Nicola Griffith's Blog, page 99

Hild roundup #4

It's hard to believe that Hild has only been out for a week...

There's been a lovely lull between waves of publicity stuff so I've been enjoying blinking and catching up with my reading (and sleep). For now, here are three blog reviews--I love each for very different reasons--plus a few miscellaneous items. (Also see roundups #1, #2 and #3.)
REVIEWS
Snarkmarket
A book for winter, by Robin Sloan
"On the surface, Nicola Griffith’s book is not the kind I usually gravitate towards — which, maybe, ought to make the recommendation count for even more? Hild is set in 7th-century England, and it traces the life of its namesake, the woman known today as St. Hilda of Whitby. I got my hands on an advance copy earlier this year and found myself utterly absorbed. It’s been a long time since I was so happy reading a book this fat; a long time since I was so sad to see it end. [...] As I read, and after, I found Hild’s way of thinking seeping into my brain. She is a scientist before science, a flâneuse before Paris or anything remotely approaching it. She is a watcher, a pattern-finder, a naturalist growing into a politician. [...] This truly is a winter book — big and heavy, with a warm heart. It will look good wrapped in colorful paper."

Far Beyond Reality
Hild, by Nicola Griffith, by Stefan Raets
"I am here to tell you: don’t hesitate. Read this book. It is wonderful and your life will be the richer for it. [...] This is a journey of a novel. I was lost to the world reading it. If you’re only going to read one historical novel this year, make it this one. If you weren’t planning on reading a historical novel, read it anyway. Buy it this weekend: it will be, after all, the Feast Day of St. Hilda."
Chasing HildaHild by Nicola Griffith, by Pastor Pilgrim"This beautifully written book is about that fascinating era of the 7th century Anglo-Saxons in Britain’s Northumbria and East Anglia with a focus on St. Hild(a) of Whitby. It reads almost like poetry as it is so lyrically written."
MISCELLANEOUS
The Coode Street PodcastEpisode 167: On Hild, History, Genre and WFC by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. WolfeExtremely interesting discussion about Hild and how the novel does or doesn't fit into the SFF genre. Conclusion: it could be speculative fiction but most likely not fantasy, unless-- Ah, but you'll have to listen to But I'll leave you to find out for yourself. 

Here's a photo by @Skullule whose trees are a pretty exact match for Hild's :
And another by David J. Williams of his most discerning cat, Ajax, hogging Hild: There are other pix of readers' Hild but I haven't had time to ask various permissions. So if you have a pic you'd like to link to, drop a comment. I'll tweet my favourites.
And finally, see the original Hild cover art, sans title etc., by the talented Anna and Elena Balbusson. It's gorgeous. I wonder if it could be made into a poster...

Photos from the Hugo House reading and party

Just three quick proofs for now, taken by the incomparable Jennifer Durham. We've got more photos, and some splendid video from Kurt Lorenz coming, but that takes time to edit.

It was a wonderful event, perhaps the most fun I've ever had at a reading. It was standing-room only. With a bar. And packed with people who have helped me, or I have helped, or whom I know someone I know will help. My people. It was a fantastic feeling.

I read two pieces from the book: the beginning, and a snippet about two-thirds of the way through, that I think of as the butcher bird sequence.
Then I answered questions--mostly Hild-related, some career-related, and some about writing process.
I signed a zillion books for people. (The book, the folks at Elliott Bay tell me, is selling well, so I'm pleased.)
And, as you can see, except for the dramatic, Hild-is-killing-people-now moments in the readings, I smiled and smiled and smiled.

Thank you to everyone who was there.

Feast day of St Hilda

Today is Hild's feast day. Or, rather,the feast day of St Hilda--whom some regard as the patron saint of learning and culture. May your day be full of the leisure to learn something that change your life for the better, or at least interesting, and perhaps read a good book.

Edited to add: Here's a blog post by Michelle of Heavenfield comparing Hild to Martha that you might enjoy.

Ooops! Got the date wrong...

