History, Fiction, and Historical Fiction (Part 2)

For me, the preeminent historical subject—and history’s greatest story—is Rome. It’s a 2,000-year arc, which begins with a pagan, Latin-speaking republic on the banks of the Tiber, and ends with a Christian, Greek-speaking monarchy on the banks of the Bosphorus; and yet it’s a single narrative, about a single entity that over millennia of tumult and transcendence becomes something entirely different. There are almost no points of intersection between that first Rome and the final one, which has caused us, in the modern period, to give a new name to the latter—Byzantium, we call it, and the people who live in it Byzantines. But those are terms they themselves never used, and that wouldn’t have made sense to them. Never mind that their empire no longer included the city of Rome—or any of Italy—they considered themselves Romans, and their empire Rome.

This is a great, endlessly fascinating paradox, and it has kept me a happy reader for most of my life.

Occasionally you see this type of story played over the course of a single life. Right now I’m reading the latest book by the biographer Robert K. Massie, which begins as the story of Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, a petty German princess living on the edge of poverty in the small Prussian town of Stettin, and ends as the story of Catherine II, empress and autocrat of all the Russias. The girl at the beginning and the woman at the end comprise a single lifespan, but thematically there are no commonalities; they’re one physical entity, but two separate characters.

I crush hard on this kind of thing. And in Rome, it’s not the six or seven decades of a single life we’re talking about, it’s two hundred decades of social, political, cultural, and spiritual ferment. Or even longer. After all, there’s no real consensus on when Rome ended. Some authorities say it was with the collapse of the western empire in AD 476; others (myself included) point to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Others maintain it continued in the west until 1806, having been revived by Charlemagne and called the Holy Roman Empire. And still others say, stop fooling yourselves, we’re still living in Rome, and probably always will be.

It’s certainly true of me; I spend a fair amount of my intellectual life in Rome, reading histories, biographies—and historical fiction. Rome has been much, much luckier in that regard than England, or Egypt, or any of the other nations and empires which seem to inspire overwrought, romanticized dreck. Maybe it’s Rome’s essentially masculine, martial character that tamps down the dizzy romanticists.

Probably no one will be astonished to hear that my favorite Roman period is the five hundred years comprising the final centuries of the republic and the first of the empire. This is probably everyone’s choice; it is, after all, central to the story of western civilization, and therefore a direct antecedent of our own history. And within those five hundred years, my special affection is reserved for—again, no surprise—the eight or nine decades bookended by the rise of Julius Caesar and the death of his adopted son, the emperor Augustus. The sheer number of indelibly famous personages crammed into this period can almost choke you: Pompey the Great, Cicero, Cato the Younger, Cleopatra, Mark Antony. I myself would probably be happy to read nothing but biographies of Julius Caesar for the rest of my life. In so many ways, he was the first modern man: forward-looking, ruthlessly ambitious, urbane and sophisticated, the inventor of the cult of personality. And yet in other ways he’s incomprehensible to moderns; we look at his Gallic campaign today, for instance, and what we see is flat-out genocide. But that’s the appeal for me—the paradox of it; the uncertainty. Just when you think you know where you are in Rome, someone pulls the rug out for under you, and all your limbs go cattywampus.

One of the advantages this period enjoys is a spate of excellent ancient sources: Livy, Suetonius, Plutarch, even Cicero himself. Possibly if later dynasties had talent of this caliber documenting their preeminent personalities and events, they’d be equally well known to us; but by that time, of course, being a chronicler was a vastly more dangerous job. Emperors, unlike consuls, could have you killed on a whim. And they were always having whims.

