The Flame Bearer: Bernard Cornwell On How Meeting His Real Father Inspired A Saxon Epic

Stephen Lewis at the British newspaper the York Press offers a piece on how author Bernard Cornwell came to write a series of historical novels on the Saxons and a character called Uhtred of Bebbanburg..

THERE aren’t many characters in modern historical fiction that grab you by the throat the way Bernard Cornwell’s Uhtred of Bebbanburg does. He’s foul-mouthed, lustful, bad tempered, and soaked in the blood of the enemies he’s slaughtered. But he also has a great way with words, talking straight to the reader like an actor confiding to camera.

How about this, from the opening page of The Pale Horseman, the second in Cornwell’s series of novels set during the time of King Alfred, which have been turned into the BBC series The Last Kingdom.

“These days I look at twenty-year-olds and think they are pathetically young, scarcely weaned,” Uhtred, the novel’s narrator, begins. “But when I was twenty I considered myself a full-grown man. I had fathered a child, fought in a shield wall and was loathe to take advice from anyone. In short, I was arrogant, stupid and headstrong..."

Through the course of nine novels, Uhtred gets older and more grizzled but not much wiser as he fights, plunders and murders his way through a Dark Ages England torn by savage wars between the Saxons and the invading Danes, or Vikings. Along the way, he also manages to become King Alfred’s most fearsome warrior-general. Which is interesting, because he hates Alfred, and all Christians, as pious hypocrites.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

 http://www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/14792892.Bestseller_Bernard_Cornwell_s_got_a_date_in_York/

Note: Although the series on Uhtred is interesting and entertaining (and I also enjoyed the BBC TV series adapted from the novels), I wish Bernard Cornwell would return to writing about Richard Sharpe, his roguish hero from the Napoleonic Wars.

I interviewed Bernard Cornwell about Sharpe a while back and you can read my Crime Beat column via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2012/12/a-q-with-sharpe-creator-bernard-cornwell.html 

Happy Birthday To Michael Shaara, The Late Author Of 'The Killer Angels'

 

As History.com notes, on this day in history Michael Sharra was Born. He died in 1988.

Michael Sharra was the author of the great Civil War historical novel, The Killer Angels.

You can read about Michael Sharra via the below link:

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/michael-shaara-author-of-the-killer-angels-is-born 

Bookmonger Podcast: Bernard Cornwell Discusses 'Warriors Of The Storm' And His Other Works Of Historical Fiction

John J. Miller at National Review Online offers a podcast interview with historical fiction author Bernard Cornwell.

Author Bernard Cornwell talks about his new novel, Warriors of the Storm, the challenges of writing about England before the Norman Conquest, and how he wound up as an American citizen. 

You can listen to the interview via the below link:

http://www.nationalreview.com/media/bookmonger/bookmonger-bernard-cornwell-0

You can also read my interview with Bernard Cornwell about his Sharpe novels via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2012/12/a-q-with-sharpe-creator-bernard-cornwell.html

Good Drama, Bad History: Krauthammer on 'Wolf Hall'

I've been watching the television series Wolf Hall on PBS and I'm enjoying the series, despite the historical distortion. The series offers good drama, if bad history.

Charles Krauthammer offers his take on Wolf Hall in a column in the New York Daily News.

"Wolf Hall,” the Man Booker Prize-winning historical novel about the court of Henry VIII — and most dramatically, the conflict between Thomas Cromwell and Sir Thomas More — is now a TV series (presented on PBS). It is maddeningly good.

Maddening because its history is tendentiously distorted, yet the drama is so brilliantly conceived and executed that you almost don’t care. Faced with an imaginative creation of such brooding, gripping, mordant intensity, you find yourself ready to pay for it in historical inaccuracy.

