Lady Vernon and Her Daughter

Thank you for joining me on the Historical Novel Review Blog, Jane and Caitlen, I'm sure our readers are fascinated to hear about how you wrote this lovely Regency Novel.

1. Your website and media blurb say that Jane has been writing for a while but this is Caitlen’s first novel. What made both/either of you want to write in conjunction with someone else? What made you base your novel on Lady Susan specifically, as opposed to, say, an original storyline based on an Austen format?

Jane had written a contemporary series, based at the Jersey shore that, incidentally featured a Jane Austen-loving sleuth, Cat Austen, who has a nine-year-old daughter named Jane! After a few books in the series were published, she started thinking about writing a second series. She happened to be reading Lady Susan at the time, and thought that there were elements that could be adapted to a mystery – the beautiful, manipulative woman who has lost her husband in a circumstance that is never made clear; the young ingénue, the headstrong young man, a wary sister-in-law, the gossipy London friend. She decided that it wouldn’t really do justice to the work to convert it to the “Lady Susan Mysteries”, and started thinking about reconstructing it as a historical narrative, and asked Cait if she would like to co-write it - Caitlen was not only a serious fan of Jane Austen, but had taken an intensive Austen seminar in college. In fact, the book is dedicated to the professor of that course, Professor Mary Ann Macartney.

Lady Susan is also a complete work, though underdeveloped; we had the characters, the relationships and the lovely, ironic ending to work with, and, of course, translating an epistolary work to a narrative novel was precisely what Austen did with Elinor and Marianne, which was recast as Sense and Sensibility.

2. Which leads me to my next question – why each other? Most mothers and daughters cannot collaborate on a shopping list, let alone a novel.

The problems we had with collaboration had to do with our different circumstances – where we live, how much time we had to devote to the project – rather than issues of personality. When you collaborate with anyone, you have to have the same appreciation of the material, the same commitment to the project, the same understanding of who does what and the same professional attitude – it doesn’t matter if you’re related or not, because in the end, it’s not about you, it’s about the goal; we both approached this with the same goals in mind: we wanted to convert Lady Susan into a novel-length narrative, we wanted to try to reproduce the tone of an Austen novel and we wanted to get it published!

3. The omniscient narrator who tells us what is happening rather than living through the characters is considered no longer fashionable for contemporary novels. However, you remained faithful to Jane Austen’s writing style in the book. Was that a deliberate decision?

Yes. When you write a pastiche, you have to look to the original body of work – in this case, Austen’s major novels – for precedent: prose style, word choice, plot elements. In the case of Lady Vernon and Her Daughter, if we couldn’t find a precedent in Austen’s novels, we didn’t do it.

4. In the early 1800s, women had no protection from the law if their husbands chose to leave them destitute on widowhood. Although Sir Frederick believed he had left his wife and daughter in the capable hands of his brother, there was nothing to prevent his subsequent actions, other than the approbation of his peers. Was this injustice you wanted to highlight with your handling of the book?

What we did highlight was done not because it was what we now perceive as injustice, but because we saw a precedent in Austen’s work. Just as Mr. Dashwood trusts to John Dashwood's family feeling when his son “promised to do everything in his power to make [Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters] comfortable”, Frederick Vernon projects his own notions of filial affection upon his brother and heir and trusts that Charles will provide everything he has promised to Lady Vernon and Frederica. In Austen, you see repeated examples of the “negligent father” ( or "husband"), men who have a disconnect in their emotional ties or financial obligation to their wives and daughters. Mr. Bennet is a case in point; he has no sons, an income of about two thousand pounds a year derived from his entailed property, yet a quarter century into the marriage he still has laid nothing aside for the provision of his wife and daughters. In Lady Vernon and Her Daughter, Lady Elinor Martin observes, "Only think of all the daughters and wives who are cast adrift when property goes from one hand to another?" When you see how the Bates women in Emma, or Mrs. Smith in Persuasion are plunged from comfort into poverty, you can comprehend (even if you cannot agree with) Mrs. Bennet’s desperation to have Elizabeth marry Mr. Collins; when Elizabeth refuses him, plain, twenty-seven-year-old Charlotte Lucas grabs him; her philosophy expresses the reality of the time, that marriage “was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune.” When John Dashwood meets his sisters in London, he remarks upon Marianne's wasted appearance by wondering “whether Marianne now, will marry a man worth more than five or six hundred a-year, at the utmost…” While Austen's heroines ultimately marry for love, marriage and money are inseparable in her novels.

5. Unlike Jane Austen, whose characters may be sly, imperious and unjust, your antagonist, Charles Vernon, definitely struck me as sinister and with implications that he was capable of murder to achieve what he saw as his birthright. Was that a deliberate move away from Ms. Austen’s style for the modern reader, or do you feel her original characters were too mild?

