Guest Post - Linda Proud

Today, I'm stepping aside from my usual monthly post to make way for a rescheduled guest post featuring historical fiction writer Linda Proud.  I'm delighted for this opportunity to introduce Linda's works to a wider audience - her Botticelli Trilogy, set in15th century Florence and Tuscany and focussing upon the life and times of Lorenzo de Medici was a source of inspiration to me as I worked on honing my own skills as a historical fiction writer.  At times sublime and poetic, at times harrowing, her work casts light on the best and the worst that Humanity can offer, and the result is broad, majestic, and breath-taking, without ever losing sight of the small-scale, the domestic, the individual.  And now, without further ado, I will cease eulogising, and hand you straight over to Linda....

Maria Poliziana existed. She was the youngest sister of the poet, Angelo Poliziano. He mentions her twice in his letters, both times without much show of affection, so my first view of her was as a frumpy, stupid lump of a sister who was pushing him too hard to acquire benefices. This view was fed by a profile of her on the obverse of Poliziano’s portrait medal, where she looks chubby and somewhat obnoxious. The same image occurs on the obverse of the medal of Pico della Mirandola, the leading scholar of the age and Poliziano’s closest friend. Now that’s very little to go on, but sufficiently odd to attract the interest of a novelist. Why on earth would those two literary luminaries want to pair their image with that of the frumpy sister of one of them? In the age where image was symbol, this needed investigating.

          I'm not sure when my view of Maria changed. Perhaps it was when I was reconstructing Angelo's early life, trying to imagine what it was like to see your father murdered when you were only nine. Maria at this time was only one. The family were dispersed afterwards, the four children fostered here and there, the mother remarried (quickly, as was the norm). To all intents and purposes, they were orphans. It was entirely possible that Maria did not meet her brother again until she was adult.

          I went to Montepulciano to find out all I could about her. Were there any records? Do we know where she was buried? I remember now the city archivist laughing at me. 'Una donna? Ho! Ho! Ho!' Now who was being stupid, to go all that way in search of a woman? Women leave no records. So I had to make her up. Somewhere along the line, she began to make herself heard in my imagination, and I liked what she was saying. A lot.

       She enters the story in the second* book of the trilogy, Pallas and the Centaur, and shares the narration with Tommaso de' Maffei. Having given her a voice, I wanted her to use it in first person. This is an intelligent young woman in a man's world, in love with her brother and his friends, staunchly loyal as their world begins to fall apart.

             I can't imagine now the trilogy without her. I've always had trouble creating women, because of the dynamic between my own experience and what I think that experience should have been (i.e. the stock stereotype). I've met most of my characters in real life, mostly in fleeting glimpses. I met Maria on a vaporetto in Venice, slimmer than I'd imagined, but just as strong in feature with some pretty marvellous teeth. Una donna? Una bella donna.

* The second book can be read as a stand alone but it will spoil the plot of the first. All three books are currently available together as a special deal direct from Godstow Press. www.godstowpress.co.uk/catalogue.html.

Pallas and the Centaur is the middle volume of the trilogy. The first and last volumes are narrated by Tommaso de’ Maffei but in this middle book he shares the narration with the poet Poliziano’s sister, Maria. They say there are two kinds of novel: quest (Odyssey) and siege (Iliad). Pallas and the Centaur, set in a time of war, is definitely siege, the other two quest.

1

From the notebook of Maria Ambrogini,

called ‘Poliziana’

Sexagesima Sunday

I TRY SO HARD to love you, Lord God, and I fail. The fault is your own, for being invisible. It would be easier to love smoke – at least I can see it and smell it if not touch it. It would be easier to love an idea or dream, because I can think it. But if you cannot be seen, heard, touched, smelt or tasted, how am I to love you?

            This evening the sky over the Val di Chiana was astonishing: milky grey here, blue there, the clouds plum and apricot and strewn about like tattered banners. Over in the east, where that mysterious line of water catches the dying sun, it was orange and glowing. As the sun sank down behind our high, dark city, every tower in the valley before me, every castle, farmstead and hermitage capping one of the little hillocks shone like rich gold. Oh, how I wanted to be out there, where so many bells were tolling compline in the still air. Utter beauty!

