OK – so this blog did not actually start shortly after the dawn of time, but it’s certainly been around for a good while now. The idea is to have authors answer a fixed set of questions about a prominent character in one or more of their books. Last week, Derek Birks blogged about his fifteenth century character Ned Elder. You can read about Derek’s wonderful characters and stories here:

http://dodgingarrows.wordpress.com/20...

This week I’m introducing the main character in my debut novel Andrew LathamThe Holy Lance.

1) What is the name of your character? Is he/she fictional or a historical figure/person?

My main character is Michael Fitz Alan, an English Templar knight. He’s a fictional character, but everything about him as a late-twelfth century Templar is historically accurate. To be certain this was the case, I went so far as to submit the manuscript to the guy who literally wrote the book on the Templars, Professor Malcolm Barber. He suggested some relatively minor tweaks, but otherwise gave my portrayal of Fitz Alan, and Templar life more generally, an enthusiastic thumbs-up.


2) When and where is the story set?

The story is set in the Holy Land during the Third Crusade (1191). It begins with a ferocious battle in which Fitz Alan and his band of Templars barely manage to fend off Saladin’s last-ditch effort to relieve the besieged garrison of Acre and defeat the crusader host.


3) What should we know about him/her?

Fundamentally, Fitz Alan is an archetypal warrior hero: courageous, clever, resourceful, idealistic, tough and, of course, a peerless fighter. Like all such heroes, however, he is also “wounded”. Externally, this takes the form of a recurring pain in his shoulder (a rotator cuff injury, which I have to assume was common among people who spent so much time swinging a heavy sword). Internally, it takes the form of a longing for spiritual redemption that can only be fulfilled by living the Templar ideal as fully as possible. It is the effort to realize this ideal – to subordinate his exceptional martial abilities to the values of the monk – that both animates Fitz Alan and makes him interesting.

None of this is to imply that Fitz Alan’s a saint – like all great military adventure heroes, he most assuredly isn’t. He falls short of (or overshoots) this ideal time and again. It is, however, to place him in his proper historical context. Fitz Alan isn’t simply a twenty-first century (presumably secular-humanist hero) parachuted into a story set in the twelfth century. Rather, he’s my very best educated guess about what a twelfth century hero would actually look like. As such, like almost all people in medieval Christendom, Fitz Alan understands the world in terms of Christian religious categories and concepts. For the people of Medieval Latin Christendom, these beliefs were neither a symptom of mental illness nor a cynical ideological smokescreen concealing their true motives (as they are far too often portrayed). Instead, rather like the laws of physics are for us, Christian religious categories and concepts provided the fundamental imaginative matrix through which medieval people made sense of – and thus acted in – the world around them. As I see it, not taking the medieval religious worldview seriously would simply be to get Fitz Alan – and his world – entirely wrong.

4) What is the main conflict? What messes up his/her life?

Fitz Alan has been sent on a mission by King Richard to recover the Holy Lance, an important religious relic widely believed to have been responsible for the “miraculous” success of the First Crusade. The ensuing quest leads Fitz Alan and a hand-picked band of Templars on a journey deep into enemy territory, where they battle Saracens, Assassins, hostile Christians and even a traitor within their own ranks as they seek to return the relic to Christian hands and thereby ensure the liberation of Jerusalem.

5) What is the personal goal of the character?

At one level, Fitz Alan’s goal is to recover the Holy Lance. At a somewhat deeper level, however, his goal is to become the very embodiment of Templar ideal: a disciplined, skilled and brutal warrior motivated not by the desire for earthly reward (power, wealth, glory, pleasure) but by the higher ideals that would later crystallize into the ideal of chivalry. He’s a proper bastard so it’s difficult for him to realize this goal. But he’s trying.

6) Is there a working title for this novel, and can we read more about it?

The series is entitled The English Templars. The first novel is entitled The Holy Lance. I’m currently writing the sequel, provisionally entitled The Assassin’s Revenge. There’s a third installment under development, but it’s as yet untitled.

You can find out more on my website at www.aalatham.com


7) When can we expect the book to be published?

The Holy Lance will be published by Knox Robinson in 2015. I’m hoping the Assassin’s Revenge will come out in 2016. As for the third installment, I don’t think 2017 is too unreasonable.