In earlier drafts, there was a stronger implication that Charles Vernon had murdered his brother; we ultimately took it out because, again, we wanted to look to Austen’s work for precedent, and there were no murders in her novels. Vernon, like many other characters in Austen who act maliciously, is motivated by greed – greed for money, property, status. They are not necessarily mild, but have a veneer of civility that passes for mildness - Willoughby, Walter Elliot, Frederick Tilney, are genteel in their address, but cruel, even predatory. Charles Vernon persuades himself that he has been cheated, and it is a very short leap from feeling cheated to considering how you will retaliate or recover what you think is your due. The property and money are almost irrelevant – Charles is no more suited to be the administrator of the Vernon fortune and property than Henry Crawford is to be the husband of Fanny, or Wickham is to be a clergyman.

6: I couldn’t tell where Jane’s work ended and Caitlen’s began in the novel. Was this deliberate, or are you so attuned to each other you didn’t have to think about it?

That may be because we didn’t write alternate parts of the book; we both contributed to the work as a whole. Jane tends to write in sentences and paragraphs, focusing on phrasing and cadence which she think are important but often unaddressed aspects of writing a pastiche. Caitlen writes in scenes and chapters – in larger blocks – and is also the better editor when it comes to repositioning scenes within the manuscript. When a draft was done, we would take turns at revising the entire work, phoning and e-mailing back and forth, so it really was a united effort.

7: Did you base the character of Catherine Vernon on another Jane Austen character or was she entirely your own creation.

Catherine Vernon appears in Lady Susan. Early on in Austen’s work, we learn that she and Lady Susan Vernon have never met. It is rare in Austen to see in-laws who never meet – the only prominent example of it is in the long estrangement that exists between Mrs. Price and her sisters’ families. Since the Vernon sisters-in-law have never met, all of Catherine’s information about Lady Vernon has come to her second-hand, so how she regards Lady Vernon, her point of view until they meet, is based upon her prior prejudices, and even afterward, her prejudice may color her view of her sister-in-law’s behavior.

As to the “hook” in her character, the overriding quality, you see a self-satisfaction, and indolence that is reflective of a number of Austen’s characters – certainly Lady Bertram, but also Lady Middleton and Mrs. Elton, who use marriage as an excuse to discontinue accomplishment – music, in their cases. In a character like Charlotte Palmer, you see a willful determination to mischaracterize her husband’s inattention and indeed, throughout the novels you see married couples – the Bennets, the Middletons, the Bertrams, the Musgroves – settle into their separate, and not always compatible, spheres. She becomes almost a satiric opposite on Caroline Bingley’s assessment of the accomplished woman – music, singing, dancing, drawing, languages – preferring to "write her letters and then proceed to do nothing in peace and quiet".

8: With the release of Lady Vernon and Her Daughter, do you have any other novels planned, either working alone or together as mother and daughter?

We are working on another Austen-related project, but we are still in the very early stages.

9: Now the more frivolous bit. What has been the biggest stumbling block in writing together and getting this work published?

One big obstacle in the writing was that Caitlen was occupied with her masters program, internships, moving to the city and taking her first job, which prolonged the writing time. Nonetheless, writing the book – that was the fun part. Getting published is another matter. There is a lot that determines whether a book gets published or not, and it isn't always encouraging to see how little of it has to do with the work itself. Fortunately, we had wonderful advocates, both in our agent, and in our editor at Crown.

Thank you so much for joining me today, and I would also like to recommend the excellent book trailer you released for the novel available on your website. Which I also note is another family collaboration! Anita Davison

Lady Vernon and Her Daughter

Lady Vernon and Her Daughter is an extended version of Jane Austen's forgotten manuscript, 'Lady Susan'. The storyline focuses on the economic and romantic plights of two heroines displaced when the family home passes to an unworthy heir on the death of Sir Frederick Vernon.

The style is truly reminiscent of Jane Austen, with some of the letters and original text from the novella of Lady Susan. It contains all the witty repartee and poking fun at the mores of society and the fickle minds of the Regency landed classes. The language is colourful, intricate and flows beautifully with some ironic and amusing touches that stayed with me after I put the book down. Such as this little gem:

.....declaring what a fortunate thing it was for a girl when an early engagement relieved her of the tedious business of accomplishment.

Unlike Jane Austen, the villain is a darker, more sinister presence to the two heroines than I have previously encountered in a Jane Austen novel. [Or perhaps I haven't read the right ones] The implication that the antagonist, in the form of Sir Frederick’s brother Charles, is not so much cold and uncaring, but may be a murderer too which adds another aspect to the story.

Dislodged from their comfortable lives, Lady Susan and Frederica have to find a way to secure their own future in a society which has no compassion for the impoverished and dispossessed. Frederica, who is intelligent as well as beautiful, and has aspirations for science, is suspicious of her uncle and detaches herself from him very quickly. This action gives Lady Vernon’s detractors more ammunition to use against her, piling neglectful mother onto her other faults of outrageous flirt and labelling her as being desperate to secure a second husband.

The authors create sympathy for Lady Susan Vernon immediately, and I would certainly not have been able to maintain the aloof dignity and measured silence she did with so many nasty Regency cats dishing unfounded dirt about her, and some not so privately.

