The Fever and the Flame

[lady_schrapnell]

Such an unappealing title - this is the 'Special Omnibus Edition' of Mary Hooper's At the Sign of the Sugared Plum and Petals in the Ashes, set in London in 1665 (Great Plague) and 1666 (Great Fire) respectively.

I did a very short review of At the Sign of the Sugared Plum back in August, but didn't say much about it, other than thinking that the fluffy chick-lit-esque girls => fashion+boys element in the beginning was fun enough, but didn't go well with the horrific times portrayed. I did more note-making on my copy of Petals in the Ashes, and wanted to toss around a few thoughts about it here, in hope of interesting input from my flist. This isn't a rant, btw - a few things annoyed me, some seemed silly, but it's not -- well, I've read much worse historical fiction and bits and pieces were good.

As I said about The Sugared Plum, there are a few inaccuracies, of what appear to me to be several different sorts. In many ways, the straight incorrect details are the least interesting, but one of them (linguistic) coincides with what seems to me to be an error of mindset (or two or three), so I'll consider it first. Behind a cut so as not to mess up my flist's friends' pages, but please read if you have any interest in historical fiction. It's long, but you can skim the sections about the book and just give your denomination-of-choice's worth at the end. (I'll even throw in a virtual cup of tea to anyone who reads behind the cut!)

Bit of context: first-person narrator is Hannah who has gone to London to live with her older sister Sarah and help in the small sweetmeat shop the family inherited. Hannah and Sarah leave London at the end of the first book and Sarah stays home (ostensibly to help their mother, really because of her love-interest, 'natch), so Hannah returns with their younger sister Anne to re-open the shop once the Plague is over.

Another day, obtaining some lengths of parchment from Mr Newbery (who asked me if I wanted it to write my Will and said it was wise to do so), I wrote a list of all the sweetmeats that we made, to be advertisements for our goods. This read:

Frosted rose petals
Crystallised violets
Sugared plums
Herb comfits
Sugared angelica
Glacé cherries
Sugared orange peel
Lemon and orange suckets
Violet cakes

[...] I took great pains with the spellings of these items, even though many of our customers would not have known any better and, after getting some coloured inks from Mr Newbery, drew a likeness of the sweetmeat next to its name for those who could not read. I made two copies and nailed one to the wooden shutter to be on show when we were open, and put the other inside on the wall.

(The cut portion is just a sentence about another item they make and why it's not on the list.) I'm sure I'm not the only one to have thought the 'glacé cherries' stuck out badly, and this was warranted; according to the OED, 'glacé' referring to fruits (to mean covered with icing or sugar) wasn't used until 1882. It's an odd mistake, as Hooper had clearly done a lot of research into the types of sweets made and sold at the time, even providing recipes for many. (And I really enjoyed the parts of the book describing the making of the comfits of one sort or another.)  As she's using 'period language' for the most part, it has to be counted an error.

But, that word usage isn't the only thing that feels wrong about this passage, and the wrongness is harder to 'prove' than the first example, but I'm sure it's still wrong in some way. It's mostly a question of mindset: why would Hannah have thought of writing a list of what they sell and why would this have provided any kind of advertisement? I know literacy rates were increasing, but there's still the expense of writing materials (Mr Newbery, a neighbour with a 'parchment shop', is unlikely to have given her that for free) and the fact that they were a commodity that people of the very, very small shop-keeper class wouldn't have just had lying around (in The Sugared Plum Hannah says she amused herself one day by finding a stub of pencil and making a list of the sweetmeats they were going to make and the needed ingredients - again, not so much with the likelihood). Add to that the fact that nobody would need a list on the wall of a tiny shop when they could see the things themselves in front of them, and the impulse to make a list to stick on the wall seems extremely unlikely to have been part of Hannah's mindset.

The mistake (or not) about the advertisement I mentioned earlier seems a bit of generic unclear thinking rather than historical fiction-relevant ditto. (They have a painted sign, in case the title of the first book doesn't make that clear, and it's a bit of a mystery how the well-to-do and even aristocratic customers get into their neighbourhood to find the shop anyway.) 

This isn't the only example of the type of inaccuracy I've put down to mindset error. Some others amused me a bit, such as Hannah's trying to decide what to wear to meet up with her sweetheart, Tom: '... for I'd changed my dress several times. Though I loved my green taffeta gown best of all, I remembered that Tom had seen this when we'd walked out the previous year, so felt compelled to change into my tabby suit'. Heaven knows, you couldn't possibly let him see you in the same dress twice, Hannah! (Hell, even nowadays you have to be well on the rich side to avoid being seen in the same outfit more than once!)