Ignore the earlier post if you saw it. I thought today was the 17th. Except, er, it's not, it's the 16th. So tomorrow is her feast day. I think all this smiling has gone to my brain...

Hild roundup #3

Hold onto your hats, this one is going to be long. (If you're a glutton for punishment feel free to check out Hild roundup #1 and Hild roundup #2. One day, when things steady down a bit, I'll consolidate things but today is not that day.)
Hild launched just three days ago and the reviews are so fabulous I can hardly stand it. I'll start with those, in no particular order.
REVIEWS
NPR With Nuanced Beauty, 'Hild' Destroys Myths Of Medieval Womanhood, by Amal El-Mohtar"With gorgeously supple prose, Griffith tells the story of Hild, the seventh-century woman who would come to be revered as Saint Hilda. Hild is, according to her ambitious and canny mother, "the light of the world," destined to lead the Yffings into prosperity as the king's seer. But her only magic is that of observations, of reading cycles and patterns of behavior, be they in weather, landscapes, or people. Step by step, thought by thought, we are introduced to Hild's development and deployment as adviser to Edwin Overking at a time of enormous social change, as petty kingdoms clash and merge like tectonic plates. [...] Hild is a book as loving as it is fierce, brilliant and accomplished. To read it felt like a privilege and a gift."(With follow-up blog post by El-Mohtar, here, that is definitely worth reading.) 
BookforumConversion Starter, Jenny Davidson"In it's ambition and intelligence, Hild might best be compared to Hilary Mantel's novels about Thomas Cromwell. Griffith does not have the extraordinary ability displayed in Wolf Hall to render densely populated political rivalries as vividly and concretely as one might describe the relationships between three or four members of a family...but she has other gifts Mantel doesn't, especially that sharp eye for what happens to plants and animals (especially birds) over the course of the seasons, as well as an understated and just-lyrical-enough prose style that delights the reader locally without ever distracting from the forward movements of character and plot."(No link to this, because it's print.)
The Idle WomanHild, by Nicola Griffith, by Leander"This was a rare thing: a book I came to on the strength of its subject, knowing nothing about its author, hoping that it would be a amusing read - only to find myself simply blown away by the quality of the writing. And I'm not easy to impress. [...] Richly-described, sensitive and very far from being conventional, this is a real treat for anyone interested in this period - or anyone who loves lush, evocative language and the poetic resonance of ancient words - gesith; gemæcce; hægtes. Griffith has done a fabulous job and I hope she might turn to more historical fiction in the future, rather than the sci-fi and crime which I understand she's focused on so far. She certainly has a gift for it. Do get your hands on a copy if you can - settle back and savour it - and come and tell me what you think. I do hope you enjoy it. And why wouldn't you? Here is the gleam of arm-rings, brooches and torcs; the fellowship of mead and songs; and the echoes of heroic grandeur in an age which is already coming to an end: We ride in service to a dream from the gods. If our dreamer's horse fails, you will give her yours. If her food runs low, you will give your own. She will light our way. And now we ride."
Los Angeles Review of BooksWeaving a Hedge, by Brian Attebury"Midway through Nicola Griffith’s splendid Medieval novel Hild is a scene of hedge-construction. […] This scene can stand for the novel itself, and for its genre of historical fiction. Supporting the narrative are bare facts: names, dates, battles, kings. Between those dead stakes the novelist transplants green shoots, bits of lived experience that link the historical moment to the present. She then lops and bends and weaves these shoots — the smell of horses, the sound of crows, the stirring of desire — to make a pattern that is not only beautiful but also meaningful."
