This time, in the Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up, I’m in Ancient Rome, rereading Naomi Mitchison’s excellent novel about very early Christians in the reign of the Emperor Nero, The Blood of the Martyrs, from 1939. You can probably guess the ending already from the clues in the title, but, trust me: it may be a weepy, but it is an outstanding philosophical and theological thriller. It’s set around the beginnings of the Pisonian conspiracy of AD65, which tried but failed to assassinate Nero. The novel’s main protagonists have no idea that a plot is being hatched, because they’re mostly slaves or Romans struggling to earn enough to eat, and the real-life plot only emerges when the main plot of the novel is thundering to its climax.
It’s typical of Naomi Mitchison’s fiction to concentrate on the lives and ambitions of the working-classes and those without power. She was a Scottish socialist novelist who first began to be published in the 1920s and 1930s, and who died in 1999. She published over 90 books, and is most famous for her epic novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), which was about prehistoric fertility rites in Anatolia, heavily influenced by J G Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and Jane Harrison’s pioneering studies of classical Greek myth and religion. Mitchison took research seriously. She wrote many novels set in prehistory and early classical and Roman history, and was a pioneer in using a pure and undateable vocabulary spoken in a modern style so her characters sound unalienatingly familiar. No hists and thous for her: her Roman matron chatters like an English society lady of the 1930s, and figures from the New Testament sound like normal people.
This plot is about slaves and the very poor in Rome who are or who have become Christian, and are struggling to maintain their tiny Churches in an increasing atmosphere of suspicion. The economy of the Roman Empire is based on slave labour, and must continually acquire more slaves to replace those who die from starvation and ill-treatment. Slaves are not considered to be human, though some of their more benign masters, such as Flavius Crispus in the novel, do see the benefit of treating their property with care to have a better return for their investment in long-term service. Sometimes the worn-out slaves who can no longer carry a litter, say, or who have lost a hand in an accident, are not thrown out or sold, but given light work or retired to the family farm as a useful labourer. But most slaves get sold again once they’ve outlived their use to one master.
Another category of non-Roman citizen were the captured children of enemy nobles, who were brought up as fosterlings in nice Roman homes, until the day came when they needed to be put out of the way, perhaps into the army, or married off to someone who would be grateful. The novel begins in a sultry post-coital scene between Beric, a captive Gaulish prince who has grown up in the house of Flavius Crispus, who has just been doing what he’s been told to by his foster sister Flavia, a beautiful, spoiled and very nasty young woman, who hasn’t yet told the besotted Beric about her betrothal, to be announced that evening. Thus the novel begins with an uneven demonstration of power, between the Roman citizen and the non-citizen, between the emotionally cold and the hopelessly dreamy, and between a young woman with a very assured manner and young man who doesn’t know how shaky the certainties of his life are becoming. We can sense his vulnerability right from the first page, and can tell that things are not going to go well.
As Flavius’s de facto son, Beric runs the house for him, and manages the slaves. But once she’s established his life for us, Mitchison changes tack and begins to tell another story, of Manasses and Josias who were captured in a raid, and grew up as slaves in Rome. Their father had known Jesus’s younger brother James, so they were brought up as Christians, and by luck have managed to find other Christians while in captivity. In a third chapter we hear about a beautiful Persian girl born into slavery and taken from her mother (that’s the second girl the poor woman has lost) when she’s old enough to sell. She becomes Flavia’s newest and most tortured maid. And so on. Each chapter in the first half of the novel puts you inside the experience of sixteen slaves or freedmen and women, and gives you their stories in their own words or from their perspective. This technique of multiple voices isn’t nearly as confusing as you think it might be because Mitchison’s control of her material is absolute, and very subtle.
Reading these chapters, and learning how each story fits into the others, and how their tiny Church grew, is a bit like walking around the outside of a building with many windows. Each time you look through a window, or read a chapter, you see characters you’ve already met, or will meet, doing something slightly different or new or in the past or future, so that the composite picture becomes more detailed, and more nuanced. Some of the characters are already Christian when they arrive in Rome; others become convinced that Jesus’s words are for them, to give them something to live for. It’s quite acceptable at this point in the story to look out a New Testament, to read Paul’s letters to the Romans, to the Corinthians, to the Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, Thessalonians, Timothy, Titus and Philemon. The tiny group of worshippers that Manasses serves as its deacon is the kind of Church that St Paul was supporting by letters on his travels. He’s in the novel too, in Part Three, when they’re all waiting for the lions, but we’ll get to that.