Or when they're staying in a great house in a strange position (neither guest nor servant), waiting to be able to return to London: 'We had a fireplace in our room and a weekly allowance of coal, and so spent a deal of time there either trying to improve our reading (there was a large library, though with monstrous dull books)... ' Hmm - and where is she supposed to have seen so many books more to her reading taste? Her mother and father are said to be barely able to read and her life has been home and then to the shop in London, where they have no books.

Last one arises from a discussion between Sarah and Hannah about whether Sarah should stay to help their mother who's about to have a baby - their sister Anne is two years younger than Hannah, and Sarah has said she's no use because she's 'just a lazy flibbertigibbet'. 'I laughed, but it was true, for Anne's head was stuffed with games and fashions and fol-de-rols. Further, as she had not bothered overmuch with school, she could barely read or scribe her name.' Ack. (Let's leave aside the internal illogic of this, as Hannah went to London precisely because her head was stuffed with fashions and boys - fol-de-rols if ever there were any! - and why her father wouldn't just punish Anne and make her help their mother sufficiently, I can't quite see.) The 'scribe' is irritating and pretty definitely incorrect also, but again, it's the whole mindset that seems badly off. If there was a village school to which all the children - boys and girls - were sent, is the schoolmaster really have been likely to let some of the girls spend their days reading fashion magazines under the desks instead of - uh, whoops, make that - gossiping instead of learning to read and write?

All of these examples were chosen for a reason though, and I think it's possible to see one belief/assumption underlying them all, which leaves me skating on the very thin ice of authorial intention, but I'm going to try anyway. You can think at the extreme ends of the spectrum either that the past is a different country and we can never understand the mentality of people out of living memory or that human nature is the same and people are people regardless of the different times. Or of course you can inhabit the vast virtual space between the two. Writers of historical fiction need to think this one through, and probably this is going to be one of the elements that goes into making 'good' historical fiction (I'll come back to that scare quote). These two books feel very much as if Hooper were assuming at some level, that young girls have always been the same, and always will be the same, and the ones today will like reading quite detailed historical fiction fine, as long as the interests and reactions of the heroine are just like their own. Leading to 'OMG - I can't wear that skirt - I wore that last month!', and 'Eww - those books are, like, totally boring!' Okay, that's probably unnecessarily nasty, but the exaggeration is for a reason.

A couple of thoughts and questions: 1) Does it matter? And if so (my answer is a resounding 'yes', btw), why? If most of the historical details of the events in London in 1665 and 1666 are accurate - which they are - does it make any difference - does it make it in some way 'worse' historical fiction - if there are what I consider to be mindset errors (especially as I'm anything but an expert on the 17th century)? Another if so: is it an essentially aesthetic thing or does it matter because there is a type of didactic responsibility when writing historical fiction (especially for children or teens)? I'm asking this about this book, because it doesn't have the noxious kind of error seen in I, Coriander, which is always erroneous in a direction supporting the author's bias. *

I realise I'm making a big assumption of my own - that authors of historical fiction can make good attempts to portray characters who are individuals but credibly of their time and that it's possible to recognise 'good' attempts; Rosemary Sutcliff and Karen Cushman are two I think do this really well.  And that such authors ought to do so, as importantly. Are these assumptions ones that others share?

2) If the (generally acknowledged) appeal of these books relates at least in part to the 'lots of period detail (... informative and engaging' - back cover quote from the Observer), did she really need to add the chick-litty (supposed) appeal too? It's hard not to judge things like appeal solely from one's own reading and reading to one's children, but I know we (the girls and I) are not unique in loving Cynthia Harnett's The Wool-Pack or Rosemary Sutcliff or Karen Cushman (not writing when I was a child, obviously, but discovered and read to the girls). I know the appeal of these kinds of books for me was learning - in fictional form, almost always - about life in other times. And in these books, to the best of my understanding, the authors are equally careful with 'mindset' details as with the other types of historical detail. Again, I'm wondering (for now - I may well come back to these questions - definitely in a much shorter post!) whether this is shared by my fellow historical fiction fans.

Comments?

 
* fjm - I couldn't find your entry about I, Coriander, and would like to give a link to it if you don't mind.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of Hannah's slipping into a 'tabby suit' - very Andrew Lloyd Webber!

A lot depends on intention, as you say. While one can't hold books responsible for what reviewers may gushingly claim about their diligent historical research, I do think that if a book includes an Appendix and/or footnotes making claims for its painstaking recreation of another world (as so many historical novels in effect do), then that has to be followed through beyond the material aspects of life into the mentalite. You don't need to be a paid-up annaliste to believe that one flows in pretty fundamental ways from the other.

'Relevance' is the motivation for ignoring this, of course; but then, if relevance is all, what (other than the possibilities for metaphor and allegory, which 'relate' to the present in quite a different way) is the appeal of historical fiction, which is almost by definition the fiction of lives quite different from our own?

More questions than comments - sorry!

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Questions are good!