The Other Side of the BrainHild: A Lyrical, Lingering World, by Alix Heinzman"Nicola Griffith’s Hild: A Novel is something rare. It’s a historical fantasy, but it’s not a magical adventure, a bodice-ripper, a military drama, or even a political thriller. It’s not the kind of book you dive into and finish a day later and forget almost immediately. Hild is a whole world with a taste and texture of its own. It lingers. […] Hild herself: A girl in and of the past, navigating a complex and patriarchal world. Griffith hasn’t caved to the strong-woman-defies-patriarchy-and-becomes-a-legit-knight tendencies of fantasy with female leads (although, admittedly, Hild does learn to use a staff). Hild gains power and influence for herself and her family, but not by hacking up bad guys and teaching everyone about equal rights for women. Instead, her weapon is her intelligence. She also isn’t motivated by some personal horror-story—she isn’t strong because she was “broken first,” she’s strong because she has natural ambitions and hopes of her own. She changes the world not because she’s man-like, but because she’s human-like."
The New RepublicWhy Is Pop Culture So Obsessed With the Middle Ages?, by Cara Parks"Over the past three years, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy-meets-Tudors books have taken the publishing world by storm. The fifth installation, published in 2011, had the highest first-day sales of any fiction book that year, and the most recent season of the HBO adaptation was the network’s second-most popular of all time. We have the CW’s hilarious teen-soap version of Mary Queen of Scots, Reign; before that, there were The Tudors and The Borgias. Hilary Mantel has won two Man Booker prizes for her novels about Thomas Cromwell, which are currently being made into a BBC TV series. And now we have a new entrant into the canon: Nicola Griffith’s novel Hild .Hild, which takes place in seventh-century Britain, is based on the historic figure now known as St. Hilda, who helped to convert Britain to Christianity. The novel uses her scant biography (about half a page in a Christian history) to weave together an epic bildungsroman. We follow young Hild from the death of her father to her early career as a seer for King Edwin of Northumbria and her eventual evolution into a political actor in her own right. Griffith explains Hild’s mystical powers as a combination of attentiveness and keen intelligence, and limits the discussion of wights and witches to Hild’s less perceptive peers. It is a tasteful work of historical fiction, artfully dramatizing real events to recreate Hild’s seventh-century world."(A mixed review.)
INTERVIEWS
Shelf AwarenessThe Writer's Life, with Ilana TeitelbaumThe language in Hild seems carefully wrought to evoke the period and setting of seventh-century Britain. Was Old English an inspiration in writing this book?I'm grinning at the notion of "carefully" and "writing this book."Yes, Old English was foundational for me. Especially the poetry. I read the surviving poems, in several translations and in the original (though my OE is rubbish). It's stirring--heroic, alliterative, elegiac. But I'm not sure how representative it is of Hild's era. It's written, rather than being oral, which means it came to us through the double filter of Latinised, Christian scribes.I read a fair amount of old Welsh/British poetry, too, because Britain in Hild's time was a seriously multi-ethnic place. Scholars argue whether that poetry was originally written in Hild's time or centuries later, but it, too, is stirring and heroic, proud in a slightly different register.I took the poetry, stuffed it into the black box of my writing brain, and let it ferment. And then I quailed. I was terrified of screwing it up. In the end I did what any good Anglo-Saxon would: I got drunk, laughed in the face of fear, and charged. So while the thinking beforehand and the editing afterwards were carefully considered, the writing itself was more like riding a bull.
UK Lesbian FictionExclusive InterviewHistorical fiction is on a high at the moment, with Mantel’sCromwell novels winning two Bookers, and many other authors – including LesFic favourites Manda Scott, Stella Duffy and Jeannette Winterson – turning their hand to history. Why the increase in popularity?
Adrienne Rich said, “We must use what we have to invent what we desire.” (What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics) That’s what I’m doing with Hild: I’m inventing what I desire. I desire a vision of the world in which the woman I had imagined (after years of research) might have existed, in which she might have been able to live her life as a human being: as subject not object. I wanted to believe that the Hild I imagined was possible. To look at where we come from–the past–and believe we could have survived there as ourselves. By making Hild possible, I wanted to recast what people today think might be possible and so make it possible. In other words, I’m recolonising the past. Recasting it. Retelling it. And by so doing, I’m recreating the present and so steering the future.
(This one is long and juicy.)

