Category Archives: Writing

Heroic factasy

Posted on by

I don’t read much heroic fantasy, for various reasons. A good one is that it all comes in such fat multi-volume series that I simply don’t have the time. But a deeper, slightly more sneaking one is that, well, it’s all a bit silly, isn’t it? It’s not real. Science fiction is generally set in present-day or future societies that could happen. Fantasy is based on past societies that didn’t happen, or can’t happen, so there.

This isn’t entirely fair but it’s always there. Good heroic fantasy gets around it by being good. I recently read Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself and enjoyed it a lot: for the characters, the world-building, the humour and the sheer enjoyment of the writing. But still I get this nagging feeling that tells me I should be reading something else, and it isn’t at all helped by reading something like Jan Guillou‘s Templar Trilogy.

Guillou himself is an interesting character – an investigative journalist and spy writer who did time in jail for revealing that the land of cuddly Volvo-driving Abba fans has a secret intelligence agency that can match the CIA dirty trick for dirty trick. That’s life on the front line of the Cold War. His character of Arn Magnusson is a local Swedish folk hero because Guillou cleverly takes Arn’s fictitious life and wraps it into real history in the form of the birth of the modern kingdom of Sweden. (Where I happen to be right now, but that’s for a later blog post.) For instance, with a bit of handwaving the fictitious Arn becomes the grandfather of the very real Birger Jarl, whose grave I have seen and once sort of wrote a poem about. All the locations are visitable, and most of them are within a few miles of my inlaws. One of life’s innocent pleasures is to watch Bonusbarn’s face when he asks with resignation why we’re looking at yet another church and we say “This is where Arn …”

I was introduced to Arn’s adventures by my future wife several years ago, but it’s taken till now to finish them because at first only the first two books were translated into English. After that the publisher pulled the plug … until recently. Different publisher, different translator, still the third book. Finally I know how it ends! Though given that Sweden exists, I had a shrewd suspicion.

In the first book, The Road to Jerusalem, Arn is born into minor Swedish nobility and for various reasons spends most of his childhood raised by monks, including an ex-Templar who teaches him various extracurricular non-monkly fighting skills. This is handy because at the end of the book Arn inadvertently sleeps (consecutively) with two sisters (hey, it could happen to any innocent young lad from the monastery), one of whom is his true love and one of whom is a scheming minx. For this sin he must do 20 years penance as a crusader in the Holy Land.

This brings us to the second book, The Templar Knight, which switches between his story and the story of the second crusade, and his beloved Cecilia doing her own 20 years penance in a convent back home. From her perspective we see the birth pangs of the new Swedish nation, while Arn’s purity of heart, nobility and Christian virtue earn him the respect of Christians and Muslims alike, and make him one of the few crusaders, and very few Templars, to make it out of the Holy Land alive after the disastrous Battle of Tiberias. And finally – finally! – in Birth of the Kingdom Arn returns home determined to use his military skills and considerable wealth to bring peace to his homeland and forge it into a new nation, the kingdom of the Sveas, or Svea Rige, as you might call it.

If you read heroic fantasy for the world-building then medieval Sweden is described in enough detail to suit your every need, with no feeling of anything being contrived just to get a little extra buzz or laugh. (Plucking just one example from the air, like Arn and Cecilia’s wedding night being unable to commence until the archbishop has made it up the stairs to bless them in bed.) If you read it for the military clashing and banging then Arn has it in spades, and the version of Christianity practised by the Swedes – a mixture of literalism, ritual, pragmatism and Marian veneration, all with residual pagan overtones – presses all the right buttons for anyone expecting arcane religions and magic. It’s exactly the same as reading heroic fantasy, except that it isn’t and it’s a guilt-free trip.

Next up: Robert Harris’s Lustrum, follow-up to Imperium, which I have previously reviewed and which has a similar effect.

Note: nothing herein in any way precludes me trying to write heroic fantasy if I ever decide that’s the direction my career should take.

Ben and Bas in Beds

Posted on by

Can I come and give a talk in Wootton to the upper school reading club? said the email. Wootton, just up the road from Abingdon? Yeah, no problem. I’d just take a long lunch break, maybe half a day off work.

I’m sure Wootton only has a primary school, mused a colleague. I looked more closely at the email address: wootton.beds.sch.uk. Okay, I’m guessing “beds” isn’t short for Oxfordshire. I may need to take longer.

Turned out to be Wootton Upper School, near Bedford, just past Milton Keynes if you can fight your way past the roadworks. First you have to drive through southern Milton Keynes, which is retail Mordor: vast and hideous, with towering, city-sized warehouses that you can probably see from orbit serving the likes of Amazon and John Lewis and which suck the very soul from you if you dare even glance at them. Sudden flashback to Big Engine days when it was cheaper for me to deliver my own books to Amazon than have them couriered, and I spent a happy day fighting my way past Amazon’s shielding spells and wards to get a simple phone number of someone to call if I got lost.

Anyway, getting through Mordor more or less unscathed I then failed the simple little task of passing under the M1. They’re converting the A412 into a dual carriageway and the whole area is a devastated battlefield with fewer signposts than the Somme.Then Google Maps lied to me by assuring me I could and should turn left into a road that doesn’t exist any more, crushed into non-existence by the route of the new big road. I had already made out an invoice with mileage based on how many miles Google Maps said it should take, but I’ll gift the school the extra as my bit towards easing a strained education budget. But I made it, and suddenly I was back in civilisation – a clean, airy, modern school with lovely people in it, both staff and pupils, who seemed to be expecting me:

Well, half of Sebastian was there (I only wrote books 1-3), but they also seemed quite pleased to see the whole of Ben Jeapes. I didn’t do a head count but I would guess 30-40 turned up. I talked for an hour about how I got into writing; the various forms I have partaken of (my own stuff, Sebastian, the ghostwriting); agents; editors; how publishing and bookselling work; what to look for in good science fiction; and then gave readings of my favourite crank letter and (a world premiere) bits of the first chapter of the current work-in-progress. It’s hard to tell how well you’re doing: carefully honed witticisms may or may not be sinking in; they might be keeping silent for an hour because they are stunned by your awesomeness, or they might have tuned out long ago.
Following the hour’s set piece it was an informal lunch and natter with the school reading club, me answering questions, of which there were many. Some harder to answer than others.
“Do you find working out plots hard?” “Yes.” – Easy.
“I write romance stories; how can I stop them sounding corny?” – Um …
It’s not completely true that you should only write about what you know, of course: I’ve never captained a starship, for a start. But when it comes to writing romance I can’t help thinking you probably should stick to your own experience and that really wasn’t something I was going to talk about to a teenage lad I had never met before. “So, have you … I mean, um …” I suppose I could have told him to write under a woman’s name. That seems to work.
I met some lovely young people with a real love for reading and writing, and at least two budding sf writers, which are of course the best type. I sold my first story when I was 24, published when I was 26, so give them another 10 years and I fully expect some high quality fiction to be emerging on the market. Pay it forward, guys … (but thanks for the bottle of wine, that was a nice touch!).