And revisionism of “Wolf Hall” is breathtaking. It inverts the conventional view of the saintly More being undone by the corrupt, amoral, serpentine Cromwell, the king’s chief minister. This is fiction as polemic. Author Hilary Mantel, an ex- and anti-Catholic (“the Catholic Church is not an institution for respectable people”), has set out to rehabilitate Cromwell and defenestrate More, most especially the More of Robert Bolt’s beautiful and hagiographic “A Man for All Seasons.”

Who’s right? Neither fully, though the depiction of More in “Wolf Hall” as little more than a cruel heretic-burning hypocrite is particularly provocative, if not perverse. To be sure, More-worship is somewhat overdrawn, as even the late Cardinal Francis George warned at a 2012 convocation of bishops. More had his flaws. He may have been a man for all seasons but he was also a man of his of his times. And in those times of merciless contention between Rome and the Reformation, the pursuit and savage persecution of heresy were the norm.    

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/charles-krauthammer-wielding-power-hellish-times-article-1.2205511

A Rogue On Our Side: Bernard Cornwell Discusses His Character Richard Sharpe On The 30th Anniversary of 'Sharpe's Eagle'

Bernard Cornwell, the author of a great series of historical novels featuring the Napoleonic-era fictional British rogue and soldier Richard Sharpe, was recently interviewed on a video that can be viewed at Youtube.com.

The author talks about the phenomenal success of Sharpe on the eve of Harper Collins' release of a commemorative edition of every novel in the series. This marks the 30th anniversary of the publication of the first of them, 'Sharpe's Eagle'.

You can watch the video via the below link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e-0HV4rVN8

You can also read my interview with Bernard Cornwell that appeared at GreatHistory.com via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2012/12/a-q-with-sharpe-creator-bernard-cornwell.html

An Interview With Bernard Cornwell, Creator of the Richard Sharpe Series, On His New American Revolutionary War Novel, The Fort

John J. Miller's Between the Covers radio program at National Review Online features an interview with Bernard Cornwell, the historical novelist.

Cornwell is the creator of Richard Sharpe, the Napoleonic-era British soldier who is featured in a wonderful series of novels and portrayed by Sean Bean in the popular BBC TV series.


Cornwell's new novel is The Fort, which is set during the American Revolutionary War

You can listen to the interview via the below link:

http://radio.nationalreview.com/betweenthecovers/post/?q=ZGEwMDdhNTZmODMxNTkyYzgwNDg4NDc2MWE3ODEwZTQ=

Below is a description of the novel from the publisher, HarpersCollins:

"While the major fighting of the war moves to the south in the summer of 1779, a British force of fewer than a thousand Scottish infantry, backed by three sloops-of-war, sails to the desolate and fog-bound coast of New England.

Establishing a garrison and naval base at Penobscot Bay, in the eastern province of Massachusetts that would become Maine, the Scots—the only British troops between Canada and New York—harry rebel privateers and give shelter to American loyalists.

In response, Massachusetts sends a fleet of more than forty vessels and some one thousand infantrymen to “captivate, kill or destroy” the foreign invaders. Second in command is Peleg Wadsworth, a veteran of the battles at Lexington and Long Island, once aide to General Washington, and a man who sees clearly what must be done to expel the invaders.

But ineptitude and irresolution lead to a mortifying defeat—and have stunning repercussions for two men on opposite sides: an untested eighteen-year-old Scottish lieutenant named John Moore, who will begin an illustrious military career; and a Boston silversmith and patriot named Paul Revere, who will face court-martial for disobedience and cowardice.

Grounded firmly in history, inimitably told in Cornwell's thrilling narrative style, The Fort is the extraordinary novel of this fascinating clash between a superpower and a nation in the making."

You can also read my GreatHistory.com three-part interview with Bernard Cornwell about his Sharpe series via the below links:

http://greathistory.com/interview-with-sharpe-creator-bernard-cornwell.htm

http://greathistory.com/interview-with-sharpe-creator-bernard-cornwell-part-ii.htm

http://greathistory.com/interview-with-sharpe-creator-bernard-cornwell-part-iii.htm

My Crime Beat Column: Conspirata - Crime, Conspiracy and Political Intrigue in Ancient Rome

Conspirata opens like many crime thrillers. There is the discovery of a dead body.

