On opera

/ Kelly Gardiner / Leave a comment

This week I’ve been on planet opera.
It’s a pretty wild place, let me tell you.

The idea was simple – gather together in one room a whole bunch of aspiring librettists, and throw at them the combined wisdom, imagination, experience, suffering, creativity, skill and humour of some of the finest minds (and voices) in the business. For a week.

Well.

I applied because my brain exploded at the idea of creating an opera as well as a novel based on the life of Mademoiselle de Maupin. And because with all my current research into Baroque and Sappho leading to Tosca and gender performance archetypes and how they play out in opera, literature and life, something big is slowly taking shape in my mind, fragments are connecting or sparking or swirling. Hopefully it’s the rest of my PhD. Dunno yet.

And because, clearly, I haven’t got enough going on.
Twit.

Anyway.
Just a few of the things I learned, some of which apply to any written work, some of which we all know but it doesn’t hurt to have them beaten into our skulls one more time:

  • There doesn’t need to be a narrative (arguably, there should not be a formal narrative)
  • Sounds of words may matter as much as meaning
  • Leave room for the audience – and the music – to do the work
  • Distill. Write essence only. Then distill again.

So I won’t tell you what happened. Just what it means for me today, knowing this will change over time.

Been thinking lately about fragments, about glimpses of lives and fragments of memory, and how to capture that in prose – specifically, in Tragédie – how to convey confusion, and memories being sometimes out of reach, sometimes conflicting. That’s not a lack of narrative, just a different way of writing it and reading it, but rethinking the meaning of narrative helped that project enormously. Or will, when I have time to reflect.

I also realised, though, that the idea of squeezing La Maupin’s life as a biographical narrative, into an opera was absurd. She may have died at 33 but she had more adventures than The Three Musketeers put together, and my version of her is also a recitative on guilt, sin, redemption and celebrity. So I’m left wondering what to do with that idea. And that’s good.

The concept I was left with was a meditation on opera, on gender, on performance of opera and gender in life and on stage, and on celebrity. A riff on Baroque, on costume and how it defines us. On sex and sin. With a little Lully and Purcell thrown in. And swordfighting. Or the sounds of swordfighting.

Sure. Still a bit of distilling to do.

Some soundbites from various presenters over the week:

  • People aren’t interested in stories. They want experiences.
  • Shakespeare’s ghosts are silent for a reason.
  • Opera is slow – it’s a meditation.
  • It’s also a blunt instrument.
  • It’s never going to be what you [the writer] imagined.
  • Write simple stories.
  • Contemporary opera done well can be very powerful in conveying the big ideas.
  • Music takes the ideas to the heart and bypasses the head.
  • Let the audience members make up their own minds.
  • If the composer isn’t weeping while she writes, nobody else will feel it either.
  • Intuition is quicker than the brain at figuring things out.
  • Each scene has its own self-contained logic and idea that contribute to the overall.
  • A breath can convey as much as a word.

Also, as with most forms of writing, it’s almost impossible to get work produced. But that’s never stopped me before.

I could go on, but I won’t.

Respect to Chambermade Opera and the VWC, the fine people at CAL who funded the workshop, the twelve bewildered composers who came to listen to our pitches, and our cast of gurus: Deborah Cheetham, Moya Henderson, Judith Rodriguez, Alison Croggan, Ida Dueland Hansen, Stephen Armstong, Margaret Cameron, David Young, Caroline Lee, and Deborah Kayser who sang our homework. (See! Read that list and weep with envy.)

Will now attempt to float back to earth.

[curtain]

Historical fantasy?

/ Kelly Gardiner / Leave a comment

I’ve wasted years of my life.

Happily I’m in good company.

A US writer – let’s call her M* – whose book for younger readers is just out, has advised a group of young aspiring writers not to bother with such feeble-minded tasks as research when writing historical fiction:

M said she didn’t know enough and had to write about what she didn’t know. ”To write a book about the past [as she has done], there is a saying that you read only two books and then close your eyes,” she said. That was all the research required.

