Historical Novel Society reviews 'Cawnpore'

I'm back in London and excited about the news I promised.

Cawnpore has been reviewed by the Historical Novel Society and got four stars. It's not up on Amazon yet, but it should be there any moment now. I saw the review a while ago, but I only just had the star rating confirmed. I know star ratings shouldn't be important (see my note here), but I also know that, in practice, they are – so I've waited until I had the confirmation before I posted this.

As I keep saying, reviews are terribly important to people who are published by small publishers like JMS Books, and a review by the Historical Novel Society is especially important because the Historical Novel Society make a thing of only reviewing 'proper' historical novels. Just getting a review from them means a lot.

This doesn't mean I don't need reviews from YOU. If you have read either The White Rajah or Cawnpore, PLEASE put a review on Amazon. Reviews are the reason why you have heard of 50 Shades of Grey but not any of the many (probably rather better) similar self-published works on Amazon. Yes, it really does make that much difference.

Another book group

I went to another book group last night. They were talking about 'The White Rajah', rather than 'Cawnpore'. It's difficult to tell how much people enjoy a book when you're in the room with them. You'd have to really hate something to be rude about it in front of the author! But it seems to have gone down well. There was some discussion about what sort of a man James Brooke had been and I was interested that a few people had decided he was too much after personal glory and didn't really care about the natives. I don't think I agree, but I'd deliberately tried to leave people room to draw the own conclusions about his character and I was pleased that this had worked. He did a lot of good things and a few truly terrible ones and people will have different opinions on which side of him was more important. When the book was just being read by friends and family, I was interested that some people felt that it vindicated Brooke and others agreed with Williamson that, in the end, the killing was too much to live with.

Someone said they wished that there was more about what happened to Williamson after he left Borneo and I read the opening of 'Cawnpore' that has him setting off to India to be caught up in the Mutiny. No one asked me to sell them a copy, but, with luck, some of them might go on to read it.

It's always fun to meet readers and Book Groups make a big difference for books that don't have the marketing department of a major publisher behind them. I'm always happy to turn up, if anyone wants to read either of my books at their group. I live in London, so I do need to be able to get to you, though I'd consider traveling if I can combine it with some sightseeing or whatever.

The curse of the three star review

The problem with five point scales for reviews is that the star ratings mean such different things to different people. Apparently, sales dip if a book receives 'only' three star reviews, suggesting that a three star review is seen as far from an endorsement to buy. Unfortunately, a lot of people giving the reviews don't seem to believe this. Here are some comments from three star reviews of my books:

"Ripping yarn... I read it prior to holidaying in Kuching and it made a very entertaining and informative prelude to our travels. Worth reading regardless, but a great way to get some context if you're travelling to Borneo." The White Rajah reviewed on Goodreads (average rating 3.8)

"It has a personal narrative that moves beyond the preconceptions of LGBT fiction and approaches that ranks of Sarah Waters in storytelling." Cawnpore reviewed on Goodreads (average rating 4.29)

'Goodreads' is an excellent site and well worth a look. I think reviewers there are more careful with their ratings than on Amazon. The lesson, though, is not to look at the star rating and move on, but read the review. (That said, Cawnpore is currently rated at 4.8 on Amazon.uk.) There's a lot of books out there and it is worth making that bit of extra effort to find the ones you'll enjoy – even if they're not mine!

And yes, although some authors claim never to look, I do read my reviews. I welcome all feedback on my work, either here or on Amazon or Goodreads. Oscar Wilde said, "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about." When it comes to book reviews, he was definitely right.

Don't read this, read that

I've been looking at a few blogs by fellow authors and I have come across one which is quite remarkable. Elizabeth (she doesn't give a surname) is an unpublished writer whose magnum opus is a book based on a real jewel theft in the France of Marie Antoinette. Like any historical novelist, she has done research that is unlikely to find its way into the final product. In fact, she's done a lot of research. And rather than waste it, she publishes it on her blog. So here, in convenient bite-sized chunks, is everything you might want to know about the characters, politics, buildings and even textiles of late 18^th century France. If anyone is studying the period at school (does anyone cover the French Revolution at school nowadays?), it's a wonderful resource. Check it out at http://queensransom.wordpress.com/

Elizabeth's blog is a work of great generosity. She's put masses of work into it and gets around 100 hits a day, but she doesn't even have an actual book to promote. In terms of marketing and self-interest, it seems to me to be an exercise of dubious worth. But how I wish there were more blogs like hers. If you have any interest in this period of history, you should get over there and have a look.

