Ancient & Medieval Historical Fiction discussion

This is the group read thread for one of THREE May group reads.

by Bruce Holsinger

In Chaucer’s London, betrayal, murder and intrigue swirl around the existence of a prophetic book that foretells the deaths of England’s kings. A Burnable Book is an irresistible thriller, reminiscent of classics like An Instance of the Fingerpost, The Name of the Rose and The Crimson Petal and the White.

London, 1385. Surrounded by ruthless courtiers—including his powerful uncle, John of Gaunt, and Gaunt’s flamboyant mistress, Katherine Swynford—England’s young, still untested king, Richard II, is in mortal peril, and the danger is only beginning. Songs are heard across London—catchy verses said to originate from an ancient book that prophesies the end of England’s kings—and among the book’s predictions is Richard’s assassination. Only a few powerful men know that the cryptic lines derive from a “burnable book,” a seditious work that threatens the stability of the realm. To find the manuscript, wily bureaucrat Geoffrey Chaucer turns to fellow poet John Gower, a professional trader in information with connections high and low.

Gower discovers that the book and incriminating evidence about its author have fallen into the unwitting hands of innocents, who will be drawn into a labyrinthine conspiracy that reaches from the king’s court to London’s slums and stews--and potentially implicates his own son. As the intrigue deepens, it becomes clear that Gower, a man with secrets of his own, may be the last hope to save a king from a terrible fate.

Medieval scholar Bruce Holsinger draws on his vast knowledge of the period to add colorful, authentic detail—on everything from poetry and bookbinding to court intrigues and brothels—to this highly entertaining and brilliantly constructed epic literary mystery that brings medieval England gloriously to life.

Anybody interested in joining in this group read come May, you may like to know that the author will be popping in to follow the discussion, answer questions etc.. from time to time.
So, if you have a query or want to give the author feedback as you read the book, post it here in this discussion and Bruce Holsinger may find it and answer it during May.

Also, I have done an interview with Bruce on the group blog which I will post to the blog end of April or may 1. (will post a link here when it is up).

I think you will all really enjoy this interview. It certainly made me even more excited about starting the book May 1st!!

I got my copy of from the library last weekend, so I will be rearing to go come May 1. can't wait.

I'll read one of two winning Ancient group reads The Song of Troy, after I finish A Burnable Book.

I would love to start the book early, but I refuse to. I really want to read it with all of you and the author, at the same time.
Sooooo. I wait...

I got my copy from the library last Thursday, but I have to return it a week from Thursday because of the size of the queue. So, I'll be reading it now, but taking down notes and discussing with everyone once they start.

Ready to read BURNABLE BOOK? (sorry, no book/ author feature that I can find).

I will be spending an audible credit on this, it is narrated by Simon Vance, sometime in the beginning of the month.

Hoping to join in this read, but I have a group read on Doctor Zhivago to lead plus another book to read first, so I may be a bit late.

I think a few of us are just hoping to get our books from the library before the end of May, so I'm sure you'll have company it you join in later!

A Burnable Book I started and stopped the book last night. It is not May, yet. Please give me your thoughts asa you start the book.

I have to return my copy to the library tomorrow, so I've just finished it. I'm waiting for others to begin before sharing anything though. :)

Good sign that you rated it so high!

I'm still hoping I get this one before the end of May. Someone in line ahead of me needs to be a fast reader and not take the entire 3 weeks, if that's gonna happen.

I've also already finished it (couldn't contain myself once my copy arrived in the mail). I'll wait for the others to start for sharing my thoughts. I also hope the author has time to drop by, because I have some questions as well :)

The opening chapter was a let down for me. If Darcy rated it four stars, it must pick up.

It should explain that there are things I suspect others may not like about this book. The first 1/3 I guess is mainly bits and pieces and as the story unfolds, those bits start to meld and make sense.
I don't always enjoy that sort of thing, but I think this author did it really well. Also, I rounded up. :)

Is it Thursday yet? I've already started this book but will wait until May officially starts before discussing. I have to have my copy back to the library by May 12. I needed to start a little early.

I'm still waiting to start May 1. :)

Ah, go ahead and read the first chapter!

No, I shall not be lured into breaking early. ;)

I have the interview with Bruce Holsinger poised and ready to go up on the blog. I was going to release it today (as I usually post the group read interviews around the 28th/29th in order to get people excited), but I have decided to post this one on the 1st of May.

Walked into my library yesterday and there it was on the shelf. So lucky.
Making an early start on it today as I may not get the time to read later in the month, and I'm a slow reader!

I had to start early because my family has a lot of events for my daughter's college graduation this month! I'm having trouble getting into it because I've read several chapters and they have all had different points of view/different main characters. As they say on Survivor, I'm waiting on the merge!

