H.E. Bulstrode's Blog, page 7

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Capturing Voices from the Past

One thorny challenge for the writer of historical fiction is how to capture and convey the language of a particular time and place in history, or indeed, whether to bother at all. To what extent should an author seek to reproduce past patterns and modes of speech, bearing in mind that they should be comprehensible and engaging for the modern reader?

There has been much discussion over the years with respect to the language of Shakespearian English, for it is striking to any speaker of English today that many of his sonnets do not rhyme, and his comedy often leaves one cold. Why should this be so? It is largely down to shifts in the spoken form of the language, and the following discussion of how it has changed – featuring examples of lines from Shakespeare rendered in both Received Pronunciation and ‘Original Pronunciation’ – is both illuminating and entertaining. There is an earthy rusticity to Shakespeare’s language in its originally accented form that is missing from its contemporary delivery which greatly enhances its comprehensibility, restoring missing rhymes and puns. It’s well worth listening to: http://www.realmofhistory.com/2016/10...

New Novella Released

Today marks the release of 'The Rude Woman of Cerne', a satirical novella with a supernatural element that finds itself in keeping with the season. The blurb follows below, together with a links to Amazon where you can preview its first pages.

'The Rude Woman of Cerne'
The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but Beatrice Clemens is determined to make this adage more ‘relevant’ to today’s society by blithely driving an eight-lane superhighway straight through the heart of rural England. Dubbed the ‘Conscience of Dorset’ by a newly launched progressive broadsheet, one could be forgiven for forgetting that this doughty campaigner for social justice in its multifarious forms is actually a B&B hostess (although she would prefer the non-gender specific term ‘host’). Alas for her guests, her values and preoccupations are never far from her lips, and her inclusive zeal is something in which she enjoins all to share, even if they are only trying to order a full English breakfast, and enjoy a country break far from the clamour of the madding crowd.

Just as Beatrice stands upon the brink of receiving the acclamation that she believes her work with ‘Diversity from the City’ deserves, something, or someone, is glimpsed amidst the hedgerows and within the banks of the Trendle; shadowy, furtive – the embodiment of old Dorset? Whoever it may be, he does not, it would seem, share her enthusiasms.

A novella of approximately 22,700 words in length.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01M7RS1OX/

https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B01M7RS1OX/

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B01M7RS1OX/

https://www.amazon.com/Woman-Cerne-Bu...

On Rewriting: the Case of 'Gwydion's Dawn'

There are few authors who do not extol the virtues of rewriting your manuscript, usually recommending that you should do so several times over, but how much is enough, and how should you approach it? For a lucky handful of souls, the words may spring ready formed like Athena from the head of Zeus, but I have not encountered anyone for whom this is the norm. The occasional sentence or paragraph may present itself in such a fashion, but not, surely, anything longer.

One piece of advice frequently given, and followed, is that a writer should hammer out a rough draft before going back and tearing the whole thing to pieces, restructuring its plot, characters and prose, and then going back and repeating the process. Others, such as myself, prefer to adopt a more organic approach to composition, revising as they go along, constantly tweaking and moulding to ensure that the tale emerges in a pleasing shape and style, to which so drastic an act of violence need not be necessary. It may well be the case that ideas relating to its enhancement later suggest themselves, but as I tend to plan my pieces in considerable depth before writing the first line, drastic revision is seldom necessary.

Those who write for a publisher have deadlines to meet, but for those of us who are able to dictate our own writing timetable, we possess the luxury of being able to impose or revoke them at will. Personally, I do find self-imposed deadlines useful, as they help to keep me on track and stop me from drifting too far from the daily discipline of writing. Although I can take as long as I wish, once I have come up with a story I am generally impatient to get it typed, knocked into shape and made available for all to read. That said, I do not allow deadlines to prompt me into releasing anything before I am fully satisfied that it has taken its final form, or more accurately, I should say that this will be the case from hereon, for there has been one instance in which I released a novella where I was not entirely happy with its ending. This, however, has now since been remedied and ‘Gwydion’s Dawn’ has been republished, but why did I initially release it in less than its fully realised state?

