Helen - By the bitch that Jane Austen took down!

As you can see the marketing department had a very clear idea here: pretend this book is a Jane Austen novel and then trundle the money along to the bank in a wheelbarrow.

After a bit more doodling and staring out of the window they decided to spice things up with a cat-fight in bonnets and slapped 'The Bestseller by Jane Austen's Greatest Rival' under the author's name. It's silly but it's how they earn their money. I like money too (as did Austen) so I'm not going to say anything more about that side of things except to suggest the title of this post as an alternative.

Helen is, of course, a very different kind of book from Pride and Prejudice or even Emma and one worth reading on it's own considerable merits. Having said that, it is difficult to read it without automatically making comparisons because Maria Edgeworth clearly influenced and inspired Jane Austen.

The blurb reads:

On the death of her guardian, honest, generous-spirited Helen Stanley is urged to share the home of her childhood friend Lady Cecilia. But this charming socialite is withholding secrets and Helen is drawn into a web of white lies and evasions that threaten not only her hopes for marriage but her very place in society.

It's then described as 'a fascinating panorama of Britain’s political and intellectual elite in the early 1800s and a gripping romantic drama.' In my opinion 'yes' to the first part of this and 'not so much' to the second. But it does highlight the main difference.

This is a book about the elite: the very rich, the very bright and the very influential. Jane Austen's characters, even D'Arcy with his however many thousands a year, are all rather middle class in comparison. They are provincial, short-sighted - and therein lies the humour and charm. Helen, on the other hand, is neither humorous nor particularly charming. It's actually rather grave, thoughtful and far-seeing. One illustration of this is that the activity the young people in Helen get excited about is medieval hawking (reproduced at enormous expense), while their peers in Highbury go strawberry picking in Mr Knightley's backgarden.

The love story between Helen and Beauclerc is not really the focus of the novel, which is the consequences of even small lies: lies for the benefit of other people's feelings, lies to save face or help avoid conflict. It examines how such a character could come into being (lack of parental involvement and bad influences) and the dire consequences of lying - the ruin of one marriage and the prevention of another.

That a wife's white lie to her husband ('I never loved anyone before you, darling') could have desperate consequences seems quaint now or at least melodramatic. But this is actually a book about the (painful) getting of wisdom and about moral courage, which will always be relevant. I certainly recognised this fault in myself:

"There are many persons in this world who, brave though they be, would rather beard a lion, sooner seize a bull by the horns, than, when they get into a dilemma, dare to ask a direct question and tell plainly what passes in their own minds. Moral courage is, believe me, uncommon in both sexes, and yet in going through the world it is equally necessary to the virtue of both men and women."

It's a good book, read it. But you can see why the marketing department chose this cover.

Other stuff:

Take a look at Helen on Amazon.
Read John Mullan on Helen in The Guardian.

The Bitterbynde Trilogy

The first thing to say is that I read all three of these books in quick succession, which is testament to the publishers being right to publish Cecilia Dart-Thornton's work. It is exactly the kind of 'area' I am interested in and like to write about myself.

That said, these books are terrible. I don't want to list everything that irritated me but here is a list of lessons I learnt from them to improve my own writing.

1. A mystery, particularly a mysterious (or missing) identity is compelling. Once revealed, the story has reached its natural end. If the story is going to continue, the mystery MUST be replaced by something equally good if not better.

2. Never, ever, ever have a stunningly beautiful white blonde as your heroine, especially if she is good at everything and very nice. If you start off with an ugly heroine (and expound the lesson that beauty isn't skin-deep) you absolutely cannot then make her the most beautiful woman alive. It is stupendously irritating and offensive.

3. If you are going to mention dawn/sunset, do so for a reason. You don't have to mention it every single day. There could be a sun-simile drinking game attached to this trilogy.

4. Romantic male leads should not be stunningly beautiful and good at everything and should NOT have long, beautiful hair. It's just creepy.

5. Do not move from one discrete, densely described fantasy landscape to another. It's too much like World of Warcraft. I kept expecting the main character to slaughter a few boar and level.