The Deepening world of books

'The Deepening' is a website that "reviews and vets books, novels, poetry, and general literature, promoting the best new releases for your reading pleasure." I'm delighted to have had a review of Cawnpore on their site. It's quite long, but it concludes: "[T]his novel is an excellent introduction to India as part of the British Raj, and to the siege of Cawnpore. The author does not deviate from the facts and the novel is a solid piece of history turned into a fascinating story and well worth a read."

There's more reader reviews going up on Amazon and other sites as well. If you like Cawnpore, please add your voice.

Why historical fiction is A Good Thing

I spend far too long these days worrying about intellectual defences of historical fiction But, apparently, I'm right to do so.  What exactly historical fiction is, and whether or not it is a worthwhile genre, troubles better brains than mine. The latest round in this continuing battle has been set off by a blogger writing in the Daily Telegraph. I'm not linking to him because, frankly, his writing is sloppy, his arguments are lazy, and he has no credentials as a critic. So why should I give him the publicity? But it has led to a flurry of historical authors trying to explain why historical novels can be good for you.

My contribution to this has been to read a 1961 pamphlet produced for the Historical Association. (No, I'd never heard of it either.) In it, Helen Cam concludes:

"The function then, of the historical novel is to awaken the incurious, especially the young, to interest in the past, widening horizons of all and enticing a minority to serious study. For such it can arouse the critical faculty and stimulate investigation for the verification or disapprove of unfamiliar facts, leading to first-hand acquaintance with original sources. It can enlarge the sympathies by compelling the reader to see abstract generalizations, whether political, social or economic, in terms of the human individual. The historical novelist has resources ... from which the scientific historian is debarred. He [sic] may fill in the lamentable hiatuses with his own inventions."

So there!

Book review: "Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British" Jeremy Paxman

As I write novels set in the days of colonial rule, I obviously had a lot of interest in reading Paxman's book on the British Empire. But, oh dear, what a disappointment it was!

Although it masquerades as history, the book is really an exercise in rhetoric. Paxman's trademark sneer translates well to the page. Already, in the preface he alliteratively attacks Britain's "dilapidated democracy". Our democracy may well be dilapidated, but it is completely irrelevant to the point he is making at the time and, more importantly, he produces no evidence whatsoever to support the argument. It's simply a way to put the lesser mortals that he lives amongst in their place. It is ironic that much of the book derides, at length, the elitist pretensions of the English, using a style and tone that immediately marks Paxman as the Oxbridge graduate that he is.

For somebody who repeatedly criticises the British for their Anglo centric view of the world, Paxman's own vision seems peculiarly distorted by the country he is writing in. For him, the British Empire is different from all other empires, apparently unique in its arrogance and exploitation. It is almost as if other empires did not exist. So he writes that the Treaty of Paris in 1763 made it "undeniable that Britain was the pre-eminent world power". The treaty did, indeed, mark the end of a war in which Britain had been victorious over France and Spain, but it returned many of the territories that Britain had captured from the Spanish and left Spain in control of the Americas from Louisiana and California down to Chile. Meanwhile Britain's American colonies were restricted to those parts of Canada that had been settled and the original thirteen American colonies together with the areas opened to the west as far as the Mississippi. Most of these territories, of course, were to be lost with American independence. Britain had significant possessions in India, but Clive's victory at Plassey had taken place only six years earlier and nobody in 1763 could have foreseen the growth of British power in India. Otherwise, British colonisation was limited to a few specks on the map in West Africa, the West Indies and, nearer home, Gibraltar and Minorca. Paxman's confident assertion that British pre-eminence was "undeniable" is unlikely to be echoed by a Spaniard.

Paxman's approach does mean that his book is not bogged down in the kind of tedious detail that I have just gone into in trying to define the size of the Empire in 1763. Such a definition is quite difficult. Do we include uninhabited and unexplored regions of the world as part of the Empire simply because they were painted red on the map? What of those distant shores where a visiting British captain had once planted a Union flag and then moved on? That's the problem with history: it's messy and complicated. Paxman's book gets rid of the mess and complications but, unfortunately, this means that he gets rid of much of the history as well. The absence of any solid foundation to this edifice is partially disguised by the use of lots of quotations with footnoted references. In many cases, though, the references are to secondary sources. That is, if you check the reference, it will turn out to be a recent publication by another author with no indication of where the original quote came from. This is particularly annoying if you are trying to check any chronological details as this approach means that the date of the original quote is not given anywhere in Paxman's book. He also has an annoying habit of referring to "colonial historians", which most readers, I think, would take to mean historians from Britain's colonial period, whereas Paxman uses the term to disguise the fact that he is citing a modern historian who writes about colonial history. It's possible that his use of this terminology is just sloppy and lazy, but I think it is difficult to see it as anything other than deliberately misleading.