Ms Rubino and Rubino-Bradway’s skill makes Lady Susan Vernon far more than a pretty face or a victim of circumstance, who doesn't panic when she discovers her brother-in-law intends to renege on any promises to look after her and Frederica. She handles her situation with aplomb, and I especially like the character of Catherine Vernon, the superior and morally bereft sister-in-law, who is the most outrageously nasty character. I was glued to the book, wondering what the awful woman would say next.

I shan’t reveal any more as I wouldn’t want to spoil a satisfying read, because this is certainly a novel to get lost in.

There is also an excellent, and very professionally produced trailer, by yet another Rubino

Revelation by C J Sansom

Revelation is the fourth in CJ Sansom's Tudor detective series featuring the hunchback lawyer, Matthew Shardlake, set at the time when Henry VIII is trying to get Catherine Parr to be his sixth wife.

The year is 1543 and Matthew has sworn not to involve himself in any more affairs of state after his last brush with the dubious factions of King Henry's court in ‘Sovereign’.

However his old friend Roger Elliard, a fellow lawyer, is found with his throat dramatically cut in Lincoln's Inn fountain. When the king's coroner appears to be covering up the murder, Shardlake promises Elliard's widow, the lost love of his youth, that he will find the killer. This is a mission he shares with Archbishop Cranmer, who must keep the investigation a secret from the king. If it fails, they could all lose their heads.

Shardlake and his hot-blooded young assistant Jack Barak uncover multiple murders, and find themselves on the search for a serial killer who is on what he sees as a holy mission using the book of Revelation as his guide.

The character of Matthew Shardlake is solitary, cerebral, occasionally flawed and driven by a belief in justice, but he has a sentimental side as his physical infirmities have deprived him of the love he has always yearned for.

The historical research is rich and colourful, so you walk the Tudor streets and into alleys seeing and smelling all their pageantry as well as the filth. Revelation takes a little time to get its main plot rolling but the finale is not a disappointment.

Royal Harlot by Susan Holloway-Scott

King Charles II has been living in impoverished exile for nearly twelve years, and Europe has pretty much given up on him as a prospective monarch of England. However in early 1660, General Monck puts forward the idea that with Cromwell dead and his son Richard a useless alternative, it’s time for the king to return.

Barbara Villiers, born into a notorious family but discarded by her cold mother as a child. Left to her own devices, albeit in a privileged world, Barbara decides her future is bound up with the young, passionate returning king. She knows from a young age what she is, and never apologises for it, though her amoral opportunism loses her friends and her lover, Lord Phillip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield along the way.

She marries Roger Palmer for expediency, but it is a loveless, desultory marriage and when her husband sees Barbara as a useful tool to help return the king to his throne, Barbara is no victim, more a willing participant. Inevitably, her first meeting with Charles II is magnetic, and when he regains his throne, Barbara is right there with him at Whitehall.

Admired by most of the Restoration court for her wit and beauty, it isn’t long before the king must marry and Barbara is relegated to the position of ‘whore’. Undeterred, Barbara wheedles her way into the new queen’s household and bears the king’s children, even claiming paternity for more than Charles fathered. Despite the titles and money she obtained for them as well as herself, her passionate nature doesn’t allow her to remain faithful, and among the men she takes as lovers is her profligate cousin, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham and her lover’s illegitimate son, the teen age Duke of Monmouth.

Eventually, Barbara’s tantrums and demands grow tiresome and she is forced to concede to her younger competition. She converts to Catholicism, which gives her royal lover an excuse to have her exiled from court, leaving me with the impression this was less a love affair than a sexual enslavement and Charles was eager to disentangle himself.

Barbara never apologises, or pretends to be what she is not, for which I admire her, but I also feel her calculating character deprived her of real happiness. Her outrageous and notorious sexual appetite didn’t bring her happiness either, so in many ways I feel sorry for her, as I know she died almost impoverished and alone.
Ms Holloway Scott’s novel is written from Barbara’s perspective, thus her portrayal could have been done for authenticity and the coldness of Barbara’s character not the author’s invention. If so, Ms Holloway Scott did a great job, and I always longed for Barbara to feel more than triumph when things went her way and anger when they didn’t.

She even capitulated to being rejected by Chesterfield, her first lover with pragmatic coolness, which seemed out of place for a young woman not yet twenty. Even the sex, though very well written, was cold, dispassionate as it had a purpose. Then again, I cannot blame the author for that, this may be her interpretation of Barbara’s own inner emotions. Or perhaps, Charles II was the man Barbara really loved, but knew she could not have, for his notorious charm was well documented.

Ms Holloway-Scott’s depiction of the Restoration court is masterly, as is her understanding of political events and intrigues that have confused many before her.

If I expected this book to be a rags-to-riches romance with a happy ending, I was always going to be disappointed. However, as an accurate account of the volatile love between a King and his mistress, this book is a gripping read.

The Rage of Achilles Excerpt

ACHILLES ON THE BEACH

The sun has been up a long time, but Paris is still in bed. Light streams in through windows generously large in his house far from the walls. There is no fear of arrows or stray javelins here, high up in the citadel.