Every narrative voice in the novel belongs to a character. There is no third-person omniscient narrator, no authorial voice who knows more than the characters or the readers. It’s an egalitarian way to tell a story, which fits beautifully with the Christian ethos that the story illustrates, that everyone is equal and that every person is as important as each other. It’s also a technical tour de force, brilliantly executed, because it’s hard to spot the seamless change in perspectives from one character to another, when – zip – you’re out of Eunice’s bakery and back into Crispus’s house, or into the cellar where the Church meets to worship and receive strength from their beliefs. For a 1930s novel it is also egalitarian in gender and sexuality. Some characters love each other and happen to be men, and also love women: later fans of Mary Renault would have appreciated the delicacy of Mitchison’s touch, who wrote this novel when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. Women too have equal status in the Church. A dancing girl called Lalage is a deacon alongside Manasses, because those who are strongest in the spirit become leaders, and she is strong.
When Beric is suffering most from the crumbling of his world’s foundations, he becomes aware that some of the slaves that he commands in Crispus’s household have some kind of belief that gives them strength. He joins their Church just as Nero arranges for some areas of Rome to be set on fire to clear the way for his latest architectural experiments. The blame for the fire falls on the Christians, who are enthusiastically rounded up by Praetorian chief Tigellinus, who is also seducing Flavia, now that she is a safely married and under-occupied woman. One by one the members of this small Church are arrested, beaten up, released, and then arrested again, because Nero and Tigellinus want to please the Roman crowds with a really spectacular Games, featuring burning women, chariot races, Christians and wild beasts and animal hunts. Other Churches exist in Rome as well as Manasses’ Church, but they are widely scattered, and rightly cautious about making contact in case they are betrayed by a smiling stranger. The novel ushers or pulls all the characters towards the Coliseum, some of them towards the spectator seats, and some of them towards the cells as the entertainment.
I mentioned that The Blood of the Martyrs is a philosophical and theological thriller. Many of the conversations are between characters trying to explain to each other what Christianity is, and what you do when you are one. In the third part of the novel Paul is in prison with the other characters, and is arguing with them about what needs to be done, and how baptism should be performed. He dictates his letters to other churches to Luke, the doctor who does his best for the prisoners after their torture, but really there is very little he can do for a raped woman who is about to be torn apart by tigers. Stoics and Epicurian characters are also present in the prison, political prisoners lofty in the knowledge that their intellectually superior beliefs do not let them in for such degrading and brutal treatment. But they are shaken by their inability to watch another person suffer and remain unmoved. By witnessing the deaths in the arena, people begin to be converted, and the seed of belief is transmitted by example and by loving kindness. It is a very moving image, drenched with sadness.
Underneath these small stories is our historical awareness of the Christian church at its beginnings, and of the other faiths prospering in Rome at the same time. The Roman Jews do not receive the persecution meted out to the Christians, but when Mitchison was writing this novel, the Jews were being persecuted mercilessly in Nazi Germany, and worse was to come. It’s pretty clear that Mitchison intended this novel to be read as a parable for the contemporary persecution of the Jews as well.
When I began to reread The Blood of the Martyrs I knew that I had not carried it with me through countless house moves for nothing: it is a marvellous, gripping read. But I also knew why I had not wanted to reread it for over twenty years; it is desperately sad, and full of tragic moments you can see coming, agonisingly, several pages off. Find your handkerchief.
Rebellion, or Uprising? In this Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up I’m in the middle of the British eighteenth century, looking at the ‘1745’, otherwise known as the Jacobite Rebellion, or Uprising, depending on which side you were on. This was the second attempt by the exiled Roman Catholic monarchy of Britain to reclaim what they thought was their rightful kingdom, so let’s have a wee bit of history to fix us in time and space, before I get on to John Buchan’s fascination with the subject.