KirkusPortrait of the Saint as a Young Girl, Amy GoldschlagerBasically, Griffith is “trying to look at different ways in which women could have power and agency.” As a seer, Hild has a substantial amount of influence over King Edwin’s decisions. History suggests that in later life, Hild sought power in the church, but the book ends with Hild as a young woman, long before that point. (Griffith plans to continue the story in at least one more volume.) It’s not entirely clear from this novel to what degree Hild’s actual spiritual beliefs will play in her decision to enter the church. […] “Religion is an organization. Religious is a political thing. Personal belief is personal,” Griffith says. Hild is simply seeking knowledge and power through the channels available to her. “Today, [Hild would grow]…up to be a scientist.”
Riffle
Backstory: Q&A with the author of HildWhat's your latest obsession?Trying to keep up with inter-library loans! After a multi-year pause--I've discovered that while actually writing a novel research not only delays the work but endangers it; it makes me uncertain--I've just gone totally berserk and ordered countless academic texts I've had my eye on for a while. Sadly, ILL doesn't allow loan renewal, so the books are piling up and time is running out. And still I see something in The Medieval Review and think, "Well, now, that looks interesting..."

THINGS I'VE WRITTEN
Booknotes, Large-Hearted Boy(In which I talk about the playlist I used to write Hild. You'll also find a link to most of the list on Spotify.)
Finding a way into a novel is like wandering in the wood late at night; sometimes what feels like a path is just a gap in the trees. Music is an emotional signpost. But it has to be pointing the right way, otherwise you end up in a bog, at the edge of precipice or floating backwards down the river.When I write I can play only music as familiar as my heartbeat--stuff I can harmonise with, pound out the beat to, soar upon without fully engaging. Otherwise I listen with the word-making part of my brain and I'm distracted. So these are all old songs. Some are older than me. I always played them in the same order, so my subconscious mind always knew what was coming next. But I started the playlist in different places, depending on what the writing required that day. Hild begins from the perspective of a frightened toddler, goes on to the glory of childhood certainty, then the tension and laugh-out-loud brilliance of first sex, the restless risk-taking of young-adulthood, the exhilaration of political power.Music is a thing of the whole body, not just the ears. So when I write I can't bear to listen to music through headphones or earbuds. I need real speakers, complete with enormous sub woofer. (Probably also for that reason, I insist on WAV files, not MP3s.) When I think there's no one around I crank it until the house trembles, feel the bass pushing my belly like a hand, the hum of cello like a bottle of bees in my long bones.I built three playlists: WeirdHild, OtherHild, and MainHild. I swapped from one to the other with Hild's mood. But as I moved into the last third of the first draft, and throughout subsequent rewrites, MainHild vanquished the others utterly.It's selections from MainHild I'll talk about today..."
Tor.comHild: Fantasy or History? (An essay in which I address the question lots of people keep asking.)More than one review of Hild has characterised me as an sf/f writer who has left the fold to try my hand at this historical fiction thing. I’m not convinced I’ve left anything. If I have, I haven’t stepped very far.When I first started reading I found no essential difference between Greek mythology and the Iliad, Beowulf and the Icelandic sagas. The Lord of the Rings,The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Eagle of the Ninth all spoke to me with the same voice: the long ago, wreathed in mist and magic. My first attempt at fiction (I was eight or nine) was a tale of a hero with no name—though naturally his sword has a name, and his horse, and dog. I’ve no idea if there would have been any fantastic element or not because I abandoned it after the first page. A brooding atmosphere, it turned out, wasn’t enough to sustain a story...
WhateverThe Big IdeaJust before I started work on Hild, I wrote “You’ve been warned,” a blog post in which I vowed that with my next novel I would run my software on your hardware. “I will control what you think and feel, put you right there, right then…give you a life you’ve never had, change the one you live. For a while, when you’re lost in my book, you will be somewhere, somewhen, someone else.” It was my dagger in the table, a public challenge—to myself. You see, I’d been aiming for Hild for a long time, and I was terrified...

