Friday 19 August 2016

John Williamson and James Burke: two very different heroes

Friday is the day that I generally write my blog. This morning I really had no idea what I was going to write about. I wanted to say something about the talk that I’m giving next week in Llandrindod Wells. I am going on about that on social media because I don't want to be the guy who gives a talk that nobody comes to but there’s only so many times I can beg you to come. (Do come. Llandrindod Wells is a lovely place and you'll enjoy it even if you have to listen to me.)

Fortunately, I woke up to somebody on Twitter who wanted to know how I coped with writing two different series and which of my main characters was my favourite. This gives me all the excuse I need to talk about how I got into this writing business which, by happy chance, means chatting about James Brooke. Did I mention I'm giving a talk on him in Wales next Friday?

There are people who got into writing because they needed to make money. Two brilliant examples are Lee Child, who started writing the Reacher novels when he lost his job with Granada TV, and Anthony Burgess who started writing when he was told that he had only a couple of years to live and he wanted to leave something that might generate an income for his family. Such examples are rare – fortunately, as the chances of making any serious money from fiction are negligible. Usually people get into writing because they have an almost pathological need to write. Some people start with the idea that "writing" is, in itself, something they want to do, but for others the first novel comes out of a desperate desire to tell that particular story. I was one of those. I came across the story of James Brooke on a visit to Sarawak, in Borneo. I was completely blown away by him and spent a year researching his life. Decades later, I finally sat down and wrote The White Rajah.

Portrait of Sir James Brooke by Sir Francis Grant
National Portrait Gallery London. Used with permission

As with most first novels, The White Rajah wasn't really a first novel at all. I made a first attempt at a novel based on James Brooke soon after I returned from Sarawak and, although it was taken surprisingly seriously by a leading London agent, it wasn't working. I knew too much about Brooke to fictionalise him. While there were other people doing things round him, there, in the centre of the story, was this historical sketch where a character should have been. It was only many years later that I decided that the way to approach Brooke's life was to tell it through the eyes of somebody else who accompanies him on his adventures. I knew that the real James Brooke had an interpreter called John Williamson. I decided that an interpreter would necessarily be close to the story. I also knew that the real James Brooke was a homosexual. Could the interpreter not become his lover? So John Williamson was born.

Williamson, although sharing the name and duties of the real interpreter, is entirely a fictional character. I gave him a back story, which didn't make it to the final edit, and settled down to have him tell Brooke’s tale. Only as I was writing did I realise that the story was turning into Williamson's story.

In the end, I don't think I got The White Rajah quite right. I wasn't prepared to commit to Williamson. It was supposed to be a story about this famous historical character, not a romance based around a man who is struggling to come to terms with his sexuality. Even so, the story was successful with the small gay press that first published it in the USA and I was asked if I could write a sequel. I was more than happy to do so. In my head I had a clear idea of who John Williamson was. The White Rajah was written in the first person and this made me very close to the character. In Cawnpore I was able to develop him however I wanted. Cawnpore is closely tied to the historical events of the Indian Mutiny, but Williamson is a very minor character in those events. I can have him do whatever I want, so long as he does not change course of history. So I made poor Williamson suffer. An outsider by class and sexuality, he never really fits in to British society in India. Instead, he immerses himself in native life, in a way that was common in the early 19th century but unusual by the time of the Mutiny. When fighting breaks out, he finds himself caught between the two sides. Whatever decisions he makes he will have to betray somebody. It's not a cheerful story, but I found it easy to write and I think it is still my personal favourite of my own books.