To answer this question, it is necessary to return to the matter of deadlines. As a rule, I tend to be constantly generating ideas, and at any given time will have a number of projects under development. Thus, at present for example, I am nearing completion of a novella – ‘The Rude Woman of Cerne’ – am a third of the way through a novelette (although it may yet morph into a novella) entitled ‘The Cleft Owl’, and half way through writing the novel ‘Pendrummel: Gwen Gwinnel’s Return.’ In addition, there are half a dozen or so embryonic plots floating around for further novelettes/novellas, and three novels. Having a timetabled plan with projected completion dates and release schedules thus comes in useful, ensuring that at any one time I prioritise a particular work. Problems only really arise if this schedule is interrupted by the intrusion of something unexpected, as was the case this past July when I awoke from a vivid nightmare and immediately scrawled down five pages of notes that became ‘3:05 am’. This story was the closest that I have ever come to experiencing an Athena springing from the head of Zeus moment. So striking was the effect of this dream, that I felt impelled to drop writing ‘Gwydion’s Dawn’ until ‘3:05 am’ was completed and published. This, naturally, threw me off track. So, why should this be a problem? As my deadlines are self-imposed rather than external, why would I wish to stick to such a deadline?

I stuck to my initial declared deadline for one straightforward reason: I had, rather blithely and naively, declared on my website, blog and Amazon author page, as well as in the supplementary matter to ‘Old Crotchet’, that ‘Gwydion’s Dawn’ would be released before the end of July 2016. As I had announced this, I felt that I had to stick to the deadline, and thus the novella came to be uploaded on 31 July with an ending which was a little rushed and compressed, that made for a less satisfying read than the preceding portions of the story. This, however, was a state of affairs that I could not let stand, so I returned to the manuscript late last month and fleshed out that which I had seen in my mind’s eye, but was left obscured from the reader in its initial abridged form. It now possesses the ending that it should have done all along.

What have I learned from this experience of self-imposed deadlines? Do not make rash and specific statements with respect to release dates; it is better to keep them vague. It is, moreover, better to break a deadline, than to break the flow of your story. As for ‘The Rude Woman of Cerne’, I hope to publish this before October is out, but do not be surprised if it should not appear until early November. ‘The Cleft Owl, will be released before Christmas, hopefully during the latter part of next month.

Cover Preview: ‘The Rude Woman of Cerne’

Given that I am too inept to insert an image of the cover of my forthcoming satirical supernatural tale ‘The Rude Woman of Cerne’ into a Goodreads blog post, you will need to visit either http://www.hebulstrode.co.uk/?p=48 or https://www.facebook.com/HE-Bulstrode... to view it in its full glory.

Yes, look at it and laugh, why not, for after all it is a comedy, and if its cover should bring a smile to your lips, so much the better. It may well feature artwork that would be very much at home on the site ‘Kindle Cover Disasters’, but you must admit one thing: it’s unique.

Ordinarily, I use photographs for my covers, but my attempt to get a good picture of the Rude Man of Cerne was thwarted by two things: mist, and the fact that he evidently hasn’t had a good scouring for a number of years, meaning that his lines were rather indistinct when I visited. Moreover, as I was neither hovering in a hot air balloon nor had access to a drone, the public viewpoint just outside of Cerne Abbas would not have yielded as clear an image as I required. So, dear reader, I introduce to you ‘The Rude Woman of Cerne.’ Beware, for Beatrice Clemens will be with you before the month is out. Watch this space for updates.

Review: 'Dissolution', C.J. Sansom

With prose pedestrian and dialogue stilted, is it any wonder that my attention wilted?

By the time that I had read thirty or so pages of this book, I had a hunch that getting through it was going to be something of a slog. For the first 220 pages or so, it read like a second draft rather than a polished final product, but to be fair, Sansom thereafter made some effort at fleshing out the rather two-dimensional characters thus far encountered. As this was his first novel, I will be charitable and own that he must have been learning his craft as he went, but there were a number of features of this novel that jarred, including the manner in which the author crowbarred his twenty-first-century preoccupations and outlook into the world of Reformation England.