Work in ProgressThe Language of Hild(In which I talk about how I used language, and Hild used various tongues--Old English, British, Irish, Latin--to achieve her aims.)Words matter. They’re like icebergs; nine-tenths of their meaning lies beneath the surface. But that hidden meaning has mass, it has momentum. A single word can crush your pretty sentence, or paragraph or even scene, like tin.
MISCELLANEOUS
VultureSix Ways Hild is like Game of ThronesThis is a piece of absolute fun. You'll discover that Hild is like Arya, Hild is like Bran, Hild is like Tyrion...

Amazing Stories
Here's a profile of me in Amazing Stories, in Spanish, by Laura Ponce

Tonight: Eagle Harbor Book Company!

Tonight I'll be reading from Hild, and chatting, and--if you want--signing your copies. All at Bainbridge Island's fabulous Eagle Harbor Book Co.

It'll be a rip-roaring evening. So come on down at 7:30 pm!

Today: Seattle Mystery Books and Hugo House

I'll be signing books and chatting for an hour or so today at Seattle Mystery Bookstore, at noon. Drop by, get your first edition of Hild signed and personalised.

And then, from 6:30 or so I'll be hanging out at Hugo House for the Hild launch party. Lots of people will be there. I'll read, tell stories, sign your book! Programme officially starts at 7 pm. Be there!

HILD IS OUT

Hild began as notes on a chart.
 Then became a pile of manuscript pages.
And now it's this.
It's out there, waiting for you. Here are some ways to buy it.

If you're in Seattle tomorrow pop in to Seattle Mystery Books around noon to say hello or drop by Hugo House at 7 pm to party.

I will spend the rest of the day beaming at the world in general. I hope you'll be spending it curled up in front of the fire with a good book...

Hild roundup #2

Stuff is coming in just a bit faster than I'd anticipated, so for this roundup of all things Hild -ish (for more see Hild Roundup #1) I'm going to divide links into sections.
First, the reviews. So far they've been stellar. Here, for your delectation and delight:
Edited to add: reviews from Tor.com and The Proximal Eye, plus a wee snippet of news from Whitby.
Seattle Times review by Nisi Shawl
Steeping us in the taste of seventh-century England’s mead, the weight and warmth of its gorgeously woven and embroidered fabrics, and the myriad sights, sounds and scents of long ago, Seattle writer Nicola Griffith has created a marvel and a joy... But it’s the book’s sheer beauty that will most astonish readers. As Hild rushes to rescue her now-grown half-brother and his wife, she envisions herself as a hawk stooping to kill his pursuers. “Waking and sleeping alike were one thing of hollowing air and falling.” Sharp as steel, clear as garnet, essential and sensual and right, Griffith’s telling of Hild’s adventures offers us something far better than mere comfort: the lure of the sublime.
Vulpes Libris, Kate McDonald
Hild, Nicola Griffith’s fifth novel, is very long and very detailed. It’s also the most absorbing and addictive story I’ve read in years. I was subliminally resentful for days until I finished it, finally, at 3am on a Sunday morning. By Sunday afternoon I had started reading it all over again. Being gobbled alive by a story isn’t so uncommon, but needing to go back and be gobbled up all over again only hours later is a mark of something exceptional. Several weeks later, I began it for a third time, because I simply couldn’t get the story out of my head, and wanted to get back into Hild’s world.

Lambda Literary Review, Susan Stinson
Hild is magnificent, an urgent, expansive pleasure... This is a big book, in every sense of the word. The pages fly by. The great surges of politics, economics and religion fuel and never overcome the tremendous force of the story. The world changes within the book, within Hild, and within the reader lucky enough to fall under its power. Hild is a pulse-pounding page-turner. It is a rich and inspired work of fiction. It is a book that fills both the urge to be taken away and the urge to be brought closer, to be called, as the jackdaws call, both outward and home.

