Sharon Penman has Died

 Another sad loss - Sharon Penman had been ill for some time, but her death was still an unpleasant surprise.  She had recently been diagnosed with a rare cancer.  She was 75.

She was one of my favourite historical novelists, and one of the few who wrote about Welsh medieval history.  Both Sharon Penman and Edith Pargeter wrote about Prince Llewelyn, the last independent Prince of Wales.  Edith Pargeter wrote four books under the umbrella title Brothers of Gwynedd, and Sharon Penman wrote the magnificent trilogy which begins with the life of Llewelyn the Great, the Last Llewelyn's grandfather: Here Be Dragons, Falls the Shadow and The Reckoning.  Falls the Shadow brings in Simon de Montfort as the main character, as his daughter Ellen eventually married Llewelyn (no thanks to Edward I, who I despise with a deep and abiding passion!). 

 I wept non-stop through the last 200 pages of The Reckoning, partly because I was so involved with the characters, and partly because I already knew the history, so I knew what was going to happen to them.  When I was an archaeologist, I did the site tours of Caergwrle Castle in North Wales, which is where Dafydd, Llewelyn's younger brother, launched his attack on nearby Hawardan Castle (which was held by the English), thus starting a war with England which Edward I very decisively finished.

Sharon didn't only write about Welsh history, though.  Her first book was The Sunne in Splendour, about Richard III, and it is magnificent.  It was also completely re-written after the original manuscript was stolen, while she was still working as a tax lawyer.

She's also written about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Anarchy under King Stephen, and Richard I.  Her most recent book was The Land Beyond the Sea, about King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem and the war against Saladin - the same period that was covered in the film Kingdom of Heaven, but with a more historically accurate Balian d'Ibelin.

For lighter medieval fare, there are the lovely Queen's Man books, shorter medieval mysteries about a young man who works for Queen Eleanor.  I'm very fond of Justin de Quincy (and his dog Shadow).

Mary Renault

Everything I knew about homosexuality as a teenager, I found out from reading Mary Renault!
This was a good thing, because in the pages of Mary Renault's novels about Ancient Greece, gay men were generally sympathetic, well rounded characters. Though I do remember reading The Persian Boy when I was fourteen (about Bagoas, the Persian eunoch who was friend to Alexander the Great) and hoping that my gran didn't try to read any of it over my shoulder!
The books, by the way, mostly came from the school library - we had a very good school librarian, who introduced all sorts of interesting literature to the mix. So I read the Alexander books, and The Last of the Wine (which included Athens under siege and Socrates), and her wonderful stories about Theseus The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea. Later I found the audio book of The Bull from the Sea, narrated by Michael Yorke, who will always be the voice of Theseus for me now (though it was a pity the story had to be abridged so much - one of my favourite scenes, where the girl bull leapers go down to try to catch the escaped bull before Theseus gets there, was missing).
This year at Hay Festival, there were two talks about Mary Renault which I wasn't able to get to, by Bettany Hughes. She talked to Hannah Critchlow on May 24th and Tom Holland and Peter Stothard on May 25th.
I did manage to get my hands on the free handout paper for the Festival, though, with her article in it. The Daily Telegraph, sponsoring the Festival, put out an issue every day it was on, and this one also has an original short story by Neil Gaiman called Click-Clack the Rattlebag.

So this is what the school librarian was putting into my eager little hands at secondary school: "What she gets right is the sheer peacock-gaudy, drug-saturated, hardcore sensuality of this time and place. Cutting-edge science now tells us ancient warriors would indeed consume vast vats of liquid opiates and a ferocious honey-mead, retsina and wine cocktail. There was cannibalism. Girls and boys did oil one another with rose and saffron-scented olive oil. Renault heard and smelt the ancient world many millennia after it had died and decades before it was resurrected by contemporary technology."

She was a nurse during the Second World War, too, so when she wrote about wounds, she knew what she was talking about. Her books were one of the reasons I studied Greek Archaeology at university - because I'd already been to Athens, and Crete, and on campaign with Alexander.
And through the magic of literature, I can go back whenever I want, to listen to the girl playing the double-flute while languid lovers toss the dregs of their wine onto the tiled floor to try to make the initial letter of their lovers' name.

Memories of Mary Stewart

I heard today (from reading tor.com) that Mary Stewart has died, aged 97.

Her books were an important part of my reading life as I was growing up. I discovered The Crystal Cave series first, and I can still remember the images that her writing conjured up the first time I read them - Merlin's mother weaving the wrong colour on the loom as she got disturbing news that the young boy didn't understand (but the reader did), a drunken wasp dying on poisoned fruit in the orchard, little details that made the Dark Age world come to life.
Her writing also gave me an important lesson - as Merlin is growing up, he learns to seek knowledge wherever it may be found, rather than sticking to a single religious tradition. When I read that, I was strongly influenced by a childhood of Sunday school attendance and a Church of England junior school to seek religious knowledge in one place only - the Anglican tradition - but Merlin's quest for knowledge encouraged me to open my mind to other traditions. Over the years, I've read about Buddhism and the Sufi tradition and Wicca and Druidry, and all sorts of other things, and found value in all of them somewhere.