So that was the Jacobite Rebellion, or Uprising. Like Flora, I am a Macdonald, descended from Clan Macdonald of the Isle of Skye. However, this took place over several centuries and follows the genealogy of only one of my many ancestors, so it’s a very selective way of claiming a heritage. I’ve never been convinced by the heady romanticism of the cult of Jacobitism. The idea of the glamorous prince from over the water, the tragedy of Culloden and the lost cause, and the resulting oppression of the Highlands, have produced a deliberate nurturing of Scottish nationalist sentimentality about English oppression and the nobility of lost Scottish causes. This can be uplifting, in very small doses, but is disturbingly divorced from historical fact. Vast numbers of novels have been written about the Jacobite theme. Until the mid-twentieth century it was one of the most important subjects in Scottish fiction, first made popular by Sir Walter Scott with his novel Waverley of 1814, and continued by, among thousands of others, John Buchan, about whom I’ve posted several times. Looking at Buchan’s Jacobite novels and how he treated the theme is a useful antidote to some of the glutinous and unhistorical nonsense that has been published about this military, political and dynastic disaster.
Buchan’s third novel was A Lost Lady of Old Years, also of 1899, so we can see what his preoccupation was at this time in his writing life. It takes a very different approach to the ‘45 than is or was usual. The ‘Lost Lady’ of the title is Mrs Murray of Broughton, the wife of Mr Secretary Murray who was hanged for his part in the rebellion, though she escaped. The ‘Old Years’ means of times past: she herself was young and beautiful. History apparently records that she was a bad lot, but Buchan romanticises her spectacularly. His Mrs Murray is pure, perfect and brave in her unswerving support for the Prince, despite the treachery of her husband whom she is beginning to suspect. The main protagonist of the novel, a teenage delinquent called Francis Birkenshaw, is saved from a life of crime because Mrs Murray catches him breaking into her house, mistakes him for the Jacobite messenger for whom she is waiting, and gives him a highly secret political message to deliver to one of the great Jacobite leaders in the Highlands, Lord Lovat.
Buchan’s best Jacobite novel is Midwinter, of 1923, because it is a very plausible story – Dr Johnson (yes, THE Dr Johnson) tries to stop an anti-Jacobite plot at the moment of the Jacobite army’s decision to march away from Derby, and helps to save the marriage of a young girl married to a traitor. It is brilliantly plotted with really memorable characters. We all have a vague idea of Dr Johnson, the grumpy and superior lexicographer sitting in state at a tea-drinking at Mrs Thrale’s house, a figure of importance. This Dr Johnson is a much younger man, and a humble but doughty tutor to the gentility. Whether he 
Negroland is a memoir of growing up in the 1950s and 1960s as an upper-class black girl in Chicago. It’s about race, class, position, white socks, prejudice, hair oil and its stains, integration, politics, fabulous clothes, architecture, representation, style, standards and history. Jefferson mixes poetry and lyrics with historical extracts and retellings of events from daily and national life. It’s not an easy read, though it is extremely absorbing as a subject, because Jefferson’s prose is challenging; the readers are not let off lightly, and have to work to be told what we want to know.
This 
It’s also chillingly tense. Hemingway’s narrative style is famous: he called it the iceberg technique, or something like that, because all the work was done below the surface of the words. So we have plain, pared-down prose, no words wasted, nothing exuberant or decorative, which gives the rare instances of enthusiasm, passion, pleasure, etc, real power, because they stand alone without fuss. The effect is similar to encountering a large rock in the middle of a desert plain. It gives the impression of being bigger than anything else around, because it’s the only one of its kind, but if it were surrounded by equally large-sized rocks, we wouldn’t pay it any particular attention. The effect of such restraint in the writing is that we really feel the undercurrents of emotion. More importantly, we can feel the stuff that’s not being said, and the approach of terrible things a long way off. The tension mounts, and it just keeps on mounting. But because Hemingway’s writing is so controlled, you can feel sure that the catastrophe won’t be sprung on you out of the blue. There will be warnings, and you will have to wait for the warning to happen for the awful, or dangerous, or risky thing to happen. When it does happen, it’s a relief, because now we can get on with it, and not sit there imagining ‘he’s going to kill them’, or ‘they’re going to be washed overboard’, and so on.