We’ve got some excellent Roman authorities writing today as well, including Anthony Everitt (Cicero, Augustus, Hadrian), Adrian Goldsworthy (Caesar), Tom Holland (Rubicon), and Stacy Schiff, who just delivered a knockout biography of Cleopatra. But I have to say, I’m almost more drawn to the novels. The Romans were so like us in so many ways, that they lend themselves to historical fiction in a way feudal and medieval figures don’t. My favorite Rome-inspired novels are a series by Allan Massie that includes Caesar (just fantastic), Augustus, and Tiberius. Another novelist, John Williams, had a crack at Augustus that’s on par with Massie’s, while being entirely different. (This is the advantage to taking Augustus as your subject; unlike Caesar, who was so unremittingly public in everything he said, did, or thought, Augustus was much more tacit, even secretive; the workings of his mind are still largely hidden from us. This makes him a pain in the ass for biographers, but a dream for novelists.)

 I also love Karen Essex’s two-volume take on the most famous queen of Egypt, Kleopatra and Pharaoh. And of course there’s Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Claudius the God, which also serve as a kind of acid comment on British imperialism, but are thumping good reads on Roman terms alone. Hell…on any terms. (Graves also wrote a terrific novel set in the Byzantine era, Count Belisarius.)

And I can’t leave you without confessing my love for Steven Saylor’s series of ancient world whodunits, known collectively as Roma sub Rosa (meaning “under the rose,” or “that which is done in secret”) and featuring the charismatic, unabashedly romantic detective, Gordianus the Finder. Saylor’s prose is a tad workmanlike, but he’s a born storyteller, and  when I read histories of the late republican period, and Sulla and Marius and Cicero appear on the page, I clothe them in Saylor’s tics and mannerisms. I can’t help it; that’s who they are to me.

It occurs to me that I took up this theme in my last post as a means of providing context for Hillary Mantel’s remarkable dual-Booker Prize win for her two recent historical novels; but I’ve sort of degenerated into fanboy babbling. Well, that’s blogging for you. Anyway, I hope I’ve given some of you a signpost or two to avenues down which you’ll gladly travel; feel free to return the favor, in the comments section. Let this be your safe space; we won’t sneer at you for professing your love for a historical novel, any more than we would for a graphic novel. (Hm. There’s an idea for another post…)  

History, Fiction, and Historical Fiction (Part 1)

Hilary Mantel has won Britain’s prestigious Man Booker prize for fiction, for her novel Bring Up the Bodies, a follow-up to her previous novel, Wolf Hall, which also won the Booker. This two-peat is remarkable enough; but it’s even more remarkable when you consider that both novels are historical fiction, which is sort of the halfwit second-cousin of traditional fiction—the one you’re reluctant to let sit and the table because he chews with his mouth open and laughs too loud—and even more remarkably, it’s fiction about the Tudor court. There are a lot of historical novels about the reign of Henry VIII—a virtual mudslide (in every sense of the word)—but the majority of them feature covers with lushly clad royal ladies and gold-embossed lettering proclaiming things like “Dusk for the Dawn Queen by Callista Pilsen.” (I just made that up, so don’t go looking for it.) (Though if you were tempted to go looking for it, stop reading now. This post is not for you.) Mantel’s two books (a third is to follow) are a gust of cold, clean air to anyone who’s ever tried to slog through any of that miasma of purple prose. Her protagonist is not a royal wife, not Henry himself, but Henry’s impossibly gifted and painfully self-aware chief minister, Thomas Cromwell. And instead of wallowing in the period, Mantel goes at it with a scalpel. I’d only read one Mantel novel (Fludd) before undertaking these two, and I wasn’t prepared for the searing brilliance of them. The Booker committee got it right, and right twice, is all I’m sayin’.

I’m an avid reader of history, and as a novelist I’m of course an avid reader of fiction; yet I don’t read much historical fiction. But this Booker win has got me thinking about the historical periods that most interest me, and how I choose to spend my time there—whether in hard history and biography, or in fiction—because there are a few historical novels that I’ve discovered and cherished over the past three decades, and it’s time I gave them a shout-out.