Had a bit of trouble with 'life into the mentalite', as my brain was trying to read it as sort of mentality-lite, which would have been a good phrase, though not what you were saying.

As to 'relevance' - yeeess, it can be a motivation for ignoring it, though that tends to imply that the author has thought it through and decided not to attempt to get the mentality as right as might be possible for the period in question. And I think we've talked about that wrt Kevin Crossley-Holland and the problem of 12th century attitudes towards people of different religious beliefs: it's all too relevant to do anything other than portray main characters with extreme open-mindedness.

Ah, but - counter-example - what about Here Lies Arthur? If the relevance to Bush-Blair-Iraq War had been made any clearer, it would have had to grab the reader by the hair and slam his/her head into the book! And yet it was done without any of the type of thing I've described here. (Will come back to this. Collapsing atm...)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Ah, but - counter-example - what about Here Lies Arthur? If the relevance to Bush-Blair-Iraq War had been made any clearer, it would have had to grab the reader by the hair and slam his/her head into the book! And yet it was done without any of the type of thing I've described here.

True. What I was thinking about, in my tangle of parentheses, was that 'relevance' might be attempted in two different ways: either a) by trying to show historical experience as directly similar to modern experience, which is what Hooper seems to have done by giving her heroine a chick-lit sensibility; or b) by making it seem similar indirectly, by way of analogy or metaphor, which is what Philip Reeve does (though he's doing a lot more besides) in Here Lies Arthur. Neither approach excludes the other, and either can be executed skilfully or the reverse, but there is a real distinction there, I think - if not a clear-cut one.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

...'relevance' might be attempted in two different ways: either a) by trying to show historical experience as directly similar to modern experience, which is what Hooper seems to have done by giving her heroine a chick-lit sensibility; or b) by making it seem similar indirectly, by way of analogy or metaphor, which is what Philip Reeve does (though he's doing a lot more besides) in Here Lies Arthur.

Yes, using Here Lies Arthur is a bit complicated by the abundance of things PR is doing, isn't it? I take your point about relevance, but I think I'm going to try to mix up your two and shelve one of the new mix-and-match methods for a later post. Part of the problem is that Reeve (in Here Lies Arthur only) and Crossley-Holland (in the Arthur trilogy and Gatty) are dealing - directly or indirectly - with both situations and mentalities that are inherently relevant to modern ones: religious intolerance leading to violence, for example.

Of course that doesn't mean that I think it doesn't matter when the 'only' relevance of the book for modern readers is in the experience and feelings of the protagonist (leaving aside the possibility of trying to relate the Great Plague of 1665 to AIDS or a flu pandemic - which would be pretty silly in 'straight' historical fiction!). It's just the way it's done in this book. I think a good example of this being well done is Catherine, Called Birdy, in which the reader is easily able to feel with Birdy and yet is brought to understand that her feelings and expectations are necessarily different (wrt marriage for example). Or even in Here Lies Arthur - Gwyna is easy to identify with, though her gender changes would be incomprehensible in modern society, so her 'relevance' is done with a generally sound historical sensibility. (Maybe except for the very minor quibble of her perhaps unlikely literacy.) (And yes, it is different because there are so few records from 6th century Britain - but that's definitely another entry!)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Or even in Here Lies Arthur - Gwyna is easy to identify with, though her gender changes would be incomprehensible in modern society, so her 'relevance' is done with a generally sound historical sensibility.

Whilst agreeing in general, I'm not absolutely sure about this specific point - though that's mostly because I'm uncertain what you mean. Why is a cross-dressing/gender-changing girl less comprehensible in our society than in Gwyna's? Are you referring to the fact that most girls in our society already cross dress (i.e. they wear clothes that were traditionally reserved for males); or that fewer 'male' activities are now closed to them, reducing the motivation for needing to pass as male? Both those would be true, I guess, but both societies seem equally hung up on questions of gender, even so - even if that manifests in different ways. The stubborn binariness of gender remains for us, just as it did in the 5th (or was it 6th?) century.

Your comments also raise the question of generic convention. For whatever reason (and I'm sure we can both supply some likely ones) females dressing as males are very common in historical fiction. A reader used to these conventions will have them in mind as well as questions of historical accuracy (whether of the mentalite or external facts). The same is true, of course, of the mystery-solving children you mentioned to obsessedwelves. Our not believing in that premise's literal plausibility needn't affect the story's effectiveness as historical fiction, any more than one needs to believe in the unnaturally high rate of homicide in St Mary Meade to enjoy Miss Marple. Agatha Christie knew very well that murders weren't that common in idyllic English villages, and she knew that her readers knew, and her readers knew that she knew that they knew [etc ad nauseam]. In short, that aspect of realism is 'bracketed' for the sake of the genre.