He scissors his legs lazily through a tangle of silk sheets still damp from dawn’s lovemaking. He likes watching his legs move. He runs his hands over his thighs and traces with his fingers the big muscles’ divide. He stares at his belly: sometimes it reminds him of his warrior brother’s breastplate, rippled and ridged like a god’s. As he stares at his belly and thighs, the snake between stirs, needing no attention but his.

But it has attracted another’s. She stands at the window wrapped in a robe his mother embroidered a long time ago. “Somebody’s awake,” she says. She has a little lisp. He once thought, long ago, that it would drive him crazy. It never has. She comes to the edge of the bed, near its foot. He smiles lazily and, holding her eye, runs the tip of his index finger down his shaft. The snake leaves its bed on his thigh and starts to strain upwards. Her eyes leave his and drift down. The wall behind her is painted with a garden that never existed on this earth; her head is garlanded with pigment lotus. “No war today?” she asks. A painted fingernail traces his instep.

“No war today.” The snake is throbbing and he admires it. “You haven’t heard the news?”

“I won’t know till you tell me what it is.” The lisp gets a little stronger when she grows petulant. Her head dips and her tongue takes her finger’s place, slipping between his toes and finally down the arch. He whimpers.

“Achilles is out of the war.”

Her head snaps up. “What?”

“Come on,” he laughs, “don’t stop.” Her head stays up. “Don’t stop or I won’t tell you.”

She dives back to his foot and splayed fingers start working their way up his calf. “The spies told us last night. Agamemnon stole Briseis from him. He said it was only fair because he was king and he had to give up his girl to save the Achaeans. Achilles went crazy. He swore he wouldn’t raise a hand again for Agamemnon. Or his brother, your husband. Did you do this for him?” His voice is suddenly sharp with anxiety.

“Never,” she slurs around his big toe.

“Good,” he says. Relaxing against the cushions, he wraps his hand around himself and squeezes. “So this is very good. The Achaeans don’t know what to do, and soon we will drive them into the sea.” He starts to pump himself. “Let me see them.”
Obediently, she releases his toe and sits up at the edge of the bed. She slips the robe off her left shoulder. Shrugging, she exposes it entirely. Even now, near ten years later, her breast affects him as it did the first time he saw it. It is like a mountain, like Olympus itself, pure white and thrusting arrogantly from the plain of her ribs, its crest a peak of coral that tightens and darkens as he watches. Any larger and it would sag to her waist; big as it is, on a woman nearly thirty, its continuing firmness is widely viewed as a sign of divine favor on the Trojan cause.
He moans. “Both.” She shrugs the robe off the other shoulder and it falls to her hips. “Touch them for me.” She smiles and reaches for the pot of oil beside the bed. Filling her hands, she anoints herself, delicately at first, then with a two-handed grip that makes the coral crests an impossible blood red that he has never seen on another woman. Her breath begins to labor and whistle.

She stops and reaches for the oil pot again. She hands it to him, smiles crookedly. “Touch yourself for me.” He grins and fills his hands with unguent.

***

The sun is directly overhead. The only shelter is in the lee of a canted ship. Two veterans have found it, as veterans will always find comfort when it is there to be found.

One, Cephales, mends the strap of his shield. It does not need mending. The old soldier just wants to be sure; he does not want to go out to face the Trojans tomorrow to find himself with an unguarded left one minute, and the next paying the boatman to take him across the River Styx. As he works, he wonders whether he is weakening the strap with his constant attention, and he gnaws his beard with anxiety. He knows he has been in the lines too long and that his heart is going if not gone. He prays that he will die before his friends know.
Lacademon, not so long in the lines but long enough to find shade when he can, does nothing. He sits on the sand with his back flush against a hull out of water so long that the barnacles might be fossils. He watches Cephales work the braided leather without guessing his purpose or his fear. Once, he glances at his own shield pitched beside him, and decides that the strap will do.

A third, Polycrates, approaches. He plants his javelin point down in the sand and leans his shield against the long, immobile ship, then drops on his ass in the shade and plants his back against the hull. “Hot,” he says. His friends grunt. “Heard the news?” The man doing nothing says nothing. The man fixing his strap must ask. “What news?”

“The boy wonder.”

“What about him?” Cephales has stopped his busy work; Lacademon turns his head.

“You heard that King Agamemnon took his girl?”

“Right. Big deal.”

“Fucking right it’s a big deal. Achilles is acting like he fucked his father. He’s running around screaming that he’s out of the fucking war and he’ll just sit on the beach and get a nice tan while we get our asses kicked.”

“No shit?” says Lacademon.

“No shit,” Polycrates says.

They sit in silence for a while. At last, Cephales puts down his worrisome shield and speaks. “What does Achilles care about one piece of ass more or less? He has a dozen girls and Patroclus, too.”

Polycrates shakes his head. “Brother, this isn’t just some piece of ass. I haven’t seen her, but one of my buddies did. Fifteen years old if she’s a day, tits like melons that stick straight out, and a face like Pallas Athena.” He shakes his head again. “What do you think it means?”

Cephales considers. “I think we will have a very hard time without Achilles.”

