeline does with its sort-of-heroic Middle Ages, that validates the approach to the story and also expands the cultural validity of the historical constructs. Crichton’s book pushed more people into a particular Middle Ages, where a modern hobbyist could hold his own against professional fighters. Timeline still has so many fans, and to the best of my knowledge, not a single one of those fans are Medieval historians. In fact, because novels validate cultural constructs, unless those constructs are the same as the ones valued by historians, historians are likely to dislike them. Timeline is a wonderful example of this. So, also, is The Doomsday Book. What works for popular fiction can fail historians.

I was saying this, as is my wont, and Van Ikin (an Australian literary critic and academic) challenged me to prove it. I wrote my own Medieval history time travel novel, Langue[dot]doc 1305. When it was released, I watched my Medieval circles closely. I am still welcome in those circles, so my novel validated the way Medieval Studies people see the Middle Ages… but my novel will never sell well, because it doesn’t validate the constructs the wider public normally associates with the Middle Ages.

History in fiction is not about accuracy. It’s about meeting the needs of the novel and the expectations of readers. You can see how this works for yourselves if you read Timeline and compare it with Langue[dot]doc 1305. There are writers who are clever enough in both worlds to cross that divide. For the fantasy Middle Ages, the gold standard for this is Judith Tarr.

Fiction is way more important than we like to admit. It supports culture, it transmits culture and it changes culture. It helps us translate our own experience into words and constructs that help us move through our lives, and to interpret what’s going on. George RR Martin is a useful testing ground for this. Game of Thrones both validates people who want to break down rule of law, and allows others to appreciate the role of law in maintaining a stable society. Why did I bring up Westeros? Because that dual view of a lawful and a broken society that Martin shares is part of US culture. We’ve seen it playing out. Stories matter.

Stories help us interpret the past, and they underpin our own understanding of the world we live in. We use them to discover truth and to place ourselves in a cultural context, and more. And, for the record, religious stories also fill this function. Never dismiss the importance of religion in giving cultural validation. The fact that we live in largely Christian societies means that the ‘neutral’ position for novels is not actually neutral at all. It validates our Christianity-based societies. In Muslim countries, the neutral setting is Islam.

Tolkien’s cauldron of story is handy for understanding this. You can find it in his essay On Fairy Stories. People like me are the chemists who work out what element does which, but most writers and readers are looking for flavour and texture, a good solid meal, or a fine snack.

We don’t talk enough about what goes into that cauldron. History is not just one ingredient in the cauldron, but many. Think of cooking as an interpretative act. Choose ingredients, some fresh, some from the back of the cupboard. Choose how to chop them, how to cook them, how long to cook them, and everything else right to the moment the food is on the table in front of us, the consumers. That’s what writers do.

Let’s look at what a couple of writers interpret what they do with history, from my interviews.

Chaz Brenchley explained “meeting Tolkien had ruined my writing life: I'd always wanted to write fantasy, but I spent my teenage writing bad Tolkien and then swore one of those great adolescent oaths that I would write no more fantasy until I had an original idea. Twenty years later, the postman delivered it, in the form of a brochure advertising a reprint of Stephen Runciman's history of the Crusades. People in exile from their own culture, at war on all their borders, at war between themselves, magic and mysticism and myth all around them”. Brenchley’s Outremer series was triggered by a specific emotional reaction to a particular moment in history.

Australian writer Dave Luckett was more pragmatic. He said, ‘the setting is a marker for a recognisable genre, and that in turn allows me to work with a set of conventions and reader expectations’. Except that Dave already had the emotional links and the knowledge from an undergraduate degree in Medieval Studies.

Most writers who use the Middle Ages in speculative fiction use it for craft reasons, with intellectual background added judiciously. Their work is read by the historians I mix with because mostly, it’s not seen as the Middle Ages. It’s seen as fantasy. Most historical fiction writers use reasons closer to those of historians to explain their writing and the way they research novels is somewhat closer to the way historians research. Kate Forsyth is a good example of this. This makes it harder for historians to read, because we can’t say to ourselves “It’s intended to be fantasy. It can't possibly be real.”