6. Don't patronise 'comedy' characters.

7. Don't overindulge in the numinous. It isn't achingly out-of-reach if it crops up on every other page.

8. Make a distinction between the richness of a human court and the richness of Faery. They should feel different.

9. Don't have everyone falling in love with heroine. Everyone else would hate her. Especially other women.

10. Don't overdo the vocabulary. I like to look up words I don't know or want to check but with this series I ended up just underlining the vast numbers of specialist or grandiloquent (see what I did there) words for amusement. There are hundreds of them.

Last assignment, first post.

I have just completed my Creative Writing course with the Open University and submitted my final assignment, a 1500 word completely factually inaccurate Anglo-Saxon story. Also the photo is from Iceland. Enjoy.

The Ship in the Ice

'He can’t lie out there in the ice all winter,’ said Eadred to the freemen of Hyðaburg. ‘It’s an insult. You’re spitting on him — all of you — not getting him into the water. He was your chief. Don’t you care that he can’t reach the afterlife?’ As he stalked around the hearth fire in the middle of the hall Eadred moved his damaged body as if already ramming his shoulder against the hull of an unseen ship. The men, gathered on benches round the fire, watched him with cautious tolerance. With a new ring-giver in charge, each man was calculating, should they be listening to the old one’s brother?

‘The ship’s stuck fast in the ice, Eadred,’ said Halfdan the tanner in his calm nasal tones. ‘We can’t push it anywhere.’

‘Haul it then,’ said Eadred. ‘Sling a rope round the prow and drag it to the water line. Or smash the ice. I don’t care. I won’t leave him stuck half way between this world and the next.’

‘We did our best for Ælle,’ said Halfdan and a few voices murmured agreement. ‘We set him on the water. And that, I remind you, was your idea. We could have kept him in a barn until the thaw.’

‘Like a salt pig,’ sneered Eadred. ‘Why not use him as a fence post, while you’re at it?’

‘I say it’s Woden’s will he’s stuck there,’ said Halfdan. His eye wandered to the bearskin that hid the bed where the new chief Oswulf lay with his new wife, possibly asleep, possibly eavesdropping. ‘Maybe you should take it as a judgement.’

Eadred’s glare was answer enough to this suggestion.

‘The ice will melt eventually,’ someone said to close the argument. ‘Ælle will be on his way when the thaw comes. Just wait, Eadred.’

‘I will not.’

‘Woden help you then. We won’t.’

Eadred stamped to the door and shoved it ajar. In the thickly barred white and grey landscape of ice and snow and distant shore, his brother’s funeral boat jutted like a black cross. The press of the ice caused it to list as if straining to roll. It was like a burr on Eadred’s skin: irritating, intolerable.

Eadred felt warmth at his side. His sister-in-law had joined him. She had been called Avatoria but her name now was Hereswið. Like all the Roman wives they had taken from the original village, she barely reached his shoulder and her long hair was dark. She had been the most beautiful of their prisoners.

‘Ælle must be honoured,’ said Eadred.

Hereswið stood with her arms straight down at her sides. She did not fold her hands around her pregnancy as happy women do.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘He made this place.’

She met his eyes briefly, unsmiling. For the first time it occurred to him that, for her, Ælle had probably destroyed it. The home she had grown up in, the men she had honoured, the name she had been born with had all been stripped away to make his Hyðaburg. But she was canny.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He did. And now there is a new lord.’

Hereswið rejoined the women. The loss of her heat caused a shiver to run between Eadred’s shoulder blades. He wished someone would take her as wife and adopt his brother’s unborn child. Soon, he would have to do it. But what good would that do them? He and Hereswið were both relicts of the old order, useless to the new. And he had lost a hand. She and the baby would be more isolated, more vulnerable under his protection than without it.

Eadred lifted down the torch by the door. Someone called after him: ‘He isn’t going anywhere, Eadred. Stay.’ He turned his back on the warm dark stink of the hall and stepped out.