Polycrates nods. He turns to Lacademon. “You?”

“I think I’m glad I’m not Patroclus.”

All three laugh. Cephales stops before the others and starts working at his shield again.

***

The kings’ tents are pitched on hills, or the closest thing—dunes whose sand is anchored by tenacious, long-rooted grass. Still, each can sit on his little eminence and look down on his ships and men and see the other kings on their own dunes.
There is an ox-hide and olivewood stool at Odysseus’ canvas door. From where he sits he can look east to Achilles and west to Agamemnon. Last night he heard the gored-heifer bellowings from the east. This afternoon he looks west and sees Agamemnon, crowned with a wreath of field flowers, strolling with his arm around Briseis’ shoulders while a piper flutes behind them.

Odysseus sits alone and watches. He looks towards Achilles’ tent, from which no sound comes now, nor has it all day. He looks back to happy Agamemnon. He raises a bowl to his lips and takes a swallow of watered wine flavored with resin. He spits it onto the ground before him. “Nice work, shithead,” he says.

***

Achilles has been on the beach since just after the sun rose. As he raved and wept it traced its long course across the sky and now verges on drowning itself at the rim of the western sea. No one has dared disturb him in this rocky little cove a mile away from the farthest outpost of the shore-hugging Achaean fleet. A few Myrmidons, his very best, nervous equally from Trojan presence and their lord’s despair, at first followed him covertly as he made his way up the coast. His storm troopers, they thought themselves invisible even from him, dropping soundlessly to their faces or fading into brush whenever he even appeared to sense their presence. They thought they could post guard without his knowing. But just as he was about to climb down to the strand at the beginning of the rocky descent from the trail, he turned without a word and loosed one of the twin javelins he carried. It landed quivering between the two men in the lead. They stood open-mouthed, staring at their lord. He raised his arm and pointed wordlessly back down the trail. One by one, his commandos left rock clefts and trees and shambled back to camp.

He has spent the day in grief. He would not let his men hear again what they heard last night, so he kept silent until he drove them away. Certain of his solitude, he howled. At first he raged. Big rocks were raised overhead and shattered into gravel against unyielding cliff. The roaring surf could not hear itself crash over his shrieks. An unlucky octopus, caught in a tidal pool, found itself Agamemnon’s effigy: its eyes plucked out, each foot-long arm torn off slowly as ink jetted down Achilles’ chest, its bag of a head sloppily vivisected with fingers and teeth.

Finally, everything that could be broken had been broken and everything that lived had been killed. He was alone with himself. It was past noon. Achilles turned on Achilles. At first he was crude. He tore at his face and splashed salt water across the bleeding tracks. Shells crunched in his mouth to lacerate gums and tongue, but he could not make himself swallow. He stripped and ground his crotch across a boulder crusted with mussels, watching blood drip from his scrotum into the water. When he shat he rubbed his own filth into his hair and beard and cried out to Olympus to make it all end. The gods remained stubbornly silent.

Twice, he battered his head against rock, not because he wants to die, but because he wants the shame to stop. Yet he lives, and so does his shame. He is exhausted, but he cannot stop. Finally, he sits in the sea and stares at the sun, now an orange semicircle gilding fat clouds. He is slumped, his forearms resting against his thighs half submerged in surf growing colder with each wave. He feels sand shifting beneath him and knows that if he sits here long enough, the tide will rise and take him out to sea. This is not how it is supposed to end.

Finally, he speaks the words he knows he must. “Mother. Mother, please. Please.

Please help me, mother.” He waits. He waits a long time.

The sun is down to a quadrant, less, an octant, just one segment of an orange. The world before him is twilight, the world behind him dark. His head throbs with last night’s wine and today’s multiple stony traumas. He has given up hope and waits for the waves to take him away. He takes comfort in the knowledge that he will be asleep when the big fishes take off his toes and work their way up his legs. The cold water is now up to his sternum and its icy kiss makes him tired. He tries one more time. “Mother, please.”

The water is over his nipples. He thinks about getting up, running back to his clothes and arms, and walking back to the camp where there is a fire and wine. But there is shame there too, and he is tired anyway, and now he is beginning to feel warm rather than cold. So perhaps the glorious death he was promised is here in the water, with his last enemy an octopus not three feet across. The water is at his collarbone. He raises an arm out of the surf and notices that his fingers are blue. He is about to lean back, to recline as though at a banquet, and inhale salt water and drown his shame. But just as he rises up for a last backstroke, the water in front of him erupts. Twenty yards offshore a geyser rises, steam curling a hundred yards into the air, water boiling all around it. Suddenly he is in a whirlpool. Alive again and astonished, he sits up. “Mother? Mother, is it you?”

***

He stares straight into the heart of the geyser now subsiding into a boiling fountain, knowing that that is where she is. Then, just back from Hades’ grasp though he is, he remembers what it means to look at an immortal, even if he slipped into the world from between her thighs, and throws a forearm over his eyes. The water boils. He can hear it. He steals a glimpse down past his forearm and sees that thighs livid from cold a minute before have grown boiled-lobster red. If the water gets any hotter, the flesh will blister and part from bone. But it does not. The roiling has stopped; so has the geyser’s jet and crash. So too has the surf. Again he peeks at the water and sees it flat as a bath in which he has fallen asleep. He waits.