Franco-Australian fantasy author Sophie Masson says ‘I love the Middle Ages because they’re so full of fantastic stories, and peopled with such amazing and individualistic characters. I love the contrasts of the Middle Ages –the frankness, humour, passion, beauty and earthiness combined with spirituality, violence, craziness and chaos.’

Sophie’s statement is the most typical one of professional writers, and reflects what Chaz said. The writer’s relationship with the subject of the novel matters to both writer and reader.

The history of historians is a complex dynamic, a discourse, a set of never-ending conversations. History for historians is an interpretative bridge and history for novelists is whatever we need to make the story work, whether it’s drawn from the history of historians or if it’s invented because sources are hard to find and time is short. 

There are some important things that writers have to take into account when bringing history into their fiction.

First, M. K. Tod’s 2018 Historical Fiction Survey https://awriterofhistory.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/2018-reader-survey-report.pdf made it very clear that readers choose history in their fiction by subject matter and genre. Fantasy and science fiction readers mostly don’t want historical fiction – they want books that confirm to their ideas of subject and are fantasy or science fiction. The historian's Middle Ages is way less important for most readers, then, than what novels tell us about the Middle Ages. This is another of the reasons that Willis is a best seller for The Doomsday Book and I never was for Langue[dot]doc 1305. I don’t meet wider reader expectations, and I can’t because I addressed the expectations of Medievalists in my novel. It’s not the past novelists bring to life, it’s what we tell ourselves ought to be the past.

How we tell the stories is also important.

Every novel has a built world. Where we don’t consciously and carefully construct our world, we draw on things we already know, or think we know. We introduce elements of diaculture, shared cultural knowledge that we think the readers will enjoy or that will help our story along.

Even when we write history into our fiction with great care, the history is often going to be subsumed by the other things we bring into our built world, ranging from tropes, stereotypes, popular assumptions, to stuff from our lived experience. This is one reason why Medieval fantasy novels used to contain so much stew. It’s why some novels set in London contain much rain. Dan Abnett’s Triumff does, and so does the opening of my own The Green Children Help Out. In both cases, it’s a way of showing place that’s part of the way readers expect see the place.

Where a trope, stereotype, popular assumption or lived experience is easy to hand, it can replace what we know historically about a place or time. For example, 17^th century Jewish life is mostly missing from Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver: she uses her own understanding to create the story. 

What we ourselves have lived through, from what we eat and what we learn, to how we walk down the street, what we dream of, what we complain about, what we remember, these create our personal historical experience. Only a tiny, tiny number of people in the world share most of our personal experiences. Unless we research it and question it, however, the world view we carry every day developed through these experiences is the world view we carry into our fiction. This is why so many novels in English have a Christian underpinning to their world view even when they’re written by atheists.

To make it worse, not all Christianity is the same. The current kerfuffle about whether Tolkien created a Christian world or not changes in nature according to whether you’re looking at the built world in his fiction, or his private life. There is overlap. There is always overlap. Our personal experience of history is a deep part of our culture. So many US friends of mine identify major events by what they were doing at the time of that major event. These remembered moments are very handy for fiction writers, because they give moments of shared understanding that help the novel along. This element of US culture reaches into novels written outside the US.

One of the best examples in English literature of a writer demonstrating how experience translates into history is, of course in Octavia Butler’s Kindred. That book is brilliant. A contrasting one is Franz Kafka’s The Castle. They both articulate horrendous everyday experiences and translate them into fiction using history. Readers get entirely different messages from the work of both writers, depending on how they themselves can translate historical knowledge and lived experience into the world of the story. For some readers, the history isn’t visible in Kafka. Others describe it as the Jewish Narnia. For still others, it is fable-like and unreal.

