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Saturday, May 29, 2010

Hearts of Oak

Happy Oak Apple day!

29 May 2010 marks the 350th anniversary of the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. I've already referred in this blog to the strange silence about this in official circles and the media, but at least there have been a few mentions of it in the blogosphere - including this suggestion that Oak Apple day should replace St George's day as a public holiday for England - and I recently discovered a website that attempts to raise awareness of the day, partly through suggesting a pub crawl of 'Royal Oaks'... 29 May 1660 was King Charles II's thirtieth birthday and the day chosen for his ceremonial entry into the city of London, having landed at Dover on the twenty-fifth (a scene described in Pepys's diary, which also commemorates its 350th anniversary this year; last week I attended the annual Pepys commemoration service at St Olave's church, where he's buried). The day was marked in the Anglican liturgy until 1859, and warships of the Royal Navy fired gun salutes to mark the occasion until well into the eighteenth century. The first warship to be named Royal Oak was launched in 1664, only to be burned during the Dutch attack on the Medway in 1667; she was the flagship of Sir John Lawson at the battle of Lowestoft in 1665 and thus features in the sections that I'm currently writing for the third Quinton novel, The Blast That Tears the Skies. The most famous Royal Oak was, of course, sunk in Scapa Flow on 14 October 1939 by U-47, which had daringly penetrated the harbour defences.

Finally, beginning with this post 'View from the Lair' will be moving home to be hosted by the website of publishers Ian Allan, who are bringing out my book Blood of Kings and are about to launch their new website; the archive of previous posts will also be transferring across, although they'll also continue to be available at this url. The blog should have much greater exposure on that site, and it might also be possible to do some exciting new things with it.

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Long Time No See

I recently finished the latest Robert Goddard novel, Long Time Coming - a delightful double entendre which reflects both the book's plot and the fact that it appears two years after his previous novel, rather than the usual one. This has undoubtedly benefited Long Time Coming, a fiendishly complex plot (like all of Goddard's best work) which alternates between 1940 and 1976, focusing ultimately on events in the tense, surreal environment of neutral wartime Dublin. Like others, I felt that the previous couple of Goddard novels had been disappointing and bore all the signs of being somewhat contrived and rushed to meet publishers' deadlines, so it's really pleasing to see one of my favourite authors return to form so impressively.

I first came across Goddard's books years ago when I bought Sea Change, set in the eighteenth century. This is actually the least typical work in his canon; most of his novels are set in the present or the near past and refer back to earlier historical periods. I've always been impressed by his formidable erudition, but since I started writing my own novels I've become increasingly appreciative of the tightness of his plotting, the grounding of his characters in their own personal histories (this influenced my construction of the Quinton family in my own books), and above all his mastery of pace. Goddard's books are grounded in 'real time', and one of the secrets of his success is that he allows his characters rather tighter time margins to get from A to B than most authors. This usually works superbly (is it possible to get from central London to Basingstoke and back again in the space of a few hours in an afternoon? Of course it is, although Goddard's world tends not to feature congestion on the M3) but it does mean that every book contains at least one or two chronological implausibilities: to take just one example in Long Time Coming, it's surely highly improbable that someone who's just been released after 36 years in an Irish jail would be able to obtain a temporary British passport in half a day in 1976 or at any other time in British history. But this is a very, very minor quibble. So like all Goddard fans, I now face a dilemma - do I hope that he reverts to one book a year, possibly with a consequent reduction in quality, or hope that the next one will also be a slightly longer time coming?

Saturday, May 8, 2010

The House That Time Forgot


I'd thought to blog about the election result, but everybody else is doing that - suffice to say that perhaps Nick Clegg should remember the fate of the last Liberal-Conservative coalition (1915-22), which divided the party for decades and contributed largely to its decline to the dire position when it had only six MPs, from which it has spent the last 30 years slowly recovering. I also wondered about commenting on some of my most recent reading, but this would probably have been far too vitriolic for such a genteel, sheltered place as the Internet; suffice to say that there is a book which shall remain nameless, by an author with a respectable pedigree in both fiction and non-fiction, which  aims to provide a broad overview of the history of a well-known family but manages to include a whole string of howlers that would disgrace even the densest schoolboy I ever taught (who's probably a merchant banker or an MP now...) Here's the classic, referring to the events of the second Anglo-Dutch war: 'The Dutch sailed up the Medway and towed away the Royal Charles. Recovery the next year, when Monk and Rupert fought a battle in the Downs and drove the Dutch fleet back to its own ports, scarcely assuaged the bitterness of the previous year's humiliation.' Anybody who can invent a naval battle in 1668, the year after peace had been signed, and any publisher that permits such crassness to reach the reading public, deserves to be named and shamed, but this blog would never stoop (quite) so low.


Instead, I thought I'd post some pictures of Derwydd, from what was evidently a specially commissioned photograph album of 1947 that I acquired on Ebay a few years ago. One of the oldest properties in Wales, it was transferred through heiresses for centuries, always staying with descendants of the earliest known owner, until finally sold in 1998 when the contents were auctioned off. In the 18th century it was a property of the Stepneys, an intriguing and colourful family whose history I'm writing, and passed in the 19th century to their descendants the Gulstons, who believed themselves the rightful heirs to the Ruthvens, Earls of Gowrie, subjects of my forthcoming book Blood of Kings. The bed dates from c.1500 and belonged to Sir Rhys Ap Thomas (1448-1525), one of Henry VII's most loyal Welsh allies and who effectively ruled South Wales on behalf of that monarch and his son. I'll aim to post more pictures of Derwydd in the near future.