Just a small tidbit- there is a cast of characters at the beginning; there is no marking to distinguish, as there has been in past books that we have read, the characters that have a basis in history. I miss that.

I'm on the wait list, so I hope I get it before the end of May. I recently had to wait about 6 months for the Goldfinch. Aargh. . .

Just made it to the top of the waitlist for the library's ebook, so I'll have to try to get through it in the two weeks allotted. Luckily I have a couple of work trips that should provide plenty of airport and hotel time-to-kill...

Candace wrote: "Just a small tidbit- there is a cast of characters at the beginning; there is no marking to distinguish, as there has been in past books that we have read, the characters that have a basis in history. I miss that. "

Most of the characters in the book are historically based. If I recall correctly, the authors note does go into that. I believe it's at the end of the book.

Nancy wrote: "I'm on the wait list, so I hope I get it before the end of May. I recently had to wait about 6 months for the Goldfinch. Aargh. . ."

Wish I'd known Nancy, I bookmooched a copy Of Goldfinch a few weeks ago.

Is there a reason for naming fictitious characters the same names as real characters?

Darcy wrote: "Candace wrote: "Just a small tidbit- there is a cast of characters at the beginning; there is no marking to distinguish, as there has been in past books that we have read, the characters that have ..."

I know what Candace means because I am having the same experience. Some characters are historical,while others or not.. Since the author did not say 'fictitious', I have to go elsewhere to get the info. The maudlyns (sp) listed within the first 147 pages are fictitious, perhaps give or take one or two. (Candance, you stated this situation much better than me.)

It is the 1st in Australia right now. I will be starting today. WOOT!! :]

I am obsessively checking to see when people return this one to the library and so far it's not looking good for May. *sigh*

Damn. That's disappointing. I would have liked to have you along.

It's been ages since we've both managed a group book at the same time.

I know! I thought this month we'd have one at least, but it isn't panning out.

Okay! Interview with Bruce Holsinger is up on the blog. Hope it inspires you during the read! Or, provokes some thought if you have already read the book.

http://ancientandmedievalmayhem.blogs...

I just finished Augustus so now I'm picking this one up tonight and starting it. Amazing, I always seem to lag at least a half a month behind on my group reads but I am actually starting this one on the 1st!

Terri wrote: "Okay! Interview with Bruce Holsinger is up on the blog. Hope it inspires you during the read! Or, provokes some thought if you have already read the book.

http://ancientandmedievalmayhem.blogspot...."

As always, great interview & great questions, Terri. Thanks Terri & Bruce!

You're welcome, Derek. Glad you liked it.

I am besotted with the language used in the dialogue so far. Truly wonderful.

Now that it's officially May, I'll post my question for Bruce. I hope you'll drop by to respond! (I'll just drop my question below a spoiler, for those of us who haven't read about the character yet. My question is about things read in chapter 5 & chapter 12, for people wondering if they can open the spoiler already or need to wait a bit more).

I've got a question about Eleanore.
I think she's a fascinating historical figure, and what little we do know about her only calls up more questions about her life and others like her, so I was very interested in reading your interpretation of her.

(view spoiler)[Honestly, I am a bit confused by the way you've written specifically about her gender identity. You refer to her as "a man in body, a woman in soul" (chapter 5), but also as "a man in body, but in soul a man and a woman both" (chapter 12). That reads contradictory to me. What do you mean by that and how do you conceptualize her gender?
(hide spoiler)]

Terri, when you speak to the author again, would you please ask him why he named the whore Joan? She is fictitious, but the Joan of the court is real. Thank you. Linda

ll

The blog will not load for me. I wanted to read your interview with the author.

good interview Teri - as always :)

Linda wrote: "Terri, when you speak to the author again, would you please ask him why he named the whore Joan? She is fictitious, but the Joan of the court is real. Thank you. Linda

ll

The blog will not l..."

Blog wouldn't load for me either, Terri. I tried several times.
Linda, Joan was a common name, but he could have used Jane [I hate to say it:)] for the madam. Both names are from the same etymology, after all and were common back then. It would help people keep the characters apart in their minds better.

Here is the interview for those who couldn't get Blogger to load. It's only in a spoiler to make it a shorter post!

(view spoiler)[Thursday, 1 May 2014
Interview with Author BRUCE HOLSINGER

What better book to whet the appetites of readers of history and lovers of books, than a book about a book set in the volatile era of late fourteenth century England? Is there better? I do not think so. I am biased though. Given my tastes for historical fiction and the like.
As one of those readers and history lovers, I was very excited by the prospect of sinking my teeth into A Burnable Book by Bruce Holsinger when it finally manifested, appearing in book stores and libraries worldwide.

