We have a first for you today at Eve's Alexandria - an author interview. Contain your surprise, oh reader mine! I so enjoyed Sarah Bower's novel The Needle in the Blood, and was so thrilled and surprised by it, that I had to make contact and pick her brain about the process and ethics of writing historical fiction. It's a genre that both fascinates and frustrates me: fraught with technical and moral difficulty, it is easy to do badly and very hard to do well. I sent off an email packed with questions post-haste and soon received a very interesting and detailed reply.
Vicky: First, by way of introduction, can you tell us a little about yourself?
Sarah Bower: I currently work as Literature Development Officer for Norfolk and teach creative
writing at the University of East Anglia. But I’ve done all sorts of jobs to make ends meet while writing Needle, including selling cheese on Bury St. Edmunds’ Market, which was fantastic fun. I live in North Suffolk with my husband, two grown-up sons, two dogs, two chickens and a cat – and am hoping soon to add a beehive to the menagerie. And I’m going to be a (very young) grandmother in July!!
I began writing at a very early age and won my first literary prize when I was nine, but the experience of being laughed at by a careers teacher when I told her I wanted to be a novelist stopped me in my tracks for about 20 years. It wasn’t until we moved from Sheffield (where I was born) to East Anglia about ten years ago that, under the influence of a friend who is also a writer, I began to put pen to paper again. My tutor on an evening course – an inspirational teacher called Alistair Wisker, now, alas, dead – persuaded me to apply to UEA’s MA course, which I did and was lucky enough to get a place. I began The Needle in the Blood while on the MA programme.
Vicky: 'The Needle in the Blood' is a highly polished and practised debut novel. How was it conceived and what are its immediate inspirations?
Sarah Bower: Firstly, thank you for your kind observations about the novel. I did study mediaeval history at university, although my big interest then was in the Angevins. My immediate inspirations were both unashamedly populist – firstly Simon Schama’s TV series, A History of Britain, and secondly a TV drama series which was on a few years ago called Clocking Off, about women working in a Manchester garment factory. Simon Schama encouraged me to look at the Bayeux Tapestry with new eyes when he observed that the image of a woman and child fleeing a burning house in the Tapestry is the first representation in western art of what war does to civilians. I don’t know if this is true or not, but it certainly made me begin to think about what the Norman Conquest really meant for those involved in it. I originally conceived the idea of writing a series of interlinked short stories about the women who embroidered the hanging, taking Clocking Off as my model. It metamorphosed into a novel after I’d discussed my ideas with Andrew Motion, who was my tutor at UEA.
Vicky: Why the eleventh century? Why Odo? Why the tapestry?
Sarah Bower: Why the eleventh century? Well originally because that’s when the Conquest happened to have taken place. But as I began to research the period I realised it had a lot of interesting fictional potential. At this period what we have come to call the Middle Ages was still, if you like, experimenting with itself. It was only 100 years since the Normans settled in France, less than 20 years after the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western churches. The tribal movements which brought about the end of the Roman empire had only very recently settled down. So we were on a cusp between the old classical world focused on Rome and Constantinople and a Europe which would eventually become recognisable as the template for 19th century nationalism and the rise of the nation state in the form we’re familiar with today.
During times of great upheaval, social groups who tend to be marginalised when society is stable can, either temporarily or permanently, exert a surprising amount of influence. Women in the early Middle Ages often managed to take advantage of uncertainties about their status. In the context of this book, for example, I found quite a bit of evidence for women in England having run embroidery workshops in their own right, producing altar cloths, military banners and clerical robes for the big abbeys and the top families all over Europe. By the thirteenth century this has virtually disappeared. Rozsika Parker’s book, The Subversive Stitch is really good on this. So, having been confronted with the eleventh century, I then found it was a really interesting period to write about.
Why Odo? You may well ask. The short answer is he got in the way – rather, I imagine, as he did in life! There have always been rival contenders for the role of commissioning the Tapestry – recent books have argued for Eustace of Boulogne and Harold’s sister, Edith. All the different arguments are more or less convincing and at this late stage, I doubt we shall ever know for certain. For me, though, Odo has several attractions. Firstly, I am a novelist not an historian. My aim was to tell a story rather than devote my energies to the painstaking work of research and interpretation which would have been called for to challenge the accepted wisdom that Odo was indeed the patron.