As long as we’re already on the subject, one my principal historical interests is the British crown, from its first stirrings in the reign of Wessex’s Alfred the Great right through to the tabloid present—but especially the five hundred years between Henry II and Charles II (two of the most complex and magnetic kings). And within that window, the hundred-year-plus Tudor era remains the most consistently interesting to me. This is the tumultuous period when a small feudal kingdom turned a corner, and for better and worse (and there’s plenty of both) charged boldly towards modernity (shirking the Church, breeding nationalism in its place, establishing a prototype police state, etc.). And there was no shortage of collateral damage; in fact sometimes I think I could happily spend the rest of my life reading only biographies of people who had their heads cut off in Tudor times (Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Jane Grey, Mary Queen of Scots, the Earl of Essex—and that’s just a partial list.) But there’s no use denying that my obsession with the era is principally due to the tremendous, larger-than-life, mesmerizing, maddening presences of two monarchs: Henry VIII and his daughter, Elizabeth I. You’d think they’d be a gift to novelists (they’ve certainly been so to playwrights and screenwriters); yet good historical fiction about either is pretty much nil—or was, until Mantel.

Even the traditional biographers tend to buckle under the weight of so much muchness—and I’ve read a load of Tudor biographies, believe me. There are a couple of writers—Alison Weir, for one—who churn them out like cherry pies; it's a cottage industry. But I find those books exhausting; that everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink approach—you know what I mean. No, the Tudor biographies I most value, and to which I return most frequently, are two short ones: Henry VIII: The Mask of Royalty and Elizabeth Tudor: Portrait of a Queen, both by Lacey Baldwin Smith. He absolutely nails the psychology of both, and does so in very pointed, plangent prose, worth reading for its own sake.

As for historical fiction about the English crown: as I mentioned, it’s slim pickin’s unless you’re in the market for bodice-rippers. But I can wholeheartedly recommend Rose Tremain’s Restoration, a wildly entertaining picaresque saga that features one of my favorite kings, Charles II, in an indelible supporting role, where he functions as something like a cross between a Greek chorus and a deus ex machina. And talks like a 17th-century Noël Coward.

And then, of course, there’s Mantel.

Right, I’ve chattered on long enough; next time I’ll talk about a historical period that grips me even more than royal England does, and which has been much, much luckier in its historical fiction—and in its histories and biographies as well.

The real casualty in Colorado

All day long I've been resisting the inclination to be more horrified than usual by the slaughter last night at the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. After all, mass murder is mass murder; there should be no degrees of heinousness allowed for. 


And yet...to attack people when they're in thrall to a story—when they are, in a very real sense, out of body, in a kind of exalted state...it seems to me like an attempt to assassinate imagination itself.


Stories are our refuge; stories are what we use to make sense of the often cruel randomness of the physical world. Stories are, in fact, sacred. To kill people at the very moment they've given themselves over to this ancient, essential ritual...I can't help it, to me, it's worse than a shopping-mall or streetside massacre. Vastly, immeasurably worse.


Because it's opened a Pandora's box. From now on, whenever we find ourselves in a theater, part of us that will remain invincibly aware of our vulnerability. Which will prevent us from investing ourselves entirely in the story we've come to see. We'll always have that small knot of awareness of ourselves, in our seats, in the open. 


Which weakens and reduces the power of story. Which weakens and reduces civilization. Which weakens and reduces us all.

Chapter sponsorships: my own personal invention

I just ran a Kickstarter campaign for my next novel, Baby, a psychological horror comedy involving the creeping paranoia caused by a seemingly demonic infant.

The campaign went well; I reached my funding goal, and the road is clear for me to begin the hard work of writing the thing. But one of the incentives I offered to entice people into pledging their support, was chapter sponsorships. For $100, a supporter would be acknowledged as the official sponsor of one of the story's chapters. It will look like this:

I offered other incentives as well, for lower price points; but the chapter sponsorships were by far the biggest draw. Almost half of my funding came from that level alone. I was surprised, because I'd only included it on a whim; I'd gotten the idea at the theater one night, sitting behind a seat bearing a brass plaque proclaiming its proud sponsorship by a Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so. It occurred to me I might try something similar in the literary arena; what the hell, no harm, no foul.


As I said, I was surprised by the response. But I've been even more surprised in the weeks since the campaign ended, by people writing to ask if chapter sponsorships are still available. What, I'm gonna say no...?