(Quoted in The Age.)
Just like that. Magic.
In fact, that’s what happens in M’s book. Just like I, Coriander, halfway through, everything turns into magic or fairies or elves. Fantasy, as we all know, doesn’t require any research or detailed planning either (just ask anyone who writes fantasy – and then take a few steps back to avoid the explosion).
It’s hard to decide which aspect of M’s advice is most worrying: that an author of historical fiction thinks the historical bit of it doesn’t matter; or that perhaps it just doesn’t matter when you’re an adult author writing their first kids’ book; or that an author has no duty of care to readers of any age or to the past; or that you would leave your editors to do your fact-checking … or that you would actually say that – out loud – to young people who are looking for guidance.
Now, I’m not sure whether it’s true. I suspect that M did much more than read two books, and I’m really hoping she’s been misunderstood.
But I’ve been brooding about this all morning, in part because I read M’s book in manuscript form several months ago and found in it several glaring mistakes which I assumed would have been removed in later versions. Not by the author, obviously, who apparently can’t be arsed looking anything up, but by some long-suffering editor.
This is what almost any other author of historical fiction would have told that crowd: it takes months, sometimes years, of research to accurately portray the past – even just to make as few mistakes as possible. Then you only put about five percent of it into the text. Many of us will tell you that the research is the fun part. It continues up until the point the ink rolls on the presses, and even after that there are breathless moments when you rush to the nearest computer or book to check something you suddenly imagine you got wrong.
That’s just as it should be. Because it matters. History matters. Truth matters, just as much as closing your eyes and imagining, and especially for young readers.
Because your publishers require you to know what you’re writing about.
Because your readers trust you, and they matter – most of all.
[*Later: names deleted to provide benefit of the doubt, because surely it isn’t what she really thinks. Surely.]

Voices

/ Kelly Gardiner / 1 Comment

I’ve been hearing a lot of voices lately, but that was the plan. Part of my PhD project is about the quest (or lack thereof) for authenticity in voices in historical fiction, and now I can’t read anything without seeing through that lens. It’s a bit like when you’re going to get a new car or a new dog, and suddenly the world is filled with that model or that breed. Except this will last for years. And is, thankfully, rather more interesting than ten year-old station wagons.

So here are some initial thoughts on a few voices I’ve heard recently.

Bethia Mayfield is the narrator of Geraldine Brooks’ Caleb’s Crossing. Brooks can enable her readers to hear a voice from the past with sublime felicity: her March is a tricky and unsympathetic narrator whose weakness and selfishness are difficult to bear but a joy to read. Bethia, on the other hand, is the opposite. the character is engaging, but her voice – I am very sorry to say – is uneven. I heard Brooks speak about the book recently, and she mentioned that she makes great use of the Oxford Historical Thesaurus. It shows*. The reader is happily meandering around the island with Bethia when we all trip over a word, and then another, which seem to be perfectly accurate in a historical sense but somehow out of time – out of tune – with all of Bethia’s/Brooks’ other words.

It’s a very very tricky business, maintaining a voice that is palatable to the modern ear but somehow historically accurate – what Sarah Waters describes as “right enough – for us”. Brooks almost always gets it right. Just not this time. Not quite.

In Room, Emma Donoghue’s narrator is five year-old Jack, who lives in a small room with his Ma and that’s the only world he knows. Hard to imagine a more difficult task for a writer – a credible five year-old voice, but also one whose world is so confined he simply doesn’t realise, at the start of the book, that the things he sees on the television are real – and yet convey the entire action of a book, including some genuinely thrilling action – in that voice and world view.

But Donoghue manages it, beautifully. There may be the odd word that seems out of place, one or two concepts that Jack couldn’t possibly know but it doesn’t matter; it doesn’t throw you out of the story. Anyway, as Jack says, “I know all the words”.

Finally, a TV series: Downton Abbey.

I love it. I do. But please: there is no way on earth that upstairs and downstairs ever collided and colluded so often and so intimately. After the Great War – perhaps. As people’s lives were shattered by grief and missing, and as the men and women at the many Fronts discovered they could be friends or enemies across class and that death really didn’t distinguish; then the social – if not economic – barriers in British society began to crumble. Or in a crisis, such as a corpse in your bedroom, yes, one might feel a trusted maid is the only place to turn.

Sybil: can’t touch this

But it really does reek of narrative reshaping history for upstairs characters to confide in the servants, for maids to offer unsolicited personal advice, for there to be such informality and idle chatter in the house of an earl. An earl! Not a minor baronetcy, but one of the great titles in the kingdom. Perhaps I wouldn’t mind the inaccuracy it it managed to be consistent, but it isn’t. Some of the voices and relationships are consistent and some aren’t. I don’t mind the lovely daredevil Sybil being too egalitarian, but other characters on both sides waver in and out.

Yes, I am one of those people who shouts at the television or scoffs in the cinema at blatant rewriting of history. Don’t get me started on Shekhar Kapur’s versions of Elizabeth I, for example.

As if!