            I told Suor Agosta what I had seen, about the eagles flying in a heaven as coloured as Joseph’s coat, but she looked down on me with great disapproval from her high chair at her writing desk. ‘These are worldly joys, child! The world is full of misery, however beautiful it seems. The sky is only a shadow of God’s radiance. Our true heaven is beyond the sky and brighter than anything you can imagine. Love God and abhor the world.’

            Regretting saying anything – but oh, how can I keep such things to myself forever? – I bent my head over my pharmacy labels.

            ‘Child?’

            ‘Yes, Suor Agosta?’

            ‘How is it you saw the valley?’

            ‘I was feeding the doves as is my duty, Suora.’

            ‘The dove cot is not so high!’

            It is true, but from the ladder to the elevated cot I can clamber up on to the granary roof which slopes over the convent wall in such a shallow line as to be near enough flat; flat enough to stand on. ‘If I stand on tip-toe on the top rung, Suora,’ I lied, ‘I can just see over the granary roof.’ And I hung my head guiltily.

            ‘It is your duty to feed the doves, not to stand staring out to space, you idle girl! To love God properly you must do your duty.’

v

It is not that I think you do not exist. Of course you exist and are everywhere. But I doubt that you love me. Just as the sun shines on everyone, saint and sinner alike, so your love, if you have it, is indifferent. Well then, so must mine be. That is only fair, is it not? And until you show yourself to me, even as a dove or in a burning bush, it will remain so.

            At Easter my long probation shall come to an end and I shall take my vows as a novice; then, next year, when I am sixteen, I shall become a Bride of Christ. A vain and shallow wife of an invisible God, a God who, like a sultan, locks away so many wives for his own pleasure, whatever that might be! To my mind a life spent amongst women is no life at all. I may as well be dead. Who would want to end up like Madre Generale, bewhiskered, toothless and full of hatred of anything young?

            Dear Lord God, you have enough wives. Wherever you are, free me from this place and this destiny, this prison for unwanted daughters.

v

Carne-vale

A new postulant arrived while we were feasting in the refectory, eating pigeon, hare and cheese, as well as the usual bread and minestra. Some of the nuns were eating much more than was good for them, as if to store up for the whole of Lent, and it is sure to be a night of much noise and disturbance in the dormitory as they come and go to the latrines, knocking against beds in the dark, farting and groaning. The new girl, a very dark, skinny little thing, is called Lauretta. Like me she is an orphan though two years younger, but she has spent those years on the Outside – and she has been married, wife to a mortal man! – and therefore seems older than me by far. I was sent to show her to our dormitory. Leaving my supper to the thieving fingers of my neighbours, I was glad to have the opportunity to talk to the frightened girl alone.

            ‘Where do you come from?’ I asked her as soon as we reached the silent cloisters.

            ‘Cagnano.’

            ‘So do I! What is it like? I was only five when I was sent here.’

            ‘Five? Why?’

            ‘I do not know. I presume my parents died. Someone must have paid for me. What is Cagnano like?’

            ‘But it is only twenty paces away!’

            ‘And beyond our walls. Tell me quick, before anyone comes, for here we must have God’s words on our lips all the time.’

            ‘Cagnano is horrible.’

            This told me nothing that I might see, touch or imagine. ‘In what way? What does it look like?’

            She shrugged. ‘Like anywhere else, only it is steep and in the shadow of the city much of the day. There are two cities, you know.’

            ‘Where?’

            ‘Here! One above the other. Cagnano is in the lower part and catches all the slops and waste of the upper city. It’s just behind the lower wall and stinks like a drain.’

            I was shocked. I came from a good home, I am certain of it.

            ‘What is your family name?’ Lauretta asked.

            ‘Ambrogini.’

            ‘Oh!’ She stepped back as if I were poisonous.

            As we neared the dormitory, I could hear someone following us – the Madre Generale herself to judge by the clipping tread she has, like a bird of prey hopping round a carcass.

            ‘Your family name?’ I whispered urgently.

            Lauretta was staring at me with frightened eyes.

            ‘Yours?’ I insisted.

            ‘Del Mazza,’ she whispered. She flinched as she said it, as if expecting me to strike her, but I was only raising my arm to the latch of the dormitory door. Before we could enter, old beaky was upon us.