So I'm going widescreen with it: Let it hereby be proclaimed that anyone would would like to sponsor a chapter in Baby (and watch the pledge video to make sure that's you), may do so by sending $100 to that purpose via PayPal to robertrodi@mac.com 


And keep your eyes peeled: I'm betting other authors pick up on this gamut. But remember, you saw it here first. Yeah, thassright, you gotcherself an innovator, here. 

The Tolkien Cure

The release of the trailer for The Hobbit (a full year before the film’s release, which is just plain goofy—like marketing on geologic time) prompted what one Facebook poster termed a collective online “nerdgasm,” and yours truly is one of those who seriously, metaphorically spunked. I’m not generally comfortable with the kind of grown man who embraces the word “geek” as a self-identifier, because most of those who do so seem to me to be hiding…making an active attempt to forestall adulthood by barricading its way with sky-high piles of endlessly replicating, increasingly self-referential, post-juvenile pop-culture junk. But it must be said, those of us who do manage to move comfortably about in the larger world are evidence that a certain Y-chromosome tendency to gibbering fannishness does in fact exist, and many of us have points of contact with this phenomenon that we tend to coddle, and feel guilty about afterwards.

And some of us…some of us wonder why. 

I first read the Lord of the Rings trilogy in college, in a four-day heat during which I first stopped going to class, then stopped eating, and then stopped sleeping till I finished it. It profoundly reordered my brain, and set me off on a decade-long pursuit of anything that seemed remotely similar…which the good old American marketplace was only too happy to supply in quantity: tidal waves of rubbishy wizards and elves and dragons and swords crested against my helpless psyche and nearly choked it on rank, stagnant ripoffs, till at some point in my early thirties I spat out the whole lot of it, wiped my mouth clean, and swore Never again.

Then, compelled by the first film in Peter Jackson’s adaptation, I reread the Rings several years ago, and was amazed to find myself as deeply enmeshed, as deeply invested, as I had been at eighteen. I didn’t see how this could be possible, since I’d long since settled into a frosty disdain for “fantasy” and its tired, tin-eared tropes; my appetite for the exotic was far more happily fed by stories set in real-world settings: ancient Rome, medieval Japan, imperial Russia, Civil War America.

So how was it that the Rings was hooking me?...After a very great deal of intensive reflection (navel-gazing, if you absolutely insist) I realized that the trilogy’s great appeal to me was the way in which it captured, and celebrated, the phenomenon of Englishness.

Like most Americans, I have a complex relationship with the empire from which our own polity spun off—the parent, as it were, against whom we rebelled and from whom we moved far away and got our own apartment, never to return. Americans have long cherished our highly distinctive national character, but while we may enjoy pretending that we’re our own self-creation, we can’t escape the fact that we speak English, our laws are based English precedents, and our folklore is populated as much by quintessentially English personae (Robin Hood, Lady Godiva, Henry VIII) as it is by our homegrown equivalents. 

Which is a long way of saying, we’re all of us a little bit English; and we have a corresponding desire—even a need—to nourish that part of ourselves. Literature is the most obvious place to go for this, and yet oddly the least satisfying. The great pantheon of English writers—Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton; Defoe, Jane Austen, and Dickens—give us, not the experience of genuine Englishness, but a highly specific guided tour of their own moral and cultural universes. Each of them fails by reason of his genius (while, of course, succeeding immortally on other levels).

The wonderful paradox is that it took an Oxford don, writing about a world that doesn’t exist, filled with strange races and monstrous creatures and so riven by magic that the laws of physics seem not to exist, to succeed in distilling the pure essence of Englishness. And I don’t mean Britishness; that’s something entirely different. I mean Englishness…homey, warm, and high-spirited—principled yet plucky, devout yet bawdy, a study in contrasts, but none so very stark. The Lord of the Rings glorifies these traits—in fact sets them up as the sole hope for an entire world’s survival. What’s thrilling about it, is that ultimately a monolithic, corrosive, expansionist evil is defeated by a few representatives of a people who love singing and dancing, drink and tobacco, and very little else. It’s the triumph of genial anarchy over totalitarian order; it resonated in J.R.R. Tolkien’s time (that of the second World War) and it hasn’t stopped resonating since.

