The divide between so-called literary and genre fiction used to be simple: the former was serious, highbrow stuff; the latter, commercially successful, but slightly embarrassing, evoking images of sword-and-sorcery or sci-fi nerds. Historical fiction was bodice-ripping romance or military romps. Fun and all, but hardly ‘serious literature’. There is an increasing recognition, though, that – for all the continued stigmatization of certain subject matters – the genre labels on bookshops shelves have never seemed more arbitrary. Charlotte Keith spoke to student writer Isabella Shaw about her novel-in-progress, The Telling-Bones, set in a fantastical medieval world, and the allure of the past.

Why write about the past rather than the present?

I personally don’t feel comfortable writing the present; it just doesn’t seem authentic. In my writing, at least, I find that there is more imaginative reality in past worlds than in trying to judge a reality that I can’t see clearly in the present moment. The Middle Ages is such a different world that we can’t possibly hope to understand it entirely, but the snippets we can recover are fascinating. Areas of the past capture the imagination – and I think the popularity of period dramas demonstrates this: we like looking at things that evoke romantic ideas of past.

How do you feel about the distinction between ‘genre’ and ‘literary’ fiction that tends to be made in the world of publishing?

It’s definitely something that worries me! It’s a very limiting way of looking at things. Although this novel is set in a medieval past, I don’t really see it as ‘historical fiction’; I think to apply that label would risk disappointing reader expectations. Perhaps it’s fantasy – but although generic labels are clearly necessary, they’re also very reductive. The guidelines for my writing are really just what I would like to read.

How did this novel come about?

The novel began as a dream that I was then trying to put into words. I closed my eyes and put pen to paper – I didn’t try to write grammatically – and then later I would go back and make sense of the different strands of narrative.

Which writers have influenced you the most?

I’m interested in alternate histories that do exciting things with perceptions of reality –like Susanna Clarke‘s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, or The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken, and the work of A.S. Byatt. The Telling-Bones includes fragments of ‘real’ historical songs and poems, some of them anonymous medieval lyrics, some from the [medieval Latin] Cambridge songs.

You use a few actual dates in The Telling-Bones. To what extent do you try to situate your work in a precise historical period?

To be honest, I almost wish I could have come up with an alternate system of numbering –instead of using real dates – to show that I know this is not exactly what the eleventh century was like! The general feel is more important though: so much of the action in what I write is based on word and song, and in a not-quite-yet-literate society – like the one I write about in The Telling-Bones – words and stories carry immense power.

---

 

It was a land between mists, a grey-and-occasionally sungold land, a land of ice and hushed silences, of secrets that the hills confided to each other (in the murmuring stillness between one ember’s glow and the next morning sky).  It was a mist-drenched land, but a good one: its soil was dark; its streams and springs limpid; its dreams heavy-laden with soft rain-lashings and sweet wind-sighs.

All along into the silence came a shimmer—a slight change, a hint of something gold-bright and fine, like the supple turning of the day.  A tale was fallen upon it.

And yet still, the hushed land bore no remorse—still, it only waited, with bated breath and close-held sighs—

Little by little, it waited.

And something emerged.

—Something, straightening itself between one fog and the next, standing firm against the mist-covered hills and sunken woods, breathed a new sigh, and all the leaves of all the trees turned and trembled, green and golden, green and golden in the long sun-burnished afternoon.  Little by little, the something shook itself, threw back its head, and let the crowning dews drip into the folds of its cloak.

Little by little, the waiting change came.  And so it did, out of those long-eyed shadows—a change that would wreak upon the land this word: a word that knew it meant it never could be the same again.

---

 

Isabella Shaw is a second year English student at Clare. Her poem ‘Variations upon the Westron Wynd’ won this year’s St Edmund Hall Benjamin Zephaniah Poetry Prize. She studied Early Music at Trinity College of Music (London), and has written two other novels, Proserpina and The Sea-Wraith.