Tor.com, by Alyx Dellamonica
In the hands of a great storyteller, it carries us into lands every bit as faraway and exotic as Frank Herbert’s Arrakis or Ursula Le Guin’s Gethen. Historical fiction even makes aliens of our ancestors, by illuminating how humanity’s attitudes, beliefs and cultural practices have changed over centuries gone by. Such a book is Nicola Griffith’s Hild…a remarkable fictional account of Hilda’s early years. […] This is a book sure to be compared with everything from The Mists of Avalon and Wolf Hall to, I’m betting, The Lord of the Rings. It has it all—the epic sweep, the utterly convincing level of detail, and the larger-than-life characters. Griffith has taken a handful of pages from the Venerable Bede and made a gift of them for us all, creating in Hild a passionate, unique and thoroughly unforgettable heroine.

The Proximal Eye, by Mark W. Tiedemann
I mention science fiction at the beginning because at a certain level, if we’re dealing with something deeper than costume drama or plot-driven adventure fiction, the exercise of finding, comprehending, and actualizing on the page an entire period from the past—Republican Rome, Hellenic Greece, the Mesopotamia of the Sumerians, the Kingdom of Chin, or post Roman England—is much the same as building a world out of logic and broad-based knowledgeable extrapolation. In some instances, extrapolation is all-important because the fact is we simply do not know enough to more or less copy a record into a fictional setting. Instead, we have to take the tantalizing scraps of what remain of that world and supply the connective tissue by imagining what must, what probably, what could have been there. And in the process we discover a new world.

---Next, the interviews:
Los Angeles Times interview by Gwenda Bond
Q: You start with Hild at age 3 and we follow her to early adulthood. How scary was it when you sat down to begin?I was frankly terrified. I wanted to write a novel set in the 7th century — about which most readers know nothing. I wanted to write a novel of character on an epic canvas. I wanted to write something so immersive that the reader would live Hild's life alongside her. ... Hild had to be in every scene — no relying on "Meanwhile, back in the point-of-view of a character you'd forgotten existed..." But how do you write an epic from one point of view? And at the same time how do you create a world that won't feel too alien to most readers? The thing was impossible!The only way to be a novelist, to think that you can create something others will give themselves up to for a dozen hours or more, is to have psychotic self-belief.
Seattle Times interview by Mary Ann Gwinn
Q: You portray the natural world in 7th-century England as wild and beautiful, though man had already changed things. How much of the natural world remains in northern England?A: You can still go on the moors and see nothing except an ancient Roman road, and heather, and sheep. Most of England, everywhere you go you see the hand of humankind, though that would have been true in Hild’s time.One of the things that broke my heart was when I came across a book, “The Birds of Yorkshire,” which had to be 100 years old. I thought, “Oh, they aren’t here anymore.” These days you can’t casually knock over a nest and take the eggs for your collection — that might be half the breeding pairs of a species.---Finally the news, which this time is mainly Hild making a few lists
Goodreads: #1 Mover and Shaker for NovemberiTunes: Top 10 pick for literature/fictionAmazon: Best Book of the Month for literature and fictionPublishers Weekly: Best Books of the Weekplus a link to Whitby Online which has snippets of recent Whitby-related news, just in case you're interested (though I couldn't find a particularly specific link, so the nifty stuff I just read might not be there is a day or two):Whitby News

Utterly DELICIOUS Hild review!

Go read this exceptional review of Hild by Kate Macdonald at Vulpes Libris which begins:

Hild, Nicola Griffith’s fifth novel, is very long and very detailed. It’s also the most absorbing and addictive story I’ve read in years. I was subliminally resentful for days until I finished it, finally, at 3am on a Sunday morning. By Sunday afternoon I had started reading it all over again. Being gobbled alive by a story isn’t so uncommon, but needing to go back and be gobbled up all over again only hours later is a mark of something exceptional. Several weeks later, I began it for a third time, because I simply couldn’t get the story out of my head, and wanted to get back into Hild’s world.

It's a long, juicy, thoroughly intelligent assessment of the novel. I am beaming. Also worth your attention: Kate's marvellous podcast, Why I Really Like this Book. She reviewed Ammonite a while back.
---Oh, and Hild is a Publishers Weekly Book of the Week. So I'm going into the weekend feeling pretty pleased with myself.