Of course, the cover leaps out at you long before you set eyes on the premise, and that alone makes it a book hard to forget. But when I do flip it over and read the blurb, my breath catches in my throat for - as a borderline bibliophile and history addict – to find a book about a book set during the 100 Years' War....Well, lets just say I was like a moth to a flame. And I have seen plenty of other readers go down to its wiles since. We cannot help ourselves. Books about books. Ohh how delightful.

Given the chance to interview the author, Bruce Holsinger, I was inspired by a thousand questions regarding, especially, the history, but I showed some restraint and whittled them down to nine.
Bruce has risen to the challenge of my nine probing enquiries, and I hope you all, lovers of books and maybe of history too, enjoy the end result, and then go on to enjoy the book too.




***

A question I ask first in every interview..Do you think it is important to be as historically accurate as possible in an historical fiction novel?

Yes, I do--though accuracy and plausibility are two very different things. First, in order to be worthy of the designation, historical fiction shouldn't mess around with the historical record to any degree. If there is a departure from or violation of known historical fact (chronology, sequence, and so on) there should be a good reason for it, and it should be explained in an author's note. Second, though, historical fiction can't be satisfied with the known facts of history. In order to write a compelling story, an author has to make things up--has to lie about history, in other words! But these lies have to be plausible. I know for a near certainty that there wasn't a book called "Liber de mortibus regnum anglorum" floating around in late-medieval London: I made this book up for the purposes of my novel. But I also know and have learned enough about the history and literature of late medieval England to be confident that the existence of such a book is perfectly plausible--and that the story I've concocted around this fictional book is a feasible one. Perhaps it's in that space between accuracy and plausibility where the magic of historical fiction happens...


Where did your setting for A Burnable Book come from? For example, did you have an interest in that specific period of history and those geographical areas first or did you choose them after deciding to write a novel?

I teach medieval literature as my day job (I'm an English prof at the University of Virginia), so I've always been enchanted by the poetry of late medieval England, particularly the circle of Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and other poets of the Ricardian age. But I wrote a few other novels before "A Burnable Book" that didn't get published, and those were set in the present, though with medieval background stories. I guess the honest thing to say is that my fiction writing over the last fifteen years led me to this period and setting, and when I set out to write a third novel with two unsuccessful ones in the drawer I vowed to tackle an era I knew something about--though as I write in the historical note at the end of the novel, I was also ignorant about a lot of this period I thought I knew so well.


Why Geoffery Chaucer and John Gower? What is it about these two real life friends that made you want them both as your major characters?

At the ending of his great poem "Troilus and Criseyde," Chaucer dedicates the work to Gower: "O Moral Gower, this book I direct to thee..." That's a pretty strong statement of friendship, though how we read it has always been open to debate. I personally read that statement as a bit tongue-in-cheek, and when I set out to write the novel I wanted to explore the darker side of this well-known literary friendship. One of my good friends who read the novel said that the relationship reminded her of the Mozart/Salieri dynamic in "Amadeus"--though of course those composers weren't friends, while we know Gower and Chaucer were. It's one of the clearest and most provocative instances of a male literary friendship in the Middle Ages, too, and it allowed me to explore a lot of themes that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise: the power of literature, friendship vs. family, and so on. One of my favourite relationship in historical fiction is the Aubrey-Maturin friendship in the Master and Commander series of Patrick O'Brian, and I suppose I have that in mind as well as I flesh out the poetic friendship between Chaucer and Gower.



Your book is set against the tumultuous backdrop of fourteenth century England. The second stage of the 100 Years’ War has kicked off and your setting of 1385 is lodged between the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 and the treacherous Lords Apellants’ moves against Richard II which really gained its momentum in 1386. Can the reader expect to feel the intensity of that climate in your tale? Or does your story speak more to a politically oblivious London sub culture?

Great question! Yes, the intensity is building between the factions, and there have already been a lot of nasty Game-of-Thrones-type moves between Richard II and John of Gaunt: alleged conspiracies, open assaults, and so on. This particular moment, spring of 1385, was a really interesting one, falling just after the death of John Wycliffe and just before Richard's disastrous campaign in Scotland that summer. Since you asked, the sequel will be set in 1386 in the thick of the Wonderful Parliament, and in this case the machinations of the appellant lords against the king's faction will be at the center of the novel. "A Burnable Book" is very much a story of town-crown conflict, too, and the city bureaucracy is very much aware of the power struggles among the upper aristocracy. At the same time, it's a story of the London streets: butchers, prostitutes, pickpockets, and so on, so I suppose the political obliviousness is part of the story, but only for a portion of the characters and subcultures explored in the novel.