He thinks an hour has passed, but he knows enough not to expose his eyes. Never curious about anything other than war, he finally notices that no matter how many times his heart beats here in the surf at sunset, the sky grows no darker, as though the movement of the sun stopped with the surf. He knows then that he is no longer in time. He waits. Finally, he can bear it no longer. His back shrieks with his prolonged half crouch; his arm trembles with the effort of shielding himself from the divine. Eyes screwed shut, he drops his right arm into the water and begins to raise his left into its place. Something thick and wet and rubbery wraps itself around his left leg. Circles of cartilage hard as bone bite into his skin. His eyes pop open as a tentacle thick as his own arm wraps its way up to his groin and tightens hard enough to make him cry out.

As though awaiting that signal, the tentacle tightens further and pulls. He jerks forward against submerged sand and his head disappears under water. His mouth, still open, takes in water like a siphon. He claws at air and light. With another yank from the tentacle, his hands submerge as well.

The salt water bites his lungs. He flails and panics and coughs, expelling the last of his air in a few pathetic bubbles that race to the shimmering surface and break and are gone. He does not notice that the dark has yet to gather in his eyes, and so he fights, clutching at the sand and rocks speeding below him and kicking at the tentacle.

He snaps his head forward. Lungs and ears full of water, his groan is something he can only feel. He sees he has been taken by an octopus that must surely be the great-great-grandfather of this afternoon’s victim, fifty feet across with a head as big as an ox, eyes the size of platters, human as his own, that stare at him with neither pity nor reproach. He thinks that he has offended his mother by killing one of her creatures and knows himself to be a dead man taking the long way to Hades. He stops struggling.

The octopus descends. The dim light roofing Achilles’ new world fades. He wonders whom he will see, whether those he sent there himself will mock him, whether the friends who preceded him will welcome him at whatever tables the dead can keep. Still, the octopus dives. The light, rather than disappearing entirely, seems only to have shifted. Now it comes from below, a hazy point of brightness ahead and down. The octopus flexes and jets and pulses towards the light.

They arrive. The tentacle around his leg relaxes and Achilles drifts down to find a seat on a submerged rock. The octopus flaps once more and is gone. Ahead of him is what looks like a roofless temple: a dozen columns of coral, pink and white, arranged in a circle twenty yards across. Within is the source of light: a ball of lightning that rolls and dances from pillar to pillar. Knowing himself dead, he dares to look directly. Inside the ambient electricity he sees what seems to be the shadow of a human form.

He draws his eyes away. What looked like a temple now seems a military camp. Around it circle hundreds of great fish, orderly as cavalry patrols, each bigger than the biggest man, armed with serried ranks of white teeth and festooned with dimly glowing lights hanging from scalloped lips and fins. On the sand around are ranks of infantry: lobsters big as hunting dogs, crabs like wild boar. Clams the size of chariot cars snap open and shut in rhythm like bacchantes banging their cymbals.
Achilles sits and waits. Water seems to nourish a dead man’s lungs just as well as air, and now that he has died, he has plenty of time. He stares at the rolling light in the roofless temple. At length it stills and a voice fills his head. I know why you weep, Achilles, my son.

Achilles is startled. He had expected the voice of Charon.

I know why you rage. The voice comes from the fireball. Achilles weeps, his salt tears blending imperceptibly with the water around him. His mother has come through after all.

The fireball grows brighter. He is bathed in warmth, not of water boiling from the divine presence, but the radiance of her love. Speak, Achilles. You can.
He opens his mouth. It is an effort for lungs and diaphragm to push water rather than air, for teeth and tongue to form words in this new medium, but she is right. “I hurt,” he says.

"I know. I know, my son.

“He has shamed me before the fleet, before all the kings, before all my men, before the Trojans, before the gods.”

I know, I know.

“How can I make him pay?”

The fireball is silent. Poor boy. My poor boy. I bore you for a short life but promised you glory. Not this. Not shame before your friends. But don’t be afraid. Your mother won’t let this happen. I will speak to my father, your grandfather, the Lord of Lightning. He will bring Agamemnon grief beyond telling. And while this happens, you must rest by your ships. Stay out of the war. Let Agamemnon know what life is like without my boy.

The fireball has grown brighter by degrees until he can barely look at it. The figure inside stands out in sharper contrast. This is as close to seeing her as he will ever come. Though the glare around her makes his head throb, he forces himself to look anyway. Don’t worry, son. Do as I say and Agamemnon will regret this. And I promise you that you will have glory before you die.

He is about to speak again, but the light winks out. For a fraction of a second, he knows himself to be alone at the bottom of the sea. Then darkness enfolds him as well.