This unexpected Englishness isn’t an accident. Tolkien is explicit about his debt to the bardic yarns of the Anglo-Saxons, their epic songs and fables, the rhythms of their idiosyncratic tongue. He’s able to distill Englishness because he’s dismantled it, gone back to first principles and rebuilt it from scratch, guided this time by his own sensibility—his love of story, of invention, of myth; and thus, Middle Earth has an integrity, a verisimilitude, a realness that no other invented fantasy realm can claim. (The single exception would be that of of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast—another archetypally English creation, and yet so radically different from Tolkien’s in every particular that there are virtually no points of intersection. Which is perhaps why it alone stands toe-to-toe with the Rings as cap-L literature…invoking, interestingly, Britishness as effectively as the other does Englishness.)

I’m not certain whether the pastoral England that inspired Tolkien exists anymore; it might be simply a state of mind, as the Old West has become for Americans. (We still revere the cowboy ideal, in a country now actively hostile to genuine cowboys.) But it remains a potent cultural touchpoint; maybe more potent than ever.

And a universal one, too. How else to explain what is possibly a greater paradox: that an Australian film director, an American film studio, and a cast of actors representing a half-dozen other nationalities, cultures, and traditions, could come together and not only accurately convey Tolkien’s Englishness, its precise tone and textures, but improve on it. It’s heresy to say so, I know; but there it is.

So yes, I’ll be dipping back into that Hobbit trailer over the many months between now and the film’s premiere; and each time the dwarves start singing of the Misty Mountains, I’ll feel the call of something closer to the infinite than I’m accustomed to encountering in the usual megaplex crapfest.

Meantime, feel free to call me whatever name you like. For once, this nerd/geek/fanboy won’t object.

Operation: Kickstarter

These are tough times for publishing—hell, for print—and as I've noted previously, the retrenchment can be felt most painfully in the narrowing market for new fiction; which is why I've gone into digital self-publishing (see "Introducing: The Sugarman Bootlegs" below). 

The comics equivalent is the reduction of viable venues for creator-owned properties. So again, I'm taking matters into my own hands. Sea Monster, a science-fiction series based on the lyrics to the album of the same name by my band, 7th Kind, and featuring art by the amazing Dan Dougherty, is now open for pledges on Kickstarter, the direct-to-your-audience funding website for arts and performance projects. 

Go to Sea Monster Kickstarter page

The high concept behind Sea Monster is that the CD is the soundtrack to a film that doesn't exist; the graphic novel is the follow-up comics adaptation. A little meta for your morning, friends!

It's like Bergman's Wild Strawberries crossed with 2012...with a little Philip K. Dick thrown into the mix. There's much more info available on the Kickstarter page, plus my used-car-salesman-worthy pitch video, and a list of all the gifts and swag we hope will tempt you into pledging.

So give it a look, then give us a boost, and together we'll blaze some new publishing trails...and have some hella good fun along the way Thank you for your kind attention.

Ask Me Anything

Well...I guess that's a tease, because the window of opportunity is now closed. At least it is for the purposes of the following video, sponsored by the fine folks at Mahalo, who gave me this forum to respond to fan-forwarded queries on my thoughts regarding writing, writers, fiction, nonfiction, comics, dogs, Italy, gay issues, and anything else that might fall under my various areas of experience or expertise. Anyway, enjoy.

BTW: That print in the background?...An authentic Palio poster from Siena—the one they slap on walls around the city every summer to announce the event. I managed to snag one (they're not really for sale), somehow got it home (it's enormous), spent a king's ransom to have it framed...and now it's making its video debut. (We've also got an actual, honest-to-god Caterpillar banner, the kind the alfieri toss around in the air. Someday I'll tell you about trying to get that past airport security. It's amazing I wasn't cuffed and Tasered.)