The Best

When I was seventeen (... it was a very good year ...), I hit the Dalton Books at the mall and found myself caught up by a cover. It had a tautly ... forward ... black-haired man on the cover, doing the Romance Novel Pose with some little blonde.

Twenty-six years later, the cover seems unfortunate to me, but I'm glad it appealed to me at the time. That cheesy cover brought into my life perhaps the single best and most influential piece of historical fiction I've ever read. (Influential on my own work. It's perhaps the one piece of writing in terms of the tone it struck - as opposed to actual subject matter and plot - I try hardest to emulate, and which entertains me most elementally.) The novel is Parke Godwin's "A Memory of Lions", and I know of nobody other than myself who's read it - unless I lent them the book myself. In the world of historical fiction at large, it's not entirely obscure - but it is old enough, and individual enough, that it doesn't have the footprint of a Bernard Cornwell, or "Katherine".

I describe my own work as muscular, and it seems likely to me that Godwin places more emphasis on, and therefore elicits, more passionate emotion - but the writing seems to come from a place where storytelling rules all, and so the work transcends any genre in that way. Godwin also treated Robin Hood, and was a varied enough author to also write comedic sci fi of the most contemporary kind, a pretty rare thing in authors these days, who mostly have to stick to one kind of world in order to continue marketing effectively. For him, it feels like *what he has to tell* is the most important thing of all - so his urgency within a story creates the urgency OF the story. I remember lending my copy of Memory to a friend some years ago, and when she returned it to me, she was almost breathless at discovering this incredible story.

Because an incredible story it is. Political, individual, powerful, and fair - we see the way an incident turns into another, and builds, and rolls into inevitability - and, far more importantly, we see it from many points of view. There are clear progatognists in this novel, but the villains are few. One man does his best, and another does the same, and - the way blended societies work - this means they become adversaries, completely aside from their actual feelings toward each other. One woman loves her daughter, and the daughter loves someone else, and in order to protect the child, the mother seems almost cruel. Another mother worships. A man is relegated to being a beast. There is almost constant brutality, and stretches of this plot are so incredibly tense I come away from them even after all these years feeling incredibly energetic.

The period - post Conquest Britain - is beautifully well rendered, but its details are (as rich as they definitely are) strictly in service to the story. The characters are believably of their period, and absolutely engaging. The story is suspenseful, sexual, mysterious, by turns a little atmospherically mystical, cultural, unafraid to be comical, and human in the most fully-realized way a novel can provide. We see scenes of a young girl, tentative in the world; and we see war in its inexorability - and all of this plays, all of it works. Godwin never loses the voice of any character, and they don't leap off the pages - they walk, entirely distinct, entirely whole, entirely authentically, through their world.

"Memory" trained me in character and in treatment of a historical subject. It also does that one single most important thing in the world: it entertains me. It owns me completely, when I read that book - even when I read just a single scene, which I have done many times. I have quoted it literally, and almost certainly I've quoted it metaphorically at times in my own writing. I turn to it again and again, and it is ever-fresh, always as gripping as the first time - and, as I've grown older, even more than the first time, with more and more experience. Its appeal owes much to experience, too - that a man of nearly fifty could write a girl of seventeen - and one born almost a thousand years ago - so believably (and all the other characters as well) is testament to how vivid a writer has to keep every part of their own life, in order to create new lives in words.

I have a small trove of those novels and writers which are most important to me. Donald Harington. Mary Stewart's Arthurian novels. Undset, too. But Parke Godwin, and "A Memory of Lions" never stop growing even more important to me. And I still aspire to its magic.