So, we've got at least three things in play here: the historical reality (whatever that was, and however accessible it is or isn't), the contemporary world of the writer and reader (assuming for the sake of simplicity that they are both contemporary!), and the set of generic conventions within which the writer is writing and the reader reading. All these are moving targets, except perhaps the first - but then our only access to historical reality is by way of a framework of interpretation that's in constant flux anyway.

Goodness me! Tricky, isn't it?

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Goodness me! Tricky, isn't it?

Definitely! (I'm finding it tricky even to know what I meant by something I wrote just a few hours ago...)

Okay - I think what I was getting at was the idea you put forward a comment ago, that Hooper has tried to show 'historical experience as directly similar to modern experience' by giving her heroine 'a chick-lit sensibility'. (Of course, by focusing on the sections I quoted for this entry I did distort things a bit by omitting Hannah's somewhat inconsistent contemporary sensibility wrt her understanding of causes and prevention of the plague. So it's all a bit more complicated again!)

Anyway, I was just saying that it wouldn't be possible for a modern kid to start pretending to be the other gender and get away with it (or the rare case might, but it'd be a topic of a Channel 4 documentary). I mentioned it to try to think about some heroines who seem to have a consistently appropriate sensibility for their period but yet engender (sorry!) reader identification and sympathy. And Gwyna's apparent ability to 'pass' - first as a boy and then, with the same group of people, as that boy's half-sister (I think?) - wouldn't be even remotely credible in British society nowadays. But because the historically different setting was firmly established and then her feelings and thoughts in response to it developed afterwards, it is both credible and easy to relate to.

Generic conventions - ah, just what we needed - another kettle of stew! But even sticking with girls dressing as boys in historical fiction for children (or YA) - of course it may or may not be literally plausible, but it'll be more successfully read as a convention (or accepted by the child who doesn't yet know the convention?) the more the author attempts to make it fit both the character's historical mentality and the setting. Think of the book you've just finished - the clues were there for both the reader and hero, and the girl got away with it at some cost and by the skin of her teeth, right? She has good reason for what she does, and it's made to make sense within the historical setting, even if it's not literally feasible. (Good grief - America's Top Model is on and however tricky it is to think about generic conventions of children's historical fiction in a nice quiet environment - it's horrendously difficult to sift that out and do it.)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I actually have less problem with the cross-dressing girl in the book I've just read, Cue for Treason, because as well as all the points you mention it's established that she's an excellent actor. I don't recall that Gwyna has any such talent or training, despite her keen observation of people. In fact, as a timid girl - Gwyna the mouse, she calls herself at the start - she might seem an unlikely person to be able to pass as a boy in the macho world of the Arthurian warband. Why do you think it would be easier for her to pass then than it would be for her modern equivalent now?

Really, though, and despite the paragraph above, I don't have a 'problem' with it at all: but I do see its plausibility being at least lubricated (is that a good word? Not so sure...) by my awareness of the generic convention.

All this is a bit of a side-issue, admittedly!

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm just thinking of school and sports/changing rooms and doctors and records and passports/other ID and school... And digging a fraction deeper, there's the fact that communities aren't so isolated and unknown these days - an awful lot about Gwyna could be explained as her being from Not-Here. Plus she had Merlin (can't begin to attempt spelling of his name in the book) to smooth away all difficulties. Though I did amuse myself rather by imagine Peter Mandelson telling Tony to disguise one of his boys as a girl.

[breathingbooks.livejournal.com]

1) I think it matters and in general would consider mind-set errors worse than small factual mistakes for ya or adult lit and small factual errors worse than mind-set errors for children's lit. In my experience, children remember the facts. They may try to project themselves into the world they've just read about, but the idea and understanding of so radical an altering of priorities isn't going to fully click until later (at least, it didn't for me and most kids I've known).

2) I haven't read the book, but it sounds like that instead of trying to make the readers connect with the characters' character, the author went for the easier route of trying to have them connect with the characters' interests/priorities via the market trend of chick lit.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Interesting points. I'm going to have to think about 1) a bit more - though I'm doing a perhaps premature wonder whether getting the mind-set wrong for children mightn't matter more because of that lack of understanding. But then again, there are lots of mysteries for younger children which happily float along with enormous glossings-over which could be considered mind-set errors (Hey - you're 10! You're going to be in the unique position of being able to solve this mystery when adults couldn't every month of so! For at least 20 books!) and that certainly doesn't worry me. (Though my next-up historical fiction book is driving me mad for that very reason.)

WRT 2) - I immediately start worrying that I've been less than fair (not that it'll make any difference to her sales!), but - well, it might be interesting to try one of Hooper's non-historical YA books and see if the characters are in any way similar.

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

WTF standardised spelling? In 1665? It's never too early to teach children that spelling isn't set in stone, imo. *cackles subversively*

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Well, quite! (To your WTF...)

Show the children Love and Freindship, if these historicals won't teach them the truth of the matter.