There is no single correct interpretation. Experience translated into fiction is about relationships between the writer and their writing, between the writing and the reader.

What we think we know about the past, what we share with other people, is a big source of emotion in fiction... and of bias. That bias can become the story. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Galileo's Dream paints Galileo as the Great Man in a Great Moment, that is so much part of what most people think history is. It’s the application of a particular cultural interpretation to history. 

 Without Robin Hood and Arthur and Troy as wishes for what history contained, our novels would be much poorer. More historically accurate, but not nearly as much fun. If you want a fun comparison of different cultural interpretations and their effect on the history in a novel, compare the Regency novels of Georgette Heyer with Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series.

What is most important for any approach to history in fiction, however, is credibility: a reader’s capacity to trust the story triumphs. Connie Willis’ ‘facts’ in The Doomsday Book are actually tidbits that enable the reader to trust that the history is credible, because many readers believe that history is full of facts, because, to be honest, school history is full of facts. Verisimilitude is another thing that can convey credibility: this thing is depicted in a way that is real-seeming to the reader. Claire G Coleman creates a science fictional future in Terra Nullius and draws her verisimilitude from Australian history. Both facts and verisimilitude rest very heavily on the reader’s background, rather than on the history of a place or time.

All novelists make decisions relating to their work. We’ve talked about some of them, but let me add two more.

“Do I reinforce the reality of the past, through using writing techniques that help the reader situate themselves in the time of the novel?” The choices in writing techniques usually relate to the genre of the novel, because so much of the marketing is done through genre. The genre signals push the reader just as choosing a genre pushes the writer into how probable their history has to be, how much telling detail they need, and how to make the story credible. Language, clothes, mapping a submarine in Peter Dickinson’s Emma Tupper’s Diary, period illustrations in Jack Finney’s Time and Again – there are many techniques. Harry Turtledove uses telling detail spectacularly in the opening of The Guns of the South and Joan Aiken fills her fiction with grime and doom to bring her readers into her version of the Industrial Revolution.

Credibility is critical. If a reader can’t see the story as possible, then they don’t accept the story. Credibility is, however, a shifty thing. Historical fiction requires a sense of ‘this history is real’ so the writer needs a closer acquaintance with the history of historians. Every single writer in the History Girls (except maybe me) is an excellent example as this.

The more formulaic a genre is – and here I’m thinking of quest adventures, romance, and mystery – the more historical detail shores up the formula rather than working independently of it. The ultimate formulaic sub-genres in this respect are those that are represented by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and much fantasy that claims a Medieval backdrop.

The bottom line is that novels are not one-size-fits-all and that history in novels reflect the nature of a given novel. All novels are interpretive acts, and that the nature of the interpretation rests on the nature of the act. The form of the story, the content, and even the writing style affect how history is depicted.

This is an edited and abbreviated version of a talk I gave at Balticon, in May 2022. If you’d like the complete version, ask here: https://gillianpolack.com/contact-me/

The Top Ten Gothic Novels - Chosen by Anna Mazzola

As the nights draw in and the spirits move closer, it’s time to huddle beneath your Victorian counterpane with an unbearably creepy book. Many brilliant Gothic reads are being released in time for Halloween: Melmoth, The Corset, House of Ghosts, The Lingering, and The House on Vesper Sands, to name but a few. All play with and develop ideas and tropes that have been ghosting about since the 18th century. Ever since Conrad was crushed to death by a giant helmet in The Castle of Otranto, the Gothic genre has been evolving strangely and blooming darkly.

Here, as a discussion/fight-starter rather than a definitive list, are my top ten favourite Gothic reads.

1. Jane Eyre (1847)

Sinister boarding schools, ghostly visions, eerie laughter, suppressed sexuality and angry women in the attic. Charlotte Brontë used Gothic elements in Jane Eyre to create a new female language. Critics of the time were not impressed, however. The Quarterly Review did 'not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.’