Secondly, when I began to look at his life, I became intrigued by the way in which he seems to have been changed personally by the experience of conquest. He was Bishop of Bayeux for nearly 50 years. He did a great deal of good work in his diocese, rebuilding the cathedral, establishing a school, putting up new, modern housing for his clergy. Mass continued to be said for him on the anniversary of his death every year until the Revolution, which would indicate that he was well thought of. His reputation in England by contrast, even in the writings of a fair-minded chronicler like the Anglo-Norman Orderic Vitalis, was dreadful. He was seen as violent, rapacious and treacherous. I began to ask myself what had happened to him, and more widely, what might be the psychological effects of conquest on the conquerors. The Normans took a fantastic risk in embarking on the conquest of Britain. It drastically depleted the resources of the duchy, and their losses at Hastings were nearly as high as those of the English army. They took an irrevocable step, they couldn’t go home again, at least, not as the people they were when they left. William, for example, having been apparently happily married for many years, fell out with Matilda over the allocation of his extended empire to their sons and by his death they were no longer on speaking terms. So, in this context, introducing the figure of Odo into the narrative enabled me to look at the effects of the conquest from another perspective, and to show how both sides could be both damaged and enriched by it.
Finally, I have to confess I found him irresistible. Man of God or not, he embodies much of what we girls in our more girly moments like in a literary hero. He’s fabulously wealthy, has enormous power, can be a complete brute but also has a feminine side (which, being a priest, he can legitimately display). For me, he definitely does the Heathcliffe/Darcy thing and I ended up quite as much in love with him as Gytha!
Why the Tapestry? To begin with, the Simon Schama programme I’ve already mentioned, but the Bayeux Tapestry is easy to love and become fascinated by. Its images are so familiar to us they are almost like the wallpaper to our history. It’s used for everything from decorating tea towels to being parodied by cartoonists. (I have a mug on my desk depicting Bishop Odo consulting with his brothers about the building of ships – it’s awfully corny.) Despite this, it’s very mysterious. Virtually nothing is known about it for certain, from who commissioned it to where it was made or why, and it’s full of ambiguities and surprising little images in its margins which seem to have little or nothing to do with the main narrative. It’s also absolutely stunning – when you see it ‘in the flesh’, even though it’s behind glass, and the museum is always packed, and you have to subject yourself to some very garish video re-enactments, you just know you’re in the presence of something extraordinary, something which is much, much more than the sum of its parts. It’s a bit shabby, with lots of clumsy repairs inflicted on it over the years, and its final panel is missing altogether, yet it’s fantastically immediate and alive, as though the embroiderers only laid down their needles yesterday.
Vicky: It's clear that a lot of research went in to the writing of Needle. What kind of preparation did you do? And how important were academic resources to the choices you made with the novel?
Sarah Bower: I did a lot of reading for the book. As you will have gathered, I didn’t know the period all that well when I began, and as for the embroidery side of things, I can scarcely sew a button on so I had to do quite a bit of research into the techniques used and what the workshop might have looked like. But then I tried very hard to put it all aside and just let my imagination work. The relationship between historical novelists and their research provokes endless debate and I think there are as many different views as there are writers, but for me, research is a sort of compost in which the characters and their story hopefully grow. The details are very important – things like what herbs were used for what medicinal or magical purposes, what superstitions people had, what dances were popular. I mean, you can’t do a sex scene unless you know how people’s clothes were fastened!
By contrast, you have to be careful with the big picture drawn by historians with hindsight because you always have to remember that your characters can only know what they could have known in the setting in which you’ve located them. I’m sure we’ve all read historical fiction in which two yokels in a hut discuss, for example, the politics of the English Civil War with a breadth and sophistication only the author’s research could have given them. Whereas, in fact, those yokels might not even have known there was a war going on unless the troops happened to have passed by their hut. I try very hard to avoid that kind of thing and immerse myself totally in the period.
We had a new kitchen built while I was writing the book, and it’s all heavy oak furniture and wrought iron light fittings. I can’t help feeling if I’d been writing a novel set in the 1960s we might have ended up with pale blue formica everywhere!
Vicky: To what extent did the literature and art of the eleventh century (aside from the Tapestry itself) affect the book?
Sarah Bower: Obviously a working knowledge of the Chanson de Roland helped, and I did re-read The Battle of Maldon, which featured in the lost Byrhtnoth hanging. I also referred to the many excellent translations of contemporary chronicles, especially Vitalis’ Ecclesiastical History in Margaret Chibnall’s translation. Because he was of mixed parentage, and writing some years after the event, Vitalis was a more impartial commentator than, for example, Wace or William of Poitiers who were shameless propagandists. The collected Letters of Lanfranc were also useful, especially those he wrote to Odo, of course. Where the visual arts are concerned, I did look at images from the Norse tradition and from some contemporary illuminated manuscripts which scholars think might have influenced the Tapestry’s designer in order to give Agatha a set of references. I’m afraid I don’t have the academic tools to have gone back to original source material, but then again, as I’ve said, too much research might have overburdened the narrative.
Vicky: Needle features a number of 'real' historical figure, not least Odo of Bayeux and William the Conqueror. Do think there are ethical implications to 'telling stories' about such individuals?
Sarah Bower: To be honest, I think the ethical implications with figures like Odo and William are minimal as they are both public figures and have been dead for many hundreds of years. The ethical issues for me lie more in writing ‘truthfully’ about all the characters one creates, so they all speak and act as they want to, rather than as I expect them to.