Yes, the protagonist Matthew Shardlake may not have been ‘shaped for sportive tricks’, but just how many times did the author need to hammer home the fact that he shared his defining trait with old Crookback himself? It was monotonous. Moreover, beyond the dominating presence of the hump, Shardlake appeared to possess little to distinguish himself from the other underdeveloped characters who populated this work, other than a seeming compulsion to explain the obvious to his younger sidekick. The presence of the latter appears to have been engineered as a clumsy device for explaining aspects of everyday life in Tudor England to the historically unaware reader. Why otherwise, for example, would Shardlake have found it necessary to explain to Mark Poer the significance of All Hallows Eve? Given that church attendance was compulsory during this period and Poer was part of this society and no suckling babe, he would have fully understood what it meant, as well as have been conversant with the customs and rituals observed on this day.

As for the idealisation of Brother Guy, the blameless, persecuted Moor, and soon-to-be ‘mud-coloured ex-monk’ befriended by Shardlake, there could be no clearer illustration of anachronistic attitudes being shoehorned into Henrician England. Anachronism also occasionally slipped into the dialogue, with the use of the term ‘pressure point’ making me wince; clumsy evidence of this being an unpolished draft, rather than a finished product. Although I have been reassured that further books in this series are better written, I am not sure that I will read anything else by Sansom, for his style did not grab me, po-faced and humourless as it was. If, however, you are looking for a novel in which a Tudor hunchbacked lawyer endowed with twenty-first-century sensibilities finds himself hanging on to a clanging bell in a monastery bell tower, then this is the book for you.

Forthcoming Release: 'The Rude Woman of Cerne'

Within a few weeks I shall be releasing my new novella - 'The Rude Woman of Cerne' - a humorous tale with an uncanny twist. Its blurb follows below.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and Beatrice Clemens is doing her utmost to drive an eight-lane superhighway through the heart of rural Dorset. With her campaigning zeal for right-on causes, guests could be forgiven for thinking that they might be staying at a socialist eco-camp rather than enjoying a break at a quiet bed and breakfast. One August bank holiday, Beatrice's disgruntlement with her latest crop of guests sets in train a sequence of events leading to something that no-one could have foreseen. Someone, it seems, is determined to stop her dead in her tracks.

Review: 'The Winter King', Bernard Cornwell

The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This initial offering in Cornwell’s Arthurian trilogy evokes a plausible sub-Roman Britain, filled with decaying towns, kingdoms and beliefs; a Britain wracked by conflict, not only with Saxon and Irish invaders, but also between the British kingdoms themselves. It is a reimagining of the Arthurian legend that dispenses with the chivalric gloss and Christianising mythmaking of the mediaeval writers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Thomas Mallory; a tale recounted, ostensibly, by an ex-pagan warrior turned monk and scribe, who realises that the material he commits to parchment will be embellished and trimmed to fit whichever political ends prove expedient thereafter. There are no stone turrets, plate armour or Grail to be found here, but rather refortified iron-age camps, leather-clad warriors, and Merlin’s quest for a mythical cauldron. The mysteries of Mithras and Isis are presented as being as living and real a force as Christianity in this vision of fifth-century Britain, with Cornwell’s imagining of an initiate’s induction into the Mithraic cult being delivered with some flair.

Cornwell’s Arthur emerges as an ambitious warlord, cannily and ambiguously straddling pagan and Christian camps, keeping his peace with respect to which gods, or God, he follows. Unswerving in his defence of Dumnonia and its infant King Mordred, his personal passions prove not always to be at one with his principles. For all of his character’s strength in terms of being an adept politician and man of action, it is, for me, Merlin and Guinevere who manage to beguile the reader with their often caustic and sharp observations and utterances. Arthur may be given the lion’s share of the action, but they are provided with the best lines.

Lancelot emerges in an unfamiliar guise, cast as a coward and a braggart, surrounded by sycophantic masters of spin who perform admirably in projecting an image of their lord as a hero and embodiment of masculine virtues. He is so irritating and petulant, that it is a relief when he leaves the page.