            ‘Lauretta del Mazza, daughter of that murderous family of villains, come here.’

            Lauretta went to meet her in the shadows of the cloister, lit only by the wax torches held by myself and the Madre Generale.

            ‘On your knees, girl. Renounce the past and all will be well. Your only father now is God.’

            ‘Thanks be to God!’ Lauretta sank to her knees as if with great relief.

            Here, then, is another of them, someone to whom being in a convent is a liberation and a source of joy. Once again, as ever, my hope for a friend, someone I can talk to, who will understand and share my soul’s longings, is dashed.

Linda Proud is an English author best known for her novels set in Renaissance Italy. She was a freelance picture researcher before teaching creative writing to US students studying in Oxford, UK, which she did for twenty years, working mainly for Sarah Lawrence College. Her first novel, A Tabernacle for the Sun, won a bursary from Southern Arts and a month's residence at the writers' retreat of Hawthornden Castle. It was published by Allison and Busby in 1997. It was followed by Pallas and the Centaur and The Rebirth of Venus. ‘The Botticelli Trilogy’ has drawn praise from authors and academics as well as the general reader, and is considered as best of its kind by many reviewers, including Lonely Planet Guide to Florence and Tuscany: 'The historical detail in all three is exemplary, and each is a cracking good read.' Her fourth novel was the prequel, A Gift for the Magus**,  which won two awards in 2014.

In 2003 she and her husband, David Smith, founded Godstow Press and began publishing her novels themselves. They live in Oxford.

Currently she is working on a novel set in Iron Age Britain.

**A Gift for the Magus

According to Leon Battista Alberti in his book On Painting, 'to be a good painter you must be a good man.' Fra Filippo Lippi is notorious for his contempt of his vows: he was never obedient and nerve chaste. The nun who modelled for his pictures of the Virgin Mary became the mother of his children. Yet this apparently 'bad' man painted divine pictures; moreover, he was the favourite painter of that very astute patron, Cosimo de' Medici. Was Alberti wrong, or was Lippi a better man than generally believed? What is the nature of goodness?

 

REVIEW: Karen Memory

Title: Karen Memory
Author: Elizabeth Bear
Genre: fantasy, steampunk
Price: $12.99 (ebook) $19.43 (hardcover)
Publisher: Tor
ISBN 978-0765375247
Point of Sale: Amazon 
Reviewed by: Chris Gerrib

I bought Karen Memory based on having heard the first chapter read aloud by the author at Windycon.  It was a hell of a first chapter, and to my delight, the rest of the book delivered on the promise.

Karen, the narrator and title character, works as a prostitute in a high-class bordello in “Rapid City” which is a mashup of Portland Oregon and Seattle Washington of the 1880s.  We’re in steampunk, so Mad Scientists are running around and (at least in theory) getting licensed, and dirigibles fill the sky.  Oh, and one Peter Bantle, pimp and all-around sleezeball, has a mind-control device.  (He uses it on Karen in Chapter 1, so that’s not much of a spoiler.)

Now, steampunk is an interesting genre, and Elizabeth Bear, the author, has decided to graft non-existent and futuristic technology on real people of the era.  I do mean real – Bass Reeves, the first black US Marshal, is a supporting character.  Bear also has realistic people, including blacks “passing” as white, gays and cross-dressers – all of the people you’d expect to find in a real bordello of the time.  Importantly, bordellos in the 19th Century were like gas stations today: ubiquitous and catering to every socio-economic group in society.

At any rate, our entertaining story is of Karen Memory, resident of Madame Damnable’s bordello (Madam is based on a real person who died as one of the wealthiest people in Seattle) who is thrust into the role of helping Priya, an Indian girl (from India, not Native American) sold into sex slavery.  Oh, and Karen would really like to get into Priya’s knickers.  Bantle is the main obstacle to progress, although we find during the story that the stakes aren’t just one girl, but rather the whole Alaska territory.

Steampunk is by definition interjecting non-real technology into a “real” setting.  That’s done here, although surprisingly sparingly.  Where non-real tech is used, it’s done in a restrained manner, which allows real characters to shine through.  In short, Karen Memory is highly recommended.