2. Wuthering Heights (1847)

Wuthering Heights was also controversial in its time because of its unflinching depictions of cruelty and its challenge to Victorian societal ideals. Even now, Wuthering Heights remains a raw and powerful read, and many authors cite its influence in their own work. Many of us have wondered what else this formidable author might have written, but Emily Brontë died at the age of 30, saying that she would have ‘no poisoning doctor’ near her.

Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's Agnes Grey, were all published in the same year.

3. The Turn of the Screw (1898)

Henry James said he preferred to create ghosts that were eerie extensions of everyday reality: ‘the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy.’ For nearly 120 years, readers have been trying to work out whether the ‘strange and sinister’ were only in the unnamed governess's mind, or whether the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw are in fact real.

4. Rebecca (1938)

Though dismissed by many critics at the time as romances, novels such as Jamaica Inn, Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel (and many of Du Maurier’s short stories) are more akin to mysteries or psychological thrillers strongly embued with Gothic elements. As with Henry James, the real and the ghostly often elide, so that Mrs Danvers is part human, part malevolent ghost, and Rebecca herself haunts the imaginations of the characters, and also that of the reader, long after they’ve finished the book.

5. We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

‘My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.’ 

It’s my favourite first paragraph so had to be quoted in full. We Have Always was Shirley Jackson’s last novel and, in my view, her best. In fact, it’s probably my favourite book on this list: deceptively simple, darkly funny and profoundly unsettling. Jackson's biographer referred to it as a 'paean' to the author's agoraphobia. If you haven’t discovered Shirley Jackson yet, you’re in for a rare and disturbing treat.

6. The Bloody Chamber (1979)

Angela Carter was hailed as the ‘grand-dame of the modern English gothic’, saying that she’d ‘always been fond of Poe and Hoffmann – Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious.’

The Bloody Chamber is perhaps her most gothic work. In her collection of stories about witches, forsaken castles, haunted forests and howling wolves, Carter gave fairy tales a fantastic, feminist twist.

7. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (1985)

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with an exceptional sense of smell. He survives his mother’s attempt to kill him at birth and grows up in stinking, extraordinary 18th century Paris. Grenouille becomes a perfumer in order to preserve that most precious of smells: his murder victims. Dark, brilliant and building in bizarreness to a climax you’re unlikely to forget. Kurt Curbain wrote a song about it.

8.  Beloved (1987)

Gothic fiction often connects with the fears and anxieties of its time. Beloved is the story of Sethe and her daughter Denver after their escape from slavery. Their home in Cincinnati is haunted by a revenant, whom they believe to be the ghost of Sethe's daughter, Beloved. This astonishing book uses the Gothic to expose the horrors and silence of slavery.

9. The Little Stranger (2009)

Sarah Waters has apparently said she did not set out to write a ghost story, but she seems accidentally to have written one of the best ones. It is the 1940s and, as Hundreds Hall decays, peculiar powers take hold. Superbly measured and deeply chilling. As with the best Gothic tales, we’re left unsettled and unsure. And probably wanting to see the movie.

10. The Loney (2015)

Of the many brilliant Gothic novels from recent years, The Loney stands out like a moss-covered tombstone. Both old and new and suspended somewhere between the supernatural, the strange, and the outright horrific, Andrew Michael Hurley’s novel is, as Sarah Perry has said, a real Gothic masterpiece.

And yes, I realise I’ve missed off many of the classics usually included in lists of this kind. But what would be the point of a Gothic list, if it conformed to expectations?


__________________________________________________________

Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime fiction. Her second novel, The Story Keeper, is a tale of dark folklore and missing girls on the Isle of Skye.

https://annamazzola.com
https://twitter.com/Anna_Mazz

The Best Historical Fiction Set on Islands - By Anna Mazzola

Islands, with their closed communities, their remoteness, their uniqueness, have a special place in an author’s heart. Sometimes they become not just settings, but characters in themselves. I chose Skye for my second novel, partly because I wanted somewhere cut off (as it once was), and somewhere with its own folklore, its own beliefs. Others have gone a step further and created fictional islands: Atlantis, Azkaban, Atuan, Fraxos, Hedeby, Svalvard.