Meanwhile, the idea that I might write books with more commercial potential than those featuring John Williamson grew in my mind. I had been told by a literary agent that I might well be able to sell a story that featured a more conventional hero – heterosexual and untroubled. Enter James Burke. Burke was based on a real person. In fact the first book about him, Burke in the Land of Silver, is surprisingly true to the historical facts. I say "surprisingly" because the idea that one man might have had affairs with a queen, a princess, and a viceroy's mistress in between engineering the British conquest of Buenos Aires seems implausible, but does fit what little we know about him. Burke is the ideal hero for a straightforward historical adventure. Brave, resourceful, apparently irresistible to women, he moves effortlessly from one success to another. Of course, if he were as straightforward as that, he'd be quite a dull chap, so my Burke is also a snob, desperate to escape what he sees as the stigma of his birth to an undistinguished Irish landowner. Burke is cynical, calculating and often cruel, but, in the end, he will always do the right thing for his country and the people who love him. I like James Burke – how could you not? And he’s huge fun to write as he brings down evil villains, saves the day at critical junctures of the Napoleonic Wars and, without apparent effort, beds yet another beautiful woman. But I will never be as involved with Burke as I am with poor John Williamson – always trying to do the right thing and always trapped in a position where all his choices will lead to pain. A damaged, tortured soul caught up in the world of Victorian Empire, which loved the James Burkes of this world but had very little use for the Williamsons. I so wanted to see Williamson come to terms with his world and find some sort of peace and he does (maybe) when his adventures finally bring him back to England in Back Home.

So that's how I ended up with two entirely different heroes in two very different sorts of book. It all started with James Brooke: to my mind, one of the most amazing adventurers in an age that produced some very remarkable people indeed. Did I mention that I'll be talking about Brooke in fact, fiction and legend at Llandrindod Wells on Friday? I've been asked to bring along some swords, too, to frighten the children and keep order if anybody asks awkward questions. It should make for an interesting illustrated lecture. It would be lovely if you could come.


Friday 12 August 2016

Past Encounters: Davina Blake

Terry Tyler is one of Amazon's Top 1000 Reviewers and she has hit on a lovely idea to get more people writing reviews. I have mentioned that Amazon reviews are important, haven't I?


Terry has launched #AugustReviews to try to persuade readers to post just one review on Amazon during August. It can be as short or as long as you want. Just post one review (or two ... or three ... or as many as you want) and then tell the world about it on Twitter. Terry will add you to her #AugustReviews Hall of Fame so authors will realise what a lovely person you are and you can bask in 15 seconds of internet fame and the eternal gratitude of writers everywhere. You can read more about the idea on Terry's blog (which I do recommend because there's a lot of good stuff on it.) #AugustReviews is featured at http://terrytyler59.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/augustreviews-because-every-little-helps.html. If you're really nervous of writing a review, there's even a link to a handy quick-start guide to becoming an Amazon reviewer.

It would be lovely if some of you reviewed my books for #AugustReviews (nobody has yet).

Portrait of an author waiting for reviews
If you can't find words enough to express your love for my books, please review someone else's and I will forgive you.

I'll start the ball rolling with a review of Davina Blake's Past Encounters. A slimmed down version of this will be posted on Amazon before the end of the month.


There seems to have been a glut of World War II novels lately, at least if those reviewed by the Historical Novel Society are anything to judge by. When I was young, these books formed a distinct genre, often called 'war stories'. They were essentially stories of battle, historical only insofar as the uniforms and weaponry were of their period. Now, though, many stories take a wider perspective, looking at the impact of the war on civilians and, sometimes, on those soldiers who did not see conflict. Past Encounters falls firmly into this category, with the events of the war seen through the eyes of Rhoda, struggling with rationing and the perpetual threadbareness of wartime life in Carnforth, and also the experiences of Peter, taken prisoner before he fires a shot and struggling to survive in a Nazi labour camp.

This book works on many levels. Rhoda's life gives a convincing insight into the world of the women left behind when their men went off to war. Her experiences have interest added by the filming of the famous movie 'Brief Encounter' at the station where she works on the bookstall. The accounts of the filming are supported by extensive research, detailed in an end-note.

Peter's story is a tale of horror. I had no idea that British POWs were treated anything like as badly as this, though  the end-note says that Peter's experience is based on memoirs of other survivors (with various sources quoted). As Peter comes to realise, the awfulness of his experience is dwarfed by the atrocities of the Holocaust, so the way that people treat it is to ignore it. It's not helped by the fact that POWs are always, at some irrational level, blamed (and blame themselves) for their own fate: good soldiers don't surrender.