A Matter of Forced Perspective

Hello folks,Mark here with a few idle thoughts about the love hate relationship all writers have with words. I have been chasing words all my life; a perplexing, rewarding, exhilarating pursuit. I cannot recall a time when I have not 'written' something. The files on my school computers are chock full of lesson plans, unit plans, academic profundity that would take reams to print. I think I am doing the world a favor by keeping those bits code. 😄. But over the length of my career, I have also amassed a decent volume of my own stuff.  There are a handful of old notebooks containing a very bad cardboardish attempt at an epic fantasy, a number of short stories and quite a few poems.  These works comprise my loose compositional biography. Over the years, I have always let inspiration guide my fingers to the keys, pen or pencil. I think that makes me a lazy writer in the sense that I have not followed all of the 'rules' one finds permeating social media these days.

I accuse myself almost daily of lacking discipline.

And yet, as I loiter here in the sunshine of Arizona, I think I need to give myself a break. You see, April finds me at the end of a long winter of discontent (thank you, Bill S, yet again), during which all progress on almost every project has become stalled. My teaching career and role as dad and husband have taken precedence over plot line, poetry and characterization.
I have been reduced to taking notes, lots of notes full of good intentions...and then nothing.
I have a tan line in April, but no revised manuscript. I have sweated away a winter's worth of stress in a week, but have made no further progress on novel four. Before this week, I felt guilty, word-silent, out of the loop from all things audience and publishing. I had begun to despair of ever recovering what my editor calls "mojo".

But I think I will be okay, and it is not because things will slow down once I return to the grind. If anything, the schedule and pace of life will get faster and more full. No, the reason I think things will be fine is because I got a text message from my neighbor informing me that our 18 year old family pet, a calico named Angel, has passed over the rainbow bridge.  She had been fading for weeks, so I was not surprised.  She was especially mine, however, and there is sadness. But there is also a tingle that previously has betokened productivity.

You see, I have written Angel into my fourth book, Pevanese Mosaic,(partial at 60k) as a character. She is a companion to an important figure in the story, and, laugh as you like, I think I need to finish it for her.
So I will.

I now feel this last winter of stoppages rather than progress will turn out to have been good for me. Events unforeseen forced me to take a different perspective on my goals and timeline for achieving them. I think I have faced some hard truths about my words and my life that leave me wiser for having explored the darkness.  There are textures, even in sadness, that lend themselves to the light.
We might wallow in our despair for awhile, agonizing as once bright ideas grow stale and lifeless through neglect, but if we are lucky we realize new and better ideas or ways to move forward. Perhaps those early images were meant to weaken and fade.  Perhaps.

As for me, I feel new words bubbling up from the froth and will look forward to where they lead me. Stay tuned; it could be a wild ride.

Mark Nelson

Wednesday Review: Unseemly Science by Rod Duncan

In the divided land of England, Elizabeth Barnabus has been living a double life – as both herself and as her brother, the private detective. Witnessing the hanging of Alice Carter, the false duchess, Elizabeth resolves to throw the Bullet Catcher’s Handbook into the fire, and forget her past. If only it were that easy! 

There is a new charitable organisation in town, run by some highly respectable women. But something doesn’t feel right to Elizabeth. Perhaps it is time for her fictional brother to come out of retirement for one last case? Her unstoppable curiosity leads her to a dark world of body-snatching, unseemly experimentation, politics and scandal. Never was it harder for a woman in a man’s world…

Unseemly Science is set in an alternative version of Britain where the mainland has been partitioned into a Republic (northern England and Scotland) and a Kingdom (the rest of England and southern Wales) with the border running through the English Midlands. It’s the sequel to The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter and several characters from that book return. The story opens in the divided city of Leicester, best known in fiction as the birthplace of Adrian Mole. It’s a steampunk/alternate history novel, thus although set in 2009 the technology, dress and social codes are sort-of-Victorian, with airships. The heroine is Elizabeth Barnabus, an intelligence gatherer from the Kingdom living in the Republic. Although in the Kingdom women can own businesses and attend university, the rights of Republican women are severely curtailed and thus Elizabeth operates double personae, being both herself and her ‘brother’, Edwin. But the Kingdom is little better, and Elizabeth’s exile has been forced on her as the only means of escaping the Duke of Northampton, to whom she’s bound by forced indentures granted by a corrupt court. I doubt he wanted her services as parlourmaid.