Once I’d started thinking about books set on islands, and asking others to give me their recommendations, I realised that there are in fact hundreds of excellent books set on islands. These include plenty of classics (Swallows and Amazons, Gulliver’s Travels, Treasure Island, To the Lighthouse, The Old Man and The Sea) and so many crime novels that I’m beginning to think going to small islands is a serious health risk.

There’s also a glut of brilliant historical novels set on islands. Here is a list of my top ten favourites, in which both ‘historical fiction’ and ‘island’ are given a broad interpretation. There will be many I’ve missed, so do comment below.

1. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys, 1966

The novel in which Rhys gives voice to the ‘mad woman in the attic’. Antoinette Cosway is a Creole heiress and the wife of a man who, though he is never named, we understand to be Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester. He renames her ‘Bertha’, declares her mad, and relocates her from the West Indies to England. Written in the 1960s but set in the early 1800s, this is a key postcolonial work, which deals with ethnic and gender inequality, displacement and injustice.

2. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell, 2010 

Mitchell transports us 1799 and to Dejima, a tiny artificial island in the bay of Nagasaki where the Dutch East India Company established a trading post. Mitchell had been backpacking through the west of Japan looking for lunch when he stumbled upon the Dejima museum. ‘I never did get the lunch that day,’ Mitchell said. ‘But I filled a notebook with information about this place I'd never heard of and resolved one day to write about it.’

In the novel, a young Dutch clerk arrives to make his name but falls in love with a midwife, who is spirited away to a sinister mountain temple cult. It’s a fascinating work of ideas, longing, power and corruption.

3. Secrets of the Sea House, Elisabeth Gifford, 2010

Having fallen in love with the Hebridean island of Harris and its legends, Gifford came across an 1809 letter to The Times about a Scottish schoolmaster who claimed to have seen a mermaid. From this sprang her brilliant debut, a dual-timeline novel that tells the tale of a newly-ordained priest, Reverend Alexander Ferguson in 1860, assigned to a parish on a remote part of the island. Over a century later, Ruth, raised in children's homes after losing her mother as a young child, discovers the tiny bones of baby buried beneath their new house, the legs fused together like that of a mermaid. A beautiful story of love, hope, healing and stories.

4. The Light Between Oceans, ML Stedman, 2012 

Tom Sherbourne returns home from the Western Front trenches of World War I. He and his wife, Izzy, move to an isolated lighthouse on Janus Rock off the coast of South West Australia. One day in 1926 a boat washes ashore, containing a dead man, and a crying baby. What happens next leads to a gripping exploration of grief, temptation and love.

ML Stedman said: ‘The island of Janus Rock is entirely fictitious (although I have a placeholder for it on Google maps). But the region where the Great Southern Ocean and the Indian Ocean meet is real, and the climate, weather and the landscape are more or less as I’ve described them. I wrote some of the book there: It’s a very beautiful, if sometimes fierce, part of the world.’ And that is very much reflected in the novel.

5. The Book of Night Women, Marlon James, 2013 

Marlon James’ searing second novel, The Book of Night Women, is set on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the late 18th century.  It tells the story of green-eyed Lilith, born into slavery and orphaned at birth by her 13-year-old mother, one of the many slave girls raped by their white masters. Forced to grow up fast, Lilith begins to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman. By no means an easy read, but an essential one, it’s a story that culminates in slave revolt, blood and atonement.

‘I don’t consider myself a historical novelist,’ James has said. ‘But I am obsessed with the past. And I am obsessed with stories that weren’t told, or that weren’t told in a good way.’ As the African proverb goes: ‘Until the lion’s story is told, the story will always belong to the hunter.’