Tension is a peculiar thing in a novel. If you think about it rationally, the reader can put a book down at any time during a tense-making episode, and it will wait for you. Nothing will change the outcome on the page. You can change how you respond to the outcome by being in a different frame of mind, or wait to have the right kind of time to devote to reading it. You can go to sleep and read the resolution of the tension with a clear mind and full attention on a different day. So what is it that makes us succumb to the tyranny of the plot and keep reading past midnight, or miss a bus stop, in thrall to the story? In Hemingway, I think it’s the hypnosis of the small plain words and the steady encroachment of story and character in tiny, incremental steps. He likes the character, and we like the character, so we don’t want anything bad to happen to that person. Emotional investment in a character binds us to their fate. The more an author encourages us to feel good about a person, the less we are likely to not be too bothered if that person does something horrible, or has something horrible happen to them. So it’s in an author’s interests to make the readers feel invested in some way – good or bad – in the characters so the book will be read. This will work for the situation too, if the situation is bigger or more interesting that the people.
So, back to the novel. Only one of the characters in Islands in the Stream populates all three of its parts: Thomas Hudson, a famous artist, a former habitué of 1920s Paris, where he lived with his first wife and son Tom. Now he lives on Bimini, an island of the Bahamas, 50 miles off Florida. He paints, and he drinks. This is apparently not too much, but the amount he and some of the other men sink daily, often starting at breakfast, made me blench. I’m not a spirits drinker, but they certainly were. Hemingway wrote this novel in 1950-51, and it certainly has a feel of Ian Fleming about it, with the details of men’s lives, and how they saw women. Hemingway and Fleming wrote with detailed precision about what their characters ate and wore, and the drinks descriptions are basically recipes without quantities. Thomas Hudson – and here’s an interesting thing, which I’m sure Hemingway critics have explained to their own satisfaction, but it was new to me – Thomas Hudson, when referred to by the narrative voice, is always called ‘Thomas Hudson’. Not Thomas, not Hudson, always the two names together. When he’s referred to by characters, its Hudson or Tom or Tommy, but the narrative voice sets itself apart with the formality of the full name. There is another Tom, his son, called Young Tom or Tommy at different times, but often just Tom. But the painter is given his full name, as if he were a brand of rum.
Thomas Hudson lives on Bimini in his house. He has a cook / major-domo / housekeeper and trusted friend and native Biminian called Eddy, and a houseboy called Joseph. The novel opens when Thomas Hudson has finished work for the day, and spends the evening drinking with friends on the quay, where things get a little out of hand, and there’s a fight. His friend Roger Davis, a novelist and screenwriter, comes back to Hudson’s house to gets his wounds doctored and to sleep, and to stay, since he needs to find quiet to start writing again. And, of course, the boys are coming: Hudson’s three sons, Tom, and David and Andrew, by his second wife. The five of them have a wonderful summer on the beach and in and out of the water. This novel is apparently praised for its nature descriptions: it certainly has tremendous descriptions of fishing, sharks, and eating. Some visitors to the island arrive, one of them being a girl who’s come to find Roger, which he is very glad about. That’s the last we see of him, because he takes her off to Hudson’s ranch in Idaho, to start writing again.
This is set a few years later in wartime, in Cuba, which isn’t very far south of the Bahamas, in Hudson’s house in the countryside outside Havana. There he has a vast number of cats and dogs, and three or four staff to keep the place running in his absence. He is absent a fair bit, because he’s converted his boat into a survey vessel for the US Navy, and he’s scouring the Caribbean coastline looking for U-boats. When this episode opens he’s just come back from an exhausting trip, and his favourite cat, Boise, is ecstatic at Hudson being home again. Hudson spends most of this section of the novel drinking, or fretting about whether the cats are eating enough. Boise eats fried eggs, and accepts a little champagne. Hudson tells stories in a bar to Honest Lil, an old prostitute friend, and allows himself to recall some very exciting episodes from his past with a princess on a boat going through the Corinth Canal. This is Lil’s ploy to make him forget a recent sadness, and to get him warmed up by recalling the princess’s sexual appetites. But out of the blue, a woman no-one expected to see walks into the bar, and Hudson and she have an ecstatic reunion, which fills Hudson’s slightly fuzzy mind with unfettered joy. It probably isn’t joyful for Honest Lil, because we don’t see her again. The drinking in Havana is prodigious, I lost count of the frozen double daiquiris that Hudson consumed. But just as we’re thinking, at last, he can be happy again, just for a bit, Hudson gets an emergency summons from the Navy and he has to go back to sea.