But Conspirata (Simon & Schuster) is different than most crime thrillers, as the dead body in this novel is a slave who was murdered more than 2,000 years ago, and the person called to investigate is Marcus Tullius Cicero, the great Roman orator and statesman.

Conspirata is a historical thriller written by Robert Harris, the British author of Enigma and Pompeii.

Prior to writing novels, Harris worked as a reporter for the BBC and then became the political editor for the British newspaper the Observer. He went on to become a columnist for the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph.

Robert Harris first introduced us to Cicero in his novel Imperium. Conspirata is the second novel in his planned trilogy about Cicero and ancient Rome.

Imperium is about the rise of Cicero to the position of consul. The novel’s narrator is Tiro, Cicero’s slave.

“My Name is Tiro,” Harris writes in Imperium. “For thirty-six years I was the confidential secretary of the Roman statesman Cicero. At first this was exciting, then astonishing, and finally extremely dangerous.”

Tiro is almost 100 years old when he writes these words. He states that he has often been asked what Cicero was really like, but he kept silent in fear for his life. But as he no longer fears death, he states that he offers this work as his answer.

Marcus Tullius Tiro was a real man. He was a slave, but he served as Cicero’s secretary and confidant. Thanks to Tiro’s invented system of shorthand, we have a historical record of Cicero’s great speeches. Tiro also wrote a biography of Cicero, but it was lost over the ages.

In a style that reminds me of Robert Graves’ great historical novels, I, Claudius and Claudius the God, both Imperium and Conspirata have Tiro as our narrator and guide through the most interesting times of ancient Rome.

When Cicero is called to the body found in the Tiber River, he was the consul-elect. The body was a young boy who had been bludgeoned, stabbed and then horribly mutilated.

This murder turns out to be a ritualistic slaying meant to cement the plotters who plan to overthrow the Roman Republic. This novel is about how Cicero puts down the plot, which was called the Catiline Conspiracy. The plotters are led by Lucius Sergius Catilna.

Catilina flees the city, leaving five other conspirators to be arrested. Harris shows us Cicero at his best in the Roman Senate debating the plotters’ fate. As Harris and others have noted, this was perhaps one of the world’s greatest parliamentary debates.
            
Cicero’s has the five men sentenced to death without the benefit of a trial. The five are taken to a prison and strangled.

For his actions in putting down the conspiracy, Cicero was given the title “Father of his Country.”

But then Cicero has to contend with the political intrigue of the young Gaius Julius Caesar and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, AKA, Pompey the Great.

In an interview with Steve Inskeep at NPR, Robert Harris said that he found Cicero to be one of the most fascinating and attractive characters in history.

“He was brilliant, he was self-made, and a man of great complexity who is accessible to the modern mind, I think,” Harris said.

Harris said that Cicero left behind 700 letters.

“In a way, this book in particular, is a duel between Cicero and Caesar, two ambitious men, but with very different forms of ambition. Cicero’s ambition is to rise within the system. Caesar’s desire is to smash the republic and remake it in his own image.”

The clash between the two historical figures - who are, Harris noted, sort of wary friends and admirers - is truly the dynamic of the novel.

“And I believe that Cicero has had a less of a good shake from history than Caesar, who was in some ways, a monster - along the lines of a Napoleon or even Hitler,” Harris said.

In Conspirata, we see Rome at a time of civil unrest, rampant crime and utter debauchery. One often reads about backstabbing politicians and cutthroat politics, but in ancient Rome, the phrases are quite literal.

Like any student of history, I know the outcome of Cicero, Caesar and the Roman Empire, but yet I still enjoyed the suspense of this most interesting historical thriller.

I look forward to reading Harris’ third novel of Cicero and ancient Rome.