***

It is night when he awakens on the beach face down in gravel and sand, fifty yards from the water line, half covered with slimy weed. For a few seconds, he lies there without moving. The beach is bright with a full moon. Little crabs like spiders dance a few feet from his eyes, wondering whether he is dead enough to eat. So does he. Not until the bravest scuttles close and brushes his ear does he move. He rolls fast and crushes it with his fist, then crazed with rage and disgust, spins and pounds three more into twitching pulp before the others scatter.

Weaving and stumbling like a boxer in his last rounds, he staggers to the water and, kneeling in the surf, rinses shell fragments and guts from his hands. Then he vomits gallons of seawater back into its source. Only then does he remember. He walks into the water until it has risen to his waist and splashes his chest and face. When he can stand the cold no longer, he walks back onto the shore and towards the rocks where his clothes and weapons wait.

He will do as his mother told him.

Interview with Terence Hawkins

Terence Hawkins was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Yale. His work has appeared in Poor Mojo's Almanac(k), Keyhole, Pindeldyboz, Ape Culture, Eclectica, Megaera, the Binnacle, and the New Haven Register. It has also appeared on Connecticut Public Radio. He is a trial lawyer in Connecticut. His website can be found at www.terencehawkins.net.

A warm welcome to Terence Hawkins. I'm very excited about hosting you here today. I truly enjoyed your novel with it's "in-your-face" tell it kind of style. I'd like to learn a little more about you and your novel, so thanks for sharing with us.

Welcome, I’m so glad to have this opportunity to chat with you. Can you share with my readers the essence of the story you’ve penned?

Thank you for having me. The book is a novelization of the Iliad in modern prose, realistically told. The Trojan War as a real war, fought by real men.

You’ve chosen a very interesting title. What inspired the title? What inspired the book?

The title comes from the first line of the Iliad: “Sing, muse, of the rage of Achilles.” Oddly enough it took me quite a while to come up with that. I thought about calling it “The Battle for Troy,” or simply “Troy” but ultimately I realized that the book----both mine and the original----were about Achilles and not the war. I think I ignored the obvious because for so much of the book he is so supremely repellent.

As to the book itself, I happened to be reading Christopher Logue’s War Music, a loose translation of the Iliad in modern verse, at the same time I saw “Saving Private Ryan” for the first time. I wondered what the Iliad would look like if it were told with the same kind of realism. And of course being a lawyer I was confident that Homer is way too dead to sue me.

The other thing behind the work is Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Real title, real book. Jaynes theorized that true modern consciousness didn’t begin until language was sufficiently complex to make one hemisphere of the brain predominate over the other, and that before that time people were essentially automatons driven by voices in their heads that they believed to be those of the gods. Based on literary and linguistic evidence----including the Iliad itself----Jaynes believed that this transformation in consciousness took place in Homeric times. In my book, the gods appear as hallucinations, which is what Jaynes thought them to have been.

What makes this book special to you?

More than anything else it was an opportunity to rediscover Homer. Or more accurately discover him; my freshman English class was at eight in the morning and I’m not the earliest of risers. There’s a lot there that I’d forgotten or simply hadn’t noticed. What struck me most is that this is a story of brothers-----Agamemnon and Menelaus on one side, Hector and Paris on the other. And while the beef is between the younger----Paris stole Menelaus’ wife--- the war is prosecuted by the older. Though Homer doesn’t mention them I try to address the humiliations and resentments that must have flowed from big brothers fighting little brothers’ battles. Also, there’s a great deal in the original that is deeply, deeply strange and brutal, and far different from what we ordinarily associate with Classical heroism-----human sacrifice, for example.

Speaking of freshman English, it occurred to me long after I’d written the book that it might be some kind of psychic payback. My first paper at Yale was called “Shame and Guilt in the Iliad.” I think. In any event it got a c minus and a tart observation about the difference between literature and sociology. Guess I showed them.

What makes this a book that people MUST read and WHY?

The Iliad is the cornerstone of our literary tradition. This book makes it new. The original story is incredibly rich and deeply human, but I think its form as an epic poem in translation limits its accessibility. I’m not suggesting that my book is a dumbed-down version of the original----at least it’s no dumber than I am-----but rather an attempt to give its readers the same sense of immediacy and reality it must have had to its first audience.

What sparks your creativity? Any tips to help others spark their own creativity?

I take notes. If I hear something on the street that strikes me as funny I write it down. If I think something I don’t want to forget I write it down. Usually on 3 x 5’s in a Levenger card holder, by the way, though I also use a Moleskine reporter’s notebook. Every so often I go through the notes in no particular order and that seems to get things moving, perhaps by promoting random connections between otherwise disparate ideas. Couple of pops doesn’t hurt, either.

Speaking of randomness and creativity, I urge everyone to watch “Topsy-Turvey”, a brilliantly written and acted film about the first production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado.” See it, and you’ll see what I mean.

What has been the biggest stumbling block in your writing? Can you share some tips to help others get past similar problems?

I’m a practicing lawyer so time would at first seem to be the most important issue. It is an issue, that’s certain---but worse is having the emotional energy at the end of the day, which is when I have the time, to write. What I’ve done----and I think this only works with a saintly spouse, which I happen to have----is to set aside large blocks of time, like Friday nights, to write. What I’ve also done recently is to set aside an hour to write in the office in the evening after my paralegal’s gone and the phones aren’t ringing. This, though, works better for revisions than first drafts.