The book is told from the perspective of 1955. Peter has returned from the war with no obvious signs of what captivity did to him. There are no flashbacks, no PTSD. But the experience has destroyed something important: he is not the man who left Rhoda in 1940. He has lived through things that no one should have to see and, to survive, he has done things that shame him. Worst of all, he can only talk about what happened with one man who shared his captivity.

Rhoda, too, has changed. She has moved from being a girl to a young woman. There are things that happened to her during the war that she can't share with Peter. Peter has proposed in a world that both of them have left. They should have accepted this and moved on. But it's 1945: engagements are not be casually broken. So two good people are trapped in a marriage undermined by silences about the things they care about and an utter inability to understand what has happened to the person they once loved.

Davina Blake captures the social attitudes of the period with a sharp, and not unsympathetic, eye. Rhoda's mother had made her marriage work by applying herself unrelentingly to the business of being a 'good wife'. We are at first shocked by how she stands by her husband, a petty domestic tyrant, but when we see him wounded after one of those acts of unacknowledged heroism that war throws up, we see the decent man struggling to hold his life and his family together. We come to understand why his wife loves him and why he is worth her efforts. Rhoda, in time, must come to see Peter for what he is and to make her marriage work by being, in her turn, a good wife. It's all the more powerful because the message is not one that we naturally warm to nowadays. Peter, surely, should have been abandoned to a counselling service and Rhoda should have found a more fulfilling, if less "respectable" partner. But in 1955 life was not like that and Rhoda's choices are judged and defined by the standards of her time.

There is an enormous amount of incident in this book and I'm not about to discuss the details for fear of spoilers, but I was gripped. It's the first time in a while that I've struggled to put a book down. And be warned: this isn't a feel-good romance. No book that features the fire bombing of Dresden as background is going to be a cheerful read and parts of the story are brutally cruel. But it does show our parents' generation at their best, quietly and decently doing the right thing, making the best of an imperfect world. It's an approach to life that was once, I suppose, a defining characteristic of the British. For better or worse those days are gone, but Ms Blake gives a glimpse of that world and of the wartime experiences that, perhaps, created and defined it.

This is a brilliant book and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

The promotional bit

My own books are set back in the 19th century, but they, too, look at the impact of war on the men who were there. The Williamson Papers follow the adventures of John Williamson, who travels to the Far East in search of adventure. He ends up caught in a local war in Borneo that sees peace restored only at a terrible cost in human life. Moving on to Cawnpore, he lives through the horrors of the Indian Mutiny and the Cawnpore Massacre. His story ends back in London where, like Peter, he has to come to terms with the things he has seen and done. For a selection of the things people have said about them, have a look HERE. After you've read Davina Blake's book, I strongly suggest you have a look at mine. (Click on the book images on this page for buy links.)



Monday 8 August 2016

Roll up! Roll up! Meet the author and see the 'orrible weapons in his books.

It's August and, with the inevitability of a wasp homing in on a jam sandwich in a thunderstorm, our thoughts turn to the end of what passes for summer and the coming of the Bank Holiday.

As usual, I'll be spending the holiday in mid-Wales. That's where I'm writing this, listening to the lambs complaining because they've been separated from their mothers. It's a lovely part of the world and I do recommend it. 

The Bank Holiday is enlivened in our county town by the Llandrindod Wells Victorian Festival. The streets fill with people in Victorian costumes and the open ground in the centre of town hosts jugglers and acrobats and tents with handicrafts and vaguely Victorian themed stalls. There's a dog show where the hound we have adopted for our trips here came third in a waggiest tail competition. It's huge fun and you'd enjoy it. 



There is a more serious side to things with talks about the Victorian era given in the Hotel Commodore, which acts as the nerve centre of the Festival. And on Friday 26 August, yours truly will be presenting the life of James Brooke, first White Rajah of Sarawak. If that's not exciting enough, there will also be a display of swords of the region, including a head hunters sword that has taken actual heads. If you have a spare head, bring it along and we can demonstrate the technique.



If you are in the area (and it really is a lovely area to be in) please call by and see me. Talking to an empty room can be embarrassing and if you come you might even find it entertaining as well as informative. And once you've had enough of the town and me, you can explore the staggeringly beautiful scenery around and about.