As the book opens, a treaty of extradition that would force Elizabeth’s return to the Duke is looming between the Kingdom and Republic; the philanthropist, Mrs Raike, is organising aid for the deserving poor, raising male eyebrows as she does so; and quantities of the ice produced by the ice farmers of Derbyshire are disappearing. Julia, Elizabeth’s friend and pupil, goes to assist Mrs Raike and soon Elizabeth (and Edwin) is manipulated into investigating the ice thefts, trading intelligence gathering for protection against extradition.

There’s much to enjoy here. The snippets at the chapter heads from two, contrasting in-world texts deepen the background of the story. This particular alternate reality is fascinating: the industrial revolution never happened, law and technology are regulated by the International Patent Office and the temperatures in the hills above Derby are consistently below zero for four months of the year. There are also nods to classic detective fiction, as when Elizabeth reminds Julia, You know my methods. Although the Kingdom and the Republic have been separate countries since 1819, their politics and self-interests are tightly entangled and corruption is rife on both sides of the border. They are nicely balanced too: one an oligarchy permitting female education and emancipation but imposing the death penalty and forced servitude, the other a limited democracy whose populace is free, but severely constrained by social mores and containing, apparently, a large number of near starving destitutes. Reader: which would you prefer?

Elizabeth is brave, competent and extremely resourceful, and her background in the Circus of Wonders has given her all sorts of useful skills. She’s a strong, active heroine, who is certainly not constrained by the limitations of Republican society. Indeed she can play its expectations to her advantage. People, she knows, see mostly what they expect. She, however, is an adept at misdirection. Nor is she the only character playing a part. Indeed there’s a theme of sleight of hand running through the book. Elizabeth recognises at first sight that Mrs Raike is not what she seems. The villains too are masters of misdirection and subterfuge, hiding their deeds in plain sight (a satisfying number of clues are scattered like breadcrumbs through the text) and between the lines of an accounting ledger. Even Elizabeth’s one powerful ally, John Farthing, an agent of the Patent Office can’t act openly, for all medical research is deemed for the greater good and hence, by definition, seemly.

For two-thirds of the book the pace is fairly sedate, as situations, characters and plot threads are introduced. Then a package is delivered, the various gears engage and the pace quickens. The final third reads like a satisfying cross between thriller and gothic horror. I found the characterisation rather flat: Julia, for example, never quite came to life in my eyes. Elizabeth herself, the first person narrator, maintains a distance between the reader and her adventures that extends even to her closest friends. Part of this is, I think, deliberate: the book is set in an imagined age more formal than our own and this formality is reflected in the language. The most vivid characters are those from the Kingdom: the lawyer Yan Romero in particular, whose talk of pianos (metaphorically) falling from the bookends the story beautifully. He brought a spark to the page, and struck one from Elizabeth.

Such reservations aside, I enjoyed reading Unseemly Science. Books work on several levels. A good story is complete in itself yet, at the same time, reading is a dynamic process: readers are not passive consumers of words. I've no idea what Duncan intended when writing, other than to invent a world and tell a story. Yet, for this reader at least, the subtexts and resonances of a divided Britain run by capricious aristocrats and politicians with vested interests were as entertaining as the story. It's worth a look, and I'll keep an eye out for the next instalment.

Also, do spend a moment looking at the cover. That’s what attracted me to the book in the first place. Now, having read it, I can see what a subtle, clever illustration of the story it is.

Harriet Goodchild

Unseemly Science Rod Duncan
Angry Robot Books (I read an ARC obtained from the publisher via NetGalley) 

UK Print
Date: 7th May 2015
ISBN: 9780857664266
Format: Medium (B-Format) Paperback
R.R.P.: £8.99

North American Print
Date: 5th May 2015
ISBN: 9780857664273
Format: Small (Mass-Market) Paperback
R.R.P.: US$7.99 / CAN$9.99

Ebook
Date: 5th May 2015
ISBN: 9780857664280
Format: Epub & Mobi
R.R.P.: £5.49 / US$6.99

http://angryrobotbooks.com/books/unseemly-science-by-rod-duncan/