6. The Lie Tree, Frances Hardinge, 2015

 

The Lie Tree, Hardinge’s seventh novel, opens with 14-year-old Faith Sunderly and her family leaving their home in Kent for the isolated (and fictional) island of Vale. Faith, forever spying, discovers they have fled to escape the growing scandal around her father’s recently published scientific findings. When her father is found dead, Faith sets out to find out what has really happened and discover the nature of her father’s investigations. This leads her to a tree that feeds off lies.
Supposedly YA, but really for all ages, this is one of my favourite Victorian-era novels, and definitely my favourite one about lying plants.

7. The Winter Isles, Antonia Senior, 2016 

Antonia Senior plunges us in to the raw and often vicious world of 12th century Scotland where Somerled, son of an ageing chieftain, must prove his own worth as a warrior. It’s a compelling story of action, warfare, love and sacrifice and one which is clearly rooted in Senior’s love of the West Coast of Scotland.

‘All my favourite places are islands,’ she says, ‘From Corsica to Mull, Iona to Ponza. As a visitor they offer a manageable, enclosed world to explore. As a writer there is something magical about islands: a world within a world. There is often surface beauty, and a sinister underbelly. They are enclosed spaces, in which people are too close to each other - that strange interplay between isolation and oppressive familiarity.’

8. Mussolini’s Island, Sarah Day, 2017 

In 1939 a series of Sicilian men were taken from their homes and imprisoned on the island of San Domino in the Adriatic Sea. Their crime? They were gay. Out of this little-known slice of history, Sarah Day has created a fascinating novel.

Francesco, a young gay man from Catania who grew up without a father, is one of those arrested and herded into a camp on the island. Meanwhile, a girl called Elena dreams of escape from her island home, imagining Francesco will save her.

‘It’s such a beautiful, peaceful place,’ Day says of San Domino, ‘and yet was used for such a dark purpose. As a visitor, arriving by boat, the island seems so idyllic, but as soon as you put yourself in the mind of a prisoner being brought there against your will, you realise how terrifying it must have been to arrive somewhere so isolated and stark. That context was really important to me when writing the book-an island can be a paradise or a prison, depending on who you are and the time in which you live.’

9. Sugar Money, Jane Harris, 2017 

Martinique, 1765. The charismatic but damaged Lucien and his more cautious older brother Emile are tasked by their French master with returning to Fort Royal in Grenada to bring back the slaves stolen by the English. Emile knows this to be a reckless mission, but, as with most things in their lives, it is something in which they have no choice. What follows is part adventure, part tragedy, and entirely compelling.

Harris has created a setting we believe in and characters we desperately want to survive. There is nothing sweet about Sugar Money, nor should there be.

10. Mr Peacock's Possessions, Lydia Syson, 2018 

It is 1879 and Mr Peacock and his family are struggling to scratch a life for themselves on a tiny volcanic island off the coast of New Zealand. At last, a ship appears, bringing six Pacific Islanders who have travelled across the ocean in search of work. All seems well until Mr Peacock’s son, Albert, goes missing.

This is a gripping mystery is woven from strands of real history. As Lydia Syson explained in her interview with History Girl Adèle Geras, the story came from her husband’s ancestors, Tom and Federica Bell, who in 1878 decided to take their six children to make their home on an uninhabited Pacific Island called Sunday Island. ‘The captain who brought them sailed away, promising to return in three months. They found their provisions were rotten and they never saw that ship again.’

Again, the island setting is crucial to the story, as Syson herself makes clear. ‘The island – so beautiful, so fertile and yet so treacherous - was a gift in terms of setting, plot and metaphor.’

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Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime fiction. Her second novel, The Story Keeper, set on the Isle of Skye, will be published in July 2018.

https://annamazzola.com 
https://twitter.com/Anna_Mazz