Tell me about the most unusual things you have done to promote your book?

I had the first chapter printed up as a chapbook which I then distributed around my various local hangouts. Sad to say there isn’t a lot of interest in the classics in Connecticut saloons, and I can show you a photograph of several of them wadded up to level off a wobbly elliptical trainer in the Yale gym. I also circulated a few among defense lawyers on the other side of some of my cases, just to see how they’d respond. One said, “When I got to the point where he threw her off the cliff, I wondered where your mother had gone wrong.”

Each author is different in the way they create a work of fiction. Please describe for us how you plan or plot a story.

This book was easier than most for the very good reason that the skeleton of plot and character were provided by somebody else. As to the former I changed what I had to in order to comport with military reality; as to the latter I added characters consistent with that reality.

Ordinarily I start a story with an idea----guy sends an email intended for his girlfriend to his wife by mistake----and start writing. After a while I start having some notion of where it’s going to end and begin to work towards that point. Sometimes I know the words that end the story well in advance, though sometimes they surprise me.

Authors are very unique in the way they write, the tools they use, when they write, etc. Please describe a typical writing day for you? How do you organize your day?

When working on a substantial project----a novel or long story-----I try to set aside two evenings a week on which my wife is invited to babysit, so I can work at home. I write for about forty minutes at a stretch. Formerly I would break by taking my dog for a quick walk during which I would smoke about half of a small cigar. Since he died I just take a walk and have half of a small cigar. (I only smoke when writing by the way.) When revising I work either at my desk at home in the morning or in the office in the early evening. No cigars in either event. I used to listen to music while working. No longer; it gets in the way of what’s in my head. I always use word for mac to write; I can’t imagine what they did before.

Incidentally, there’s a piece of advice usually attributed to Hemingway that I stick to-----always stop in the middle of a sentence. Finishing it the next day gets you back into the flow.

10. What is your current work in progress?

I’m now revising my second novel, American Neolithic. It’s a political satire set a few years from now, after a bloodless right wing coup has set up a Police State Lite. After the election of 2008 I thought the triumph of virtue meant that political satire was dead, but the right has proven me wrong. Birthers? Tenthers? Teabaggers? Thank you, thank you all.

Can you tell us where to find more information about you and your books and how readers can reach you?

My writing website is www.terencehawkins.net. and I can be reached at terry@terencehawkins.net.

What would you like our readers to know about you and your writing?

I like to think the work speaks for itself. As for me, I’ve loved historical fiction since earliest boyhood---when, in fact, I was somewhat improvidently allowed to read Julian at age 12. That book made the past alive for me. I hope this does the same for you.

The Rage of Achilles by Terence Hawkins

The Rage of Achilles by Terence Hawkins

Perhaps one of the greatest stories ever told is that of the Illiad, the Trojan war. It has been told and rediscovered by new generations through the decades. And now, author Terence Hawkins adapts this passionate story into a powerful and compelling, in-your-face retelling.

Achilles is a legendary Greek warrior of paramount grandeur. An enigma, he is renowned for his prowess in battle, noble demeanour, cruel ruthlessness, and egotistical, sometimes outrageous, behaviour. He is Ancient Greece’s most powerful weapon.

The winds of war begin to blow when Paris, the son of King Priam of Troy, steals the not-so-virtuous wife of Menelaus, brother to King Agamemnon of Greece. The Greeks send their army to Troy to retrieve her and exact their revenge. No matter how they struggle, however, they cannot breach Troy’s resistant walls.

In the turmoil that ensues between the Greeks and Trojans, Achilles’ bride is stolen. Furious, he refuses to lend his military prowess to his army against the Trojans. Without his skill, the Greeks struggle and the Trojans, led by their mightiest warrior, Hector, gain the upper hand. Even so, Achilles continues to refuse to participate. In his stead, Achilles permits his best friend and lover, to fight on his behalf. Donned in Achille’s armour, Hector kills him. When Achilles learns of the death of his beloved friend, his grief and rage knows no bounds. Achilles enters the battlefield to retrieve the body. The Trojans worry and beg Hector to withdraw, but Hector refuses.

On the battlefield, Achilles confronts Hector, who turns and runs. Exhausted and aware of the futility of his flight, Hector stops and faces his pursuer. Achilles kills him with his sword. Still enraged at the death of his lover, Achilles mutilates and vengefully drags Hector’s body around the walls of Troy.

THE RAGE OF ACHILLES is Terence Hawkins’ first novel. Within its pages, he vividly brings to life the glory and guts of a long forgotten era. He recounts this monumental tale with grim brutality and raw, violent descriptions. Hawkins delves deep into the most intrinsic of human emotions and expounds upon them with detailed intensity and an all-too-believable reality. Not for the faint of heart, Hawkins’ novel explores war with all its smells, terrors, and blood. It is the kind of heart-pumping, edge-of-your-seat book that readers long for and diligently seek.