The world was carved from whalebone and flint as Eadred shuffled his way down the shore and onto the thick ice that pushed out to where the inlet met the sea. His balance had been bad since he lost his arm in Ælle’s fight to take Hyðaburg ten years ago. The sea was a dark band on the horizon half a mile off. Ælle’s ship lay like a seal lifting its head to watch him. He began the long trudge out to meet it.

The ship rose above him, tilted awkwardly to one side and back a little like a whale frozen as it breached. Eadred was sweating from the effort of staying upright. He slip-slid to the bow. If he strained upwards, he could just see his brother seated with his back against the mast. Ælle was tied there, facing up and out. He stared as fixedly forward as he had ever done alive.

It was hard to climb with only one hand. The wood was slippery with frost and nipped Eadred’s skin. Using his feet and knees Eadred pushed himself up and into the boat. Then he slumped on the tilted thwarts, exhausted. In the ship’s shallow draft lay his brother’s horses and hunting dogs, which had been slaughtered to keep him company. Their blood had frozen in a black pool in the stern, their legs jutted like axe handles. Eadred didn’t recognize any of them: they had the look of bad carvings painted with rime.

‘The others won’t come,’ said Eadred in a low, angry voice. He edged forward until he straddled his brother’s stool. ‘They have forgotten everything you gave them, every ring, every helm, every jewel, every horse, every woman. And I can’t shift you. I can’t get you where you deserve to be. Ælle, forgive me.’

Eadred pulled a bone flask of liquid fat from his sheepskins and splashed the rancid contents over his brother’s knees, the slats, the carved and contorted bodies.

‘You’d have killed me rather than let me do this to you,’ he said. ‘And I’m sorry. But if they won’t honour you, and I can’t...then we’ll have to show them what dishonour means.’

Eadred pocketed the flask and began to prise open the dead man’s clothes. The frost bit his fingers until they could hardly move but at last he found grey skin streaked with hair. He laid his hand on the folded back cloth. Stuck to the sunken flesh, dulled and cold lay Ælle’s most valuable possession, a ring. Ælle had melted down every scrap of Roman gold in the village to make it. It was worth more than all his cattle and horses and bondsmen combined. It had blazed on his hand like a midsummer sun.

‘I’m going to take it, Ælle. I’m going to wrap it and hide it in the skins round Oswulf’s bed. I know the dead walk to take back their own. Come for it. Come for him. Get your cold bones round his little blonde concubine. Howl in the night, piss on the fire, eat their young. Make them scream for their disrespect.’

Ælle’s eyes were gelid and grey.

Eadred lost his footing climbing down and fell hard on the ice. The frost ripped the skin from his cheek and gave him a body-blow of chill that he could not shake off. He hauled himself upright and stamped and blew to force heat into his limbs but even after several minutes he was still shaking with cold.

‘Come on, come on,’ he ordered himself. Fumbling, he lifted the torch he had left propped up in the snow and began to run it this way and that along the planks.

It took time. The splashes of fat were not as incendiary as Eadred had hoped and it was dark before the wood started to char and pop. Then, at last, a thin blue flame gripped the timbers and undulated up the hull, growing as it travelled. Smoke licked Ælle’s figurehead form. The light grew bright, tricky. Eadred saw his brother’s head turn, the dogs leap up. Then, like a salivating mouth, the ice slickened, split and swallowed the ship whole.

Eadred left the pyre and stumbled back to shore, falling repeatedly. His lip bled where the ice had torn it. In the darkness ahead of him the hall’s torches blinked like disbelieving eyes.

Every step was a memory. They had run this way when their ship had first beached, bucking under their boots as they leapt into the surf. The sun had blazed, the sea blinded and the land was so beautiful Eadred had laughed aloud with delight.

‘This is it,” said Ælle as he marshalled his pack of axe-wielding exiles. The shingly sand slipped under their feet with a sound like water falling on hot stone. He smiled at his brother, the hard smile of a leader. ‘I promised you I’d give you a home. Here it is. Win it for me today and I swear I’ll never leave you unprotected. Now, let’s shake the lice out of the bed and make it mine.’

The brothers stared at the village on the shore.

‘Mine,’ said Ælle. ‘It’s mine.’