The third part of the novel is spent largely at sea, hunting for some German seamen who escaped their wrecked U-boat, and made the mistake of massacring some islanders when they stole their turtle boat. Hudson’s ship has a crew of irregular sailors, mainly smugglers and fishermen and a discharged Marine, as well as a Navy man who has been given to Hudson to make sure his ship stays in radio contact with naval authorities on Havana. This is one of the thin threads attaching the third part of the novel to the war: another thread concerns Tommy the younger, and other people in Hudson’s life who are also serving in the war. I did wonder when reading this section, why did Thomas Hudson not go straight into the army or navy? Why did he become an irregular pirate for hire? Could any of this stuff have really happened? It’s plausible enough as a novel for me to not want to bother checking out the history: the romance of the plot is quite satisfying enough.
Prepare for high-stakes romantic melodrama, early 1920s style. This 
So you see, this novel is beginning to look like the Pilgrim’s Progress, with the perfect hero undergoing trials of temper, pride, and self-control, and coming out in the right every time. Anthony’s third post is a put-up job, since Anthony has met The Girl. He owns a dog (most Yates heroes own and worship their dogs), which he boards in kennels in the countryside while he’s in service, and goes to visit at weekends for long walks in decent gentlemanly solitude. His dog gets into a fight with another dog, which Anthony breaks up very efficiently (moral: a man who can separate two fighting dogs is admirable), but he accidentally offends the other dog’s owner, while falling head over heels in love with her at first sight. She secretly returns his feelings, but when they accidentally meet again, he is handing the visibly appalling Mrs Slumper into her carriage, while The Girl is awaiting her own servants and carriage.
Is Anthony worth it? His heroism and natural leadership is typical for 1920s popular fiction, as the British ex-officer working with demobbed Other Ranks. At the beginning of Valerie French, the reactions of the demobbed Other Ranks to Anthony the starving and desperate ex-officer in need are extraordinary: not only do they feed him, they take him in their lorry to a pub, where the landlord, on hearing Anthony’s accent, immediately offers him unlimited credit, and then the lorry drivers slip Anthony twenty shillings, pretending the notes had fallen out of his coat. Shortly after this, Anthony inadvertently helps a thief steal a spare wheel off a car, meets a stupendously shouty barrister called Sir Andrew Plague, is instantly trusted despite the evidence, and is rescued from court simply because he looks and sounds like a gentleman. All this demonstrates the importance of class loyalty.
This time in the 
Nadine is Dodo’s daughter, a chain-smoker (which was very daring), and the leader of the pack. She is an appalling flirt and an empty conversationalist: her attitudes are really so much like those of a caricature of the 1920s flapper that I had to check the date of this novel twice. But it really is 1913, and prewar. Nadine and Dodo are both totally egotistical, but they both cheerfully admit this, and expect the world to accept them as they are. They aren’t malevolent at all, they are very concerned that everyone has a nice time and gets what they want. But their efforts to get what they want take priority over the desires of anyone else.
Dodo’s Daughter is also rather interesting if you’re looking for early feminist fiction. Dodo herself is a financially independent woman (thanks to both her former marriage settlements), but she is also an independent woman in terms of making her own decisions, deciding whom she will marry, where she will live, and so on. She keeps having to throw her drunk ex-husband out of the house (that’s the second one, who was a German prince of very Prussian characteristics), and she won’t ask her third husband to do this. She goes downstairs herself and gets rid of the awful tyrant Prussian, time and again.
At the last minute they change their minds, and Peter runs away without Lucy, taking Thomas with him, and finds happiness in a simple vagabond life in a cart pulled by a donkey wandering around the coast of Italy in the summer sunshine. Peter earns money by selling his embroidery – this was a period when embroidery by an artistic young man was considered a little odd but quite reasonable as an aesthetic choice of activity – and they find rest and safety on the lee shore of life, sheltered from the rough winds of the world.