Gundleus and Gorfyddyd appear as particularly repulsive foes of Arthur, invariably attended by their spitting, cursing druids Tanaburs and Iorweth, the latter sometimes finding themselves in confrontation with Dumnonia’s female equivalents – Morgan and Nimue. A great deal of blood and guts gets spattered about these pages, and not always within the context of clashing shield walls.

Overall, I found this a gripping and richly satisfying read. My appetite has been whetted for the next two instalments in this trilogy.




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Review: 'Wolf Hall'

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I would have given this a 4.5 if possible, but as this is not an option, I will have to settle for a four. Why not a five? Like many other readers, I found Mantel’s habit of only occasionally indicating who was speaking rather irritating, for it can be easy to lose track of who is speaking to whom. Otherwise, this is an expertly crafted novel with some beautiful prose, although I could not help but feel that Thomas Cromwell was portrayed in a manner rather more sympathetic than he deserved. Holbein’s portrait of the man, together with the historical record of what he did, suggests a political bruiser possessed of a character that would have fitted comfortably into the upper echelons of any of the European totalitarian regimes of the last century. Perhaps the next volume in the trilogy will temper my impression of the author having indulged the man with rather too sympathetic a treatment. We shall see.



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Researching Historical Fiction

‘Write what you know’ is one of the cardinal commandments that hangs over the heads of aspirant authors, and if taken too literally, could be fatally crippling to the imagination, particularly with respect to the venture of writing historical fiction, for what do you, I, or anyone else living today, know of, for example, the nineteenth century? Nothing, in terms of direct experience of course. That said, there is still a great deal that we can ‘know’, should we care to take the trouble to find out, and it is this process of investigation, this uncovering and reconstruction of worlds long since lost, that makes the writing of this particular type of fiction doubly rewarding, if your interests happen to incline in this direction.

We can never fully immerse ourselves in first-century Rome, fifth-century Gaul, the Russia of Peter the Great, or seventeenth-century England, but neither can we truly know what it is like to have grown up in a country, or culture, of which we have no direct first-hand experience; the nature of the author’s abstraction from a particular context – whether it be geographical, cultural, temporal, or a combination of all three – is only a matter of degree. The interposition of time serves to make this exercise of ‘retrieving’ or ‘recreating’ human experience more difficult, but not impossible, and it is important to recall at this point that the author is creating a work of fiction, rather than a history. The author of historical fiction seeks to create characters, scenarios and behaviours that are historically plausible, rather than necessarily entirely accurate. The primary challenge could be said to be that of producing a work that is both authentic to its period, yet engaging for the contemporary reader, given the transformations in attitudes and beliefs that have occurred over the centuries and millennia that might render the reader unsympathetic to the characters depicted. One thing, however, appears to remain constant across the ages: the foibles of human character.

There are many ways in which we can access past experience and the worldviews that bounded the horizons of our ancestors, the most obvious of these being the use of contemporaneous written sources in the form of books, letters, official documents and archives. These do, however, possess their limitations, particularly as we travel further back in time, for within a couple of centuries we already arrive at a point when only a minority of the population was literate, resulting in a narrowing of perspective that becomes increasingly filtered through the attitudes and preoccupations of elites. Thus, although seventeenth-century England was a relatively literate society by historical standards, the level of literacy varied greatly between class, gender and region, and whereas we are at this point able to directly access the written reflections of the upper classes and many of the middling sort of folk – particularly of men – the voices of the lower orders of society and women are largely lost to us.

There are also the material remains of the past, some of which survive in something approximating their original form, and others which have been updated or repurposed. Architecture, monuments, the visual arts, furniture, personal effects and costume, even the landscape itself, all provide sources of information and inspiration relating to different periods and aspects of our past. The more places that you visit and the more attention that you pay to what you see, the more finely attuned you become to the flow of time and changes in architectural forms, interior decoration, style and the attitudes and beliefs that fashioned them. In the UK for example, visiting properties and sites owned by the National Trust or English Heritage will provide an insight into the lives of the wealthy elite in particular, although a glimpse into the everyday world of the lower orders can be had in the kitchens, stables and working buildings such as watermills, windmills and forges. If you are lucky, your visit will coincide with a day during which corn may be milled, metal worked or re-enactments of different aspects of everyday life staged. Should you have children, the latter will soften the ‘ordeal’ of being dragged around a historic property on a day out, and, hopefully, stimulate their imaginations.