Later, I discovered her romantic mysteries, and searched out as many as I could. The Moonspinners introduced me to a magical modern Greece (I was already devouring as many of Mary Renault's books about Ancient Greece as I could get my hands on), and there were books set in France, and even Scotland, in Touch Not the Cat. Again it was the little details that made the stories come alive - in one it was the blue flowers that a dying girl had loved, which proved that she was not the missing girl that the heroine was seeking, who had been colour-blind and unable to see the colour blue. Or it was the nightingale singing near the taverna where the heroine was staying in the Moonspinners, giving her an alibi to be out at night when the villain of the piece finds her there.

What a pity her work wasn't better served on screen! The Disney film of the Moonspinners has little more than the title in common with the book - and the plot makes little sense. I could forgive the switch from the aunt collecting wild flowers to her collecting folk songs for the screen - Greek villagers singing into her tape recorder was far more photogenic than picking a few flowers. But how did the young man who was skin-diving get the money for his trip to Greece and all the equipment if he had been ruined and lost his job because of whatever the bad guys had done in England? And then there was the woman on the yacht, with the leopard....

The BBC were no better, when they serialised The Crystal Cave one Christmas. Some of the scenes were word for word straight from the book, but others.... I have never forgiven them for the scene where Merlin leads everyone to the cave under the castle that keeps falling down (an old Roman mine working, causing subsidence). In the book, he has a genuine vision, of the red and white dragons fighting - and wakes up a couple of days later feeling awful and asking "What did I say?" In the series, it was all a trick, and he only pretended to have a vision.

Hobson's Choice

I've seen the film, of course, starring Charles Laughton and John Mills - I'd say it was the film about Salford, but A Taste of Honey has to vie for the honours there. At any rate, it's the film about Victorian Salford.
I hadn't realised there was also a novel. It's by Harold Brighouse, who wrote the original play, with Charles Forrest. Apparently it's quite rare. I picked up a copy published by Northern Classic Reprints, because I thought it was about time I read it. After all, it describes the area I grew up in, though anyone visiting from 1879 would have difficulty recognising it.
The proof reading was appalling - but everything else about the novel was a delight!

Hobson has three daughters and a boot shop, and the three daughters want to get wed. Maggie, the eldest, has been running the place for years, while her father spends most of his time at the local pub, the Moonrakers - and when Maggie wants something, woe betide anyone who stands in her way!
To start with, I was enjoying the book for the descriptions of the places and the rhythms of speech that I remembered from my gran. Agecroft Colliery is mentioned, which was just down the road from where I used to live, and at one point Hobson walks from Salford to Besses o' the Barn - which is a heck of a long walk for an overweight middle aged man who generally only walks between his home and the pub. On the way back, he meets one of his daughters walking out with her young man on Kersal Moor. I used to play on Kersal Moor - there were still the remains of wooden steps and pathways from the days when it was a popular location for going for walks on Sundays.
Maggie and Willie spend an afternoon out at Belle Vue, to celebrate their wedding - I remember the Zoo there closing (with a picture of a sad eyed monkey in the Manchester Evening News) and my mum used to go to the speedway races there in the 1950s.
They talk about the posh houses on the Crescent - my first job was on the Crescent, at Salford University (which didn't exist in Hobson's day, of course) and they walk in Peel Park, which I used to cycle through on my way to work, and they look down on the horribly polluted River Irwell. (There was a saying: "Irwell, Irk and ink are all impossible to drink", the Irk being another local river).
When disaster is staring Hobson in the face, someone remarks that there will be a story about it in the Salford Reporter. Or even worse, the Manchester Guardian!

Then I started thinking about the options open to Maggie. When she declares her intention to marry Willie Mossop, her father's boot-hand (who is the best cobbler in Salford and on whose work the success of Hobson's boot shop relies), her father throws them both out. So she sets up a rival business with Willie - but she has to go to a rich woman locally to ask for a loan to start up the business, and when they open a bank account it has to be in Willie's name. Women couldn't get bank accounts back in 1879. The only way for Maggie to make a success in business is to do it through a man - she has to marry Willie Mossop.

Over the course of the book, Hobson claims (and believes) he doesn't need the assistance of women and would be better off without them - until he finds that his tea isn't cooked, and the beds aren't made, and he starts spending more and more time in the Moonrakers - where he discusses keeping women in their place with his friends, who all agree that women need to be kept submissive by threats and violence.
In spite of all the odds being stacked against her, though, Maggie comes out on top, and everything ends happily.

Leafing Through My Mental Bookshelf

Dancing Beastie, who has the wonderful blog of the same name about life in a Scottish Castle, has been talking about writing, and how to decide what it is you want to write. She described it as "leafing through her mental bookshelf" for the books she loved - the books that she wanted to emulate when she wrote something.