By all appearances, you seem to have gone to great lengths to inject a sense of realness into your book by using real life characters and a realistic social fabric. Has this been difficult and do you ever long for the freedoms offered by having purely fictional characters?

Yes I do! Staying true to history means staying true to the known facts of historical personages, and this can be a really tricky balance. In some ways it's easier to make up a character out of dust and nothing than to invent around the known facts of biography and chronicle. But I love this kind of creative challenge, and I'm eager to hear reactions to the various types of characters from readers. Are the real-life reincarnations (Gower, Chaucer, Swynford) as strong as the completely made-up characters? Are there other ways in subsequent novels that I might flesh out these characters, whether historically or otherwise? Character is a notoriously difficult part of fiction writing, and I'm just a beginner in many ways.



Are there periods of history that you would love to write in and why? And do you think you will one day?

I think so. I'm particularly intrigued by Roman Britain and have given some thought to setting a novel in that era, exploring the decline of Celtic culture in the face of Roman incursion. I'm also determined to write a present-day novel, though I'm not sure what form or genre that would assume.


You are working on a follow up to A Burnable Book. Will this be a sequel in final form? Or are you planning a multi book series?

I'm under contract to write a sequel (I have a two-book deal), but I would absolutely love to continue this as a five-book series. I already have a vision for it, and know exactly what Book 5 would do. So if "Burnable" and its sequel do well enough I'll hope to continue the series with three more books. More Gower, more Chaucer, more Edgar/Eleanor Rykener...


Is A Burnable Book written with a mind on the reader familiar with Chaucer and Gower? Or can the novice - who knows nothing or little about these men - pick this book up and relate to it do you think?

A novice should definitely be able to pick up the book and enjoy it. I assume no knowledge of the period or of these poets: it's a thriller, with a storyline that I hope keeps the reader turning pages without knowing anything about the Middle Ages, let alone about the life and career of John Gower. That being said, if you *do* know a lot about medieval literature you'll be able to catch a number of allusions and "inside jokes" that will make the story all the more entertaining--at least I hope so!


And now to the question I close every interview with..

Do you prefer ebook or paper?

This is an interesting question for me right now, as I'm in a somewhat transitional period. There's nothing I love more than curling up with a trade paperback, but I find myself increasingly drawn to e-readers for pleasure reading--and even for work. I did one of the near-final edits on "A Burnable Book" on my Kindle, sending it to myself as a Kindle doc and using the highlight function to bring out passages I wanted to come back and change. This was a really great way to see my own prose in a different light, and it worked wonders for my revision process. So I'm definitely a fan of e-readers, though as a scholar of manuscripts and early books I hate to think about the decline of print!


Thankyou for taking the time to do this interview, Bruce. I am sure that as people read this interesting novel, they will appreciate the insights and value the time you took to give them.

And thank you, Terri, for the wonderful opportunity to talk about the novel in this forum. I hope your group readers enjoy it and that they'll feel free to ask me any questions and make any comments they'd like!


*** (hide spoiler)]

In ROSES OF WINTER by Murdo Morrison, he used the same name for fictitious characters many times. I had just finished that book when I started the present book. What did I find? An author giving a fictitious character the same name as a historical character. If the practice is a trend, I do not like it. I stay confused enough without the same name adding to my confusion. lol

I agree with Jane on the same name confusion.

Thanks for the interview Terri, I found it really interesting!

Twelve chapters in, and I'm really enjoying the book - I like the way the prose flows, it's easy reading without sacrificing the sophisticated voice one would expect from Gower and Chaucer. The different settings of court, city and stews all feel well drawn and well distinguished.

I'm interested in the author's choice to use a first-person perspective for Gower, as it doesn't yet seem to offer a deeper insight into his character than the others (although I'm wondering if that *is* the insight into Gower - he takes his secret-keeping seriously :-) ).

Just read the blog interview via Facebook. Some good questions and interesting answers. A five book series would be good judging from what I've read so far, but whether the author will get the chance will be another thing. I wonder what his un published books were like? A bit of perseverance pays off and a lesson for any potential authors out there.

Good interview Terri! I'm about 50 pages in and the interview got me even more excited to keep on reading. Good book pick as well (so far :P). Love the style of writing!

I agree a good choice of book so far. The style of writing is different to what I'm generally used to so I find I'm having to re read the odd line or two to understand a particular phrase or meaning. The first few chapters are quite earthy in their descriptive sense I thought which made me want to read on and I am enjoying it so far. Just beginning part two.

Good reads isn't working for me.