There are also museums of course, which house invaluable collections of artefacts from the past, and a number of which are classed as ‘living museums’, meaning that they attempt to demonstrate a number of crafts, industries and agricultural practices that have now passed away. To witness a defunct or rare craft being demonstrated provides the author with an invaluable aid to the imagination, even should that craft itself not be described in writing. Knowledge of a character having engaged in a particular line of work will have an impact upon how he or she carries and expresses themselves, as well as, potentially, upon the types of aches and ailments that they may suffer from.

London’s Geffrye Museum, whose focus is the domestic sphere, contains a series of reconstructed interiors spanning the period from 1630 to 1998, and is well worth a visit if you are on a trip to London (who knows, a visit may even provide you with the inspiration to remodel your own domestic surrounds). Many living museums tend to focus upon one particular time period, although often also possess exhibits relating to other periods, thus Butser Farm spans a vast expanse of time from the Stone Age to the coming of the Anglo-Saxons, whereas Morwhellam Quay focuses upon the Victorian era. The Weald and Downland Open Air Museum, and St Fagan’s National History Museum in Wales both feature collections of vernacular architecture reassembled onsite. Londoners are spoilt for choice, home as their city is to the great national art collections in the National Gallery, Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum, but there are also many provincial art galleries that are worth visiting. One quirky establishment worth visiting if you should be in the vicinity is Boscastle’s Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, which caused quite a furore when it initially opened in the village in 1960. However, it should be borne in mind that much of its content focuses upon the distinctly modern English invention that is Wicca (or it did when I last visited many years ago. I shall give an update on my impressions following a forthcoming visit early in 2017).

One of the most important concerns for the author writing about the past is avoiding anachronism, which can be difficult. A good rule of thumb with respect to diet is to remember that all of those foodstuffs originating in the New World would not have been available to the inhabitants of Europe, Asia and Africa before 1492. There should thus be no mention of potatoes, tomatoes, sweet corn, chocolate or chillies, to name but a few, in any work set before the European discovery of the Americas, nor indeed of that noxious stinking weed named tobacco, unless that is your piece should be set in the Americas. Diets around the world have changed greatly since the golden age of European exploration.

Technology is another sphere in which we encounter much potential for anachronism. It is particularly important to note that people’s sense of time has changed greatly since the introduction of the clock, for thinking in the sense of seconds, minutes and even hours, would have been alien to our forebears for the greater part of history. One’s sense of space, time and the wider world has changed greatly, with unified national time not coming into existence until the spread of the railways, communications being far slower during the era of poorly maintained roads than during that of steam and the telegraph.

Our forebears were attuned to the rhythms of the seasons, from which we have, to a greater or lesser degree, been largely insulated since the introduction of gas and then electric light and heating. Our bond with the natural world and sense of place within it has become increasingly attenuated on a practical day-to-day level.

The warp and weft of everyday life, which usually escaped specific thematic documentation and treatment in days gone by, is particularly challenging to reconstruct. What rituals of personal hygiene did people observe? How often did they bathe? How did they look after their teeth? How many changes of clothes did they possess, and how frequently were they laundered? If you are naturally inclined to writer’s block, writing historical fiction, throwing up so many questions as it does, may engender complete and protracted paralysis. Beware.

Once we have done our research and are satisfied that we have gleaned sufficient knowledge to commence writing our tale, the next task is how to create a text that is both ‘authentic’ and yet engaging and comprehensible. It is something of a conundrum, to which I shall return in a later post when I reflect upon creating the characters and voices that inhabit my forthcoming novel set in seventeenth-century Cornwall. Before closing, it may be worth mentioning that I find it helpful to track down and listen to music from the period about which I am writing. Even should it not be successful in eliciting an appropriate mood, it is at least enjoyable.