Generally, the book left me with a the feeling that some of the detail in it might be plain wrong, but as I'm not a professional historian this remained, for a while, just a niggling doubt. That changed when the book moved onto the Indian Mutiny and, in particular, the siege of Cawnpore. If you're reading this blog, you presumably know that my own book, Cawnpore is set during the siege. I enjoyed researching it. There was an enormous amount written about it at the time and some good modern summaries. (The best is probably Ward's Our Bones are Scattered.) Despite this, Paxman makes several errors. He says that the rebel leader, Nana Sahib, was "a victim of the Company's new Doctrine of Lapse which decreed that only natural born sons could succeed to the father's lands". Nana Sahib did, indeed, suffer under the Doctrine of Lapse, as the British refused to recognise his title. He did not, however, have any lands to lose. His adoptive father had already forfeited these as the result of a failed rebellion many years earlier. Nana Sahib did lose his father's pension, but this was not because of the Doctrine of Lapse.  Paxman claims that the shooting of prisoners was "too inefficient to act as a final solution" where most accounts agree that the rebel soldiers deliberately fired wide – an act for which they surely deserve some credit, even after 150 years. Most astonishing of all, Paxman claims that the women and children murdered in what is generally became known as the massacre of the bibighar, had not been included in the promise of safe passage given by the Nana Sahib. This is quite astounding, as even the most cursory reading of any of the literature about Cawnpore shows it to be simply untrue. The point, though not significant in the context of Paxman's arguments, is not a trivial one. The cold-blooded massacre of women and children who had surrendered under promise of safe conduct was a significant factor in the horrific level of reprisals conducted by British forces. Whilst it does not excuse British conduct (which did lead to expressions of concern even at the time) simply rewriting history in this way is quite extraordinary.

Perhaps we should not blame Paxman for all of these errors. His acknowledgements start with a credit to Jillian Taylor, who seems to have done much of the work. Paxman refers to himself as the writer. And here is the nub of the problem. Historians research their subject areas and, from the mass of information which they gather, they try to tease out some proper understanding of the subject. Paxman clearly started with his own prejudices (he read English at Cambridge and has no background in history) and then sent Ms Taylor off to gather up whatever factoids she could dredge up to support his position. In fairness, many of the factoids are fascinating. We learn, for example, that Lord Crewe, the Colonial Secretary, was so dull that it is alleged that a woman lost her mind listening to one of his speeches. We don't know who the woman was and no authority for the story is given, suggesting it is apocryphal, but it's amusing nonetheless. It isn't exactly history, but then neither is the extended summary of the plot of Rider Haggard's She with which he opens a chapter on the role of women in the Empire. Unattributed quote, after-dinner tales and outright fiction – it's all grist to Paxman's mill.

It would be easier to forgive the way in which Paxman has subjugated historical fact to the presentation of his rhetoric if all of this was done to illustrate some worthwhile argument. But, though the whole idea of Empire is clearly anathema to Paxman's 21st-century liberalism, it's not at all clear where he is going with this. He argues that modern Britain is itself a product of Empire, an argument that would surely be better supported by an analysis of modern Britain than by a trip through 300 years of colonial adventurism. He claims that the Empire was always about making money, but later discusses at length the good that was done by many young men who served abroad, dedicating themselves to the welfare of people that Britain had taken responsibility for and from whom it could never sensibly expect to make a profit. He details the brutality of some British military ventures but, finally, concedes that other nations have often behaved even worse and that, given the geo-political realities, many countries were better off under the protection of Britain than had they been left to other occupiers.

Perhaps, in the end, Paxman has accidentally stumbled on the truth of the British Empire. It was, indeed, in many ways a very bad thing, but sometimes it achieved things that changed the world for the better. (Paxman singles out the abolition of slavery as one of Britain's greatest achievements.) It was run by some wise men and a great number of fools. Many were in it just for what they could get out of it, while many a young man died far from home convinced that the good that he could achieve more than made up for his meagre salary. The British Empire was vast, inchoate and very, very complicated. The unthinking condemnation of Empire by modern liberals is as prejudiced and ignorant as the unthinking jingoism of an earlier generation. If other readers take this lesson from this extraordinarily poorly constructed book, then, perhaps, there is some tiny glimmer of worth hidden amongst all the dross.