Vicky: Do you think that historical fiction has any special qualities? That it has the power to tell us anything significant about the past?
Sarah Bower: This is a question which much greater minds than mine, notably Tolstoy, have wrestled with for years. As I’ve said, I believe the historical novelist’s task is to re-imagine history, which is different from re-telling or re-creating. Historical novels have a role alongside academic and popular history books, re-enactments, eye-witness accounts, archaeological evidence and everything else, but it is not their job to re-interpret the various truths of these. Fiction has its own relationship with truth, which lies entirely in the realm of truth as it relates to the characters and their world. Actually, I think historical fiction is much closer to scifi than to history – it takes readers into an alien world, which they will be very happy with as long as it abides by its own rules. All good fiction, of whatever genre, illuminates our own times rather than the past. The terms of reference may be different, but Gytha’s childlessness and Tom and Odo’s struggles with post traumatic stress do, I hope, strike a chord in the heart of modern readers who know nothing about the Norman Conquest.
Vicky: Snowbooks is marketing Needle as 'women's fiction'. I admit that I find this a difficult categorisation at the best of times. How do you feel about it?
Sarah Bower: It is tempting to see oneself as something special when one is a novelist, but the truth is, we are in the entertainment industry. It’s competitive and relies on good marketing. If Snowbooks’ lovely marketing people think ‘Women’s Fiction’ is the label most likely to sell Needle, then I don’t think I can argue with them. I’m a writer, not a marketing guru. Fiction labelling is entirely a marketing tool. Needle has been called literary fiction, women’s fiction, romance. One critic has even said I write like Quentin Tarantino! I imagine most of Needle’s readers will be women, both because of its subject matter and because most readers are women over 30, but I will be thrilled and grateful whoever reads it.
Needle is first and foremost a love story, so I suppose you could call it a romance although it doesn’t adhere to the strict rules. Again, categorisation is very artificial. There aren’t many novels which don’t have at least an element of romance or sexual tension. Sex and death are the taboos we most like to peep at from the safety of our armchairs.
Vicky: Can you tell us a little about the experience of being published by a small press like Snowbooks?
Sarah Bower: I have been delighted with Snowbooks from the moment Em Barnes got in touch with me to say she had enjoyed my first three chapters and please could she see the rest. She did this within 24 hours – a lovely contrast with my experience of submitting to big agencies and publishers for whom a six week turnaround time is average. Throughout our relationship, I have found Snowbooks to be efficient, accessible and completely charming. As they are a small organisation, my editor, Gilly Barnard, is my one-stop shop and has done everything from querying my spelling to designing my beautiful book cover and supporting my readings with publicity material. Dealing with just Gilly (who never takes more than 48 hours to reply to an email) instead of several departments of a huge organisation for whom you’re just a cog in a wheel is great. Let’s say authors are like dairy cows. Snowbooks is that nice organic farm just down the road where the cows all have names and don’t get stuffed with antibiotics.
With all the changes in technology, I think the publishing industry is sort of where the music industry was maybe ten or fifteen years ago, and that the indies are the way of the future. They really embrace the possibilities of on-line publishing, blogging (Em even put a report of the company’s annual strategy meeting on the Snowblog. How cool is that?), print on demand and so forth. They can be far more flexible than the big boys in responding to change. I love Snowbooks and will cheerfully champion them to anyone who’ll listen.
Vicky: Any sneak peaks into future projects?
Sarah Bower: Aha. The new book begins with the Jewish diaspora of 1492 and involves another of history’s notorious bad boys, but I’m not saying any more at this stage.
Vicky: And finally, could you recommend us some more extroadinarily good historical fiction?
Sarah Bower: When I read this question, I went through my book shelves and ended up almost re-categorising my collection! There are so many good ones. In the context of Needle, a novel which influenced me a great deal was Kathryn Harrison’s A Thousand Orange Trees, which is a stunning account of an illicit love affair between a priest and a young girl during the Inquisition. I think the best historical fiction often has an element of magic realism in it, so would have to cite authors like Marques and Carlos Fuentes, but also Lawrence Norfolk’s The Pope’s Rhinoceros which is as mad as a box of frogs, but fabulous and clearly has one of the best titles ever devised. I love timeshift – Iain Pears’ The Dream of Scipio, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Alison McLeod’s extraordinary Wave Theory of Angels. I love Rose Tremain, especially Music and Silence. But I suppose my two all-time favourites, the Scylla and Charibdys I shall never get around as a writer are Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda and A. S. Byatt’s Possession.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Many thanks to Sarah for agreeing to take part in Alexandria's interview trial run, and for recommending a glut of truly stupendous historical novels. Possession, Oscar and Lucinda, Cloud Atlas and The Pope's Rhinoceros are amongst my favourite books - I couldn't have chosen better!
Now shoo! Go and read The Needle in the Blood. Go on.
~~Victoria~~