And if I huff “As if!” several times in one viewing, we are in trouble.

I’m afraid there have been many “As ifs” during the otherwise winning Downton Abbey, though it won’t stop me watching it.

* [Later: that sounds more brutal than I meant it to. It’s a terrific story.]

Freedom of the press

/ Kelly Gardiner / Leave a comment

Sometimes things happen in the real world that are so weird, you really wouldn’t write about it. Because who would believe you?

It’s been a bit like that lately. Here are just a few wild media events:

  • Wikileaks.
  • News of the World.
  • Social media supporting protests in countries everywhere – especially the Middle East.

All quite bizarre at times and terribly, terribly modern.

Or not. These are extensions of activities that have been central to the life of a great deal of the world for centuries – millennia.

Granted, there weren’t too many bloggers in Damascus in the seventeenth century, but there have always been rabble-rousers, trouble-makers, idealists and writers whose words have spread far and wide, whose ideas and discussions have ignited unrest or provocative debates or even revolutions.

Socrates. Luther. Spinoza. Galileo. Jefferson. Those kinds of ratbags.

You know where I’m going with this. People have always dreamed and written and published their thoughts and beliefs and aspirations, whether on clay tablets or parchment or – in recent centuries – in mass media such as the pamphlets that swirled around London in the 1640s or Paris before the Terror.

For everyone one of those ratbags, there’s someone trying to shut them up – or down: authorities burning books or burning authors, excommunicating or exiling people, throwing authors and teachers into prison or camps or dungeons, banning books and media outlets.

In many of the countries in the world today, the situation is not so extreme. But let me just unpack that: I was going to write “most countries” but then realised, I don’t even know if that’s true, numerically. There are writers, journalists, artists, bloggers, whistle-blowers and teachers in prison or exiled or in danger in dozens of countries around the world right now.

Even in the liberal democracies, the immediate political response to a Wikileaks or a controversial artist is banning. Often it’s just a play to the tabloids which, as we know, are peerless upholders of intellectual integrity. Even in the liberal democracy in which I live, Australia, there’s no constitutional right to free speech.

In the media, slippery slopes head off in all directions. Anyone, like me, who has spent any time in commercial media – print or online – can tell you that every day, every week, is a battle between editorial and sales/marketing teams about what messages are acceptable, from the annoying pop-up ad campaigns on your website to the pressure not to report on certain issues, or not to publish letters critical of advertisers.

In too many countries, that pressure is about not being critical of authorities or political movements or organised crime or businesses or religious leaders – and in far too many places, you ignore that pressure at your peril. Yet people still do. And many still die.

Yes, this is what my novel Act of Faith is all about. It’s set in the 1640s, when the Parliament in England and the Catholic Church in Rome were as keen on burning or jailing dissidents as each other. When I wrote it, I knew there were parallels happening around the world – what’s fascinating is how many of the debates are now at the forefront of public discourse. Or they should be.

  • What does freedom of the press really mean?
  • How do we ensure freedom of expression, and of belief, in a multicultural/transnational publishing world?
  • What freedoms should be embedded in the fabric of a free and independent nation?
  • (Is ‘nation’ itself an outdated concept when it comes to information?)

And why, oh why, do we seem to be moving backwards? In 1948, in the aftermath of the Second World War and the frenzy that destroyed so many great thinkers, writers, artists, activists and musicians along with millions of other souls, the United Nations declared:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

– Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

It really is that simple.

Small but perfectly formed

/ Kelly Gardiner / 1 Comment

Someone asked me, the other day, to recommend some good historical fiction for young readers.

Of course, there are many recent books that are sensational (by Jackie French, for example, or Catherine Jinks or Linda Newbery – or many others).

But my mind goes back to the books I adored when I was nine or ten, many of which hold up rather well even all these MANY decades later – and in which the historical research and detail are impeccable:

  • Smith and Devil-in-the-Fog by Leon Garfield
  • Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden
  • Rosemary Sutcliff’s Romans in Britain books (or anything by her, really)
  • Most of Geoffrey Trease.

(Yes, I may have mentioned these before, but that’s because they’re good.)

And as for the paranormal/time travel/weird stuff, it seems to me that it’s still pretty hard to go past Penelope Lively, Ruth Park, L.M. Boston or Diana Wynne Jones. Or, for that matter, Beowulf.

I’m not suggesting the books of yesteryear will never be bettered, but if you write for younger readers, these are essential reading.

If you read books, or buy books for kids to read, don’t forget the gems lurking in the backlists.

Even if they are ancient history. And only 150 pages long.