My mental bookshelf has all sorts of things cluttering it up - but when I start thinking about it there are a few common themes.
One favourite writer, right back as far as the early 1980s, is Katherine Kurtz, author of the Deryni fantasy series. What I like about those is the way she blends fantasy with medieval historical detail.
For more historical detail, there's Sharon Kay Penman - who I love for all her books, but particularly the Welsh trilogy.
There's Rosemary Sutcliff, too - another writer who makes you feel that you're there, in the Roman villa or Bronze Age hillfort. She's also very good at dogs. There's a good dog character in nearly every one of her books.
And then there's Mary Gentle, who takes historical detail and fantasy and science fiction and archaeology and blends it all into one mad whole in her Ash stories - but it's a mad whole that makes glorious sense.
Finally there's Joy Chant, who wrote the wonderful Red Moon and Black Mountain, in which children from England slip across into an alternate fantasy world to fulfil their destinies, but in a way that is very unlike CS Lewis. When she was asked why she wrote fantasy, she said something along the lines of: "When I write, that's what comes out."
Which is pretty much what I find when I sit down to write, too.

George RR Martin's Reading List

While fans of Game of Thrones are waiting for the next book, they often ask George RR Martin for recommendations of other books which are like the mammoth epic fantasy series.
I came across the list of 33 books that he has chosen on Huffington Post, and was delighted to see some old friends there:

No. 1 on the list is pretty obvious - it's Lord of the Rings.
However, it was No. 3 that made me go 'squee' - it's Jirel of Joiry, by CL Moore, the first fighting heroine in fantasy. She was wearing armour and beating up the bad guys long before Brienne of Tarth was a twinkle in her creator's eye!
Then there's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser - the barbarian and thief duo in the seedier quarters of the city of Lankhmar and beyond (and without Lankhmar, there would probably be no Ankh-Morpork). This series is by Fritz Leiber, and it's great fun.
Watership Down, by Richard Adams, made me stop and do a double take, but after you've got over the "But it's all about rabbits" stage, this actually does make a lot of sense - there are rabbit legends, different warrens with differing political systems, and complex interactions with other animals as Hazel, Fiver and the others struggle to establish their own warren.
A Wizard of Earthsea is another magical and detailed world, this time by Ursula K Le Guin. The classic Wizard School, with an archipelago of islands, dragons - and the white characters are these weird barbarians with a strange religion, who don't get on well with the rest of the islands.
Then there are a couple of Arthurian stories - the classic Once and Future King, by TH White, and Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff (one of my all time favourite children's authors). Another favourite children's author is Alan Garner, and The Wierdstone of Brisingamen is also on the list.
Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake, also makes a lot of sense, with that convoluted and inward looking castle and a huge cast of grotesque characters.

He finishes off with some historical fiction, including classics like Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, The White Company by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who wrote rather more than Sherlock Holmes stories), Nigel Tranter's Scottish history, Bernard Cornwell, the Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser (being the further adventures of the cad and bully Flashman from Tom Brown's Schooldays, full of footnotes about the real history, and great fun).
Another favourite author, Sharon Penman, is mentioned for Lionheart (about King Richard, of course) but I think I'd recommend her Welsh trilogy Here Be Dragons, Falls the Shadow and The Reckoning - that is, if a reader is prepared to spend the last 200 pages of the last book sobbing, like I did (partly because I knew the history, so I knew what was going to happen to the characters). But anyone who's been through the Red Wedding would be able to cope with that, I think!

So those are my old favourites - which makes me think it really is time to start tracking down some of the other titles on the list which I haven't read. The Lies of Locke Lamora has already been recommended to me as something I might like (it's by Scott Lynch). I've also read one or two of the Conan stories, and I keep meaning to get round to the Dying Earth by Jack Vance.
Lovecraft I might leave to one side, and I suspect that Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique is similar to Lovecraft, so not my glass of tea.
Daniel Abraham's name is new to me, though, and his book Shadow and Betrayal is mentioned. So is Patrick Rothfuss and The Name of the Wind. Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold sounds promising, too.
Then there's Thomas B Costain and The Silver Chalice, Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates (I love Howard Pyle's artwork, and pirates. He also did illustrations for Robin Hood). Frank Yerby's Goat Song (about Ancient Greece) is next, though I think I prefer my Ancient Greece as told by Mary Renault.
Rosemary Hawley Jarman, with Crown in Candlelight, rings a faint bell - I may have read it once. I know I've heard good things about Stephen Pressfield - the Afghan Campaign is recommended, but one of his earlier books was Gates of Fire, about Thermopylae.
The Serpent Dreamer by Cecilia Holland is next - and it's nice to see a mixture of male and female authors on this list.
Then there's Sacred Band, by David Anthony Durham. It has a dragon on the cover, which looks promising. The Devil's Oasis is by Bartle Bull, and appears to be set in Egypt. And finally, there's the Iron King by Maurice Druon.

By the time I've tracked down all of those, there's a faint possibility that George RR Martin might have finished his series!