Book of Lost Nights

I am so tired I can hardly keep my eyes open, but today is a busy day. I’m liking it so far, however, which considering how early in the morning it is, is quite a feat:

Firstly, Violet is returned to me! Rejoice with me, brethren! She is polished and shiny. I have to take the hire car, with its embarassment of electrical embellishments (Electric windows! Central locking! IT IS A WITCH! BURN IT!) back to Waterloo this morning. It’s actually lovely out – pale but sunny – and it will be good to get back to my own car, who I have missed.

Secondly, I left Carthage last night – or rather my heroine did. I went to Avebury yesterday with K D Grace, and I always find it highly inspirational.

Avebury, Wiltshire

It was too cold to walk – there was a bitter wind blowing through the stones, but we settled into the Red Lion and had a deliciously Hobbity lunch composed almost entirely of mushroom courses (breaded garlic mushrooms followed by peppered mushroom suet puddings – nom nom nom). After that we busted out the laptops, worked for a few hours.

I dropped her off after stopping in for a cup of tea and a whinge, and was exhausted once I got back to London. Despite this I had a tinker with what I had, and then ever more clearly I could hear the final conversation between protagonist and pre-antagonist. Before I knew it, Joanna was on her way back home.

This really is us in the middle of the end of Sleepwalker now. I reckon it’s about three more chapters, mostly action, all rather short. Joanna and the Raven have reached the end of negotiations, and it also means I get to spend time with Astrid again, who is always fun in her no-nonsense way.

Also, rather fabulously, Marcus Chown (who rather magnificently guest-blogged here) arranged for me to be sent a copy of his latest, The Afterglow of Creation, so this is also sitting on my desk. Rather looking forward to that!

Currently Reading: The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

4 Comments | In: Archaeology, Food, Travel, Writing | tags: authors, avebury, carthage, faber and faber, london, marcus chown, the afterglow of creation. | #

The first draft of Sleepwalker is continuing to be troublesome. What I’d planned seemed fine when I planned it, but on the page the lead up to the denouement came across as a little pedestrian, lacking the bite I wanted it to have.

Lots of work has gone into thinking about what can be applied to make it a bit richer, a bit less “Oh, he’s just a very bad man and he needs a smack on the bottom.” Plus, I hadn’t thought through the amazing amount of historical research it takes just to appear merely incompetent rather than utterly clueless. I mean, it’s been fascinating – a great opportunity to do the Wikipedia Trail through pages on religion and geography and torture and Mediterranean piracy in the Classical world  – but it does take time, and not least because it constantly generates new ideas, makes new connections apparent, and some of these are almost impossible to resist implementing. For instance, I found out that Carthaginian priestesses wore robes embroidered to make them look like they were wearing birds’ wings. What’s not to love about that, with my bird-named quantum-phenomenon heroine currently disguised as one?

However, Sleepwalker is late, and it was starting to get me down. So I decided to run away. After I got rear-ended by Boy Racer a few weeks ago, (my neck is still killing me, actually) I was provided with a rental car, and packing up the laptop, and the knitting, and a bunch of DVDs, and something to read, and some make-up, and some bath soaky products, and… well, about three rucksacks of stuff for a single night, to be honest, most of which I didn’t touch but could if I wanted to, I took off to Canterbury and a country hotel I found on laterooms.com.

I ate noodle soup at Wagamama and then drifted through the cathedral (the horrid weather prevented much else). The visitor traffic was tiny – large tracts of the building were effectively deserted. The vast cavernous echoey space lent room to my thoughts, which eventually stopped racing, grew quiet and contemplative.

After an evening spent drowsing my neckache away in a warm old country house, watching the rain fall on the gardens in the dusk, I finally felt it all start to come together. I wrote for a few hours, and then fell asleep again, the laptop humming away on the bed.

The next morning, I drove the coast road home as far as Hastings. I stopped in Sandwich, and received one of those little gifts that synchronicity sometimes hands out to writers. I had just walked through the muddy but charming Gazen Salts Nature Reserve and was in a church called St Mary’s – still consecrated, but now used as an arts centre. This meant that the pews were gone, just leaving a beautiful timber-roofed space full of light and stone floor, with original painted knightly arms and mottos.

One of these was Mors Ianua Vitae: “Death is the door to Life” – which was just so gorgeous and appropriate I could have wept. The search for John de Rievaulx’s family motto is now over.

Currently Reading: The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

6 Comments | In: History, Research, Travel, Weird, Writing | tags: canterbury, carthage. | #

So, while we all wait to perish in the Snowpocalypse and end up fighting for meat as we cower around burning rubbish bins, I am sat here desperately trying to conjure the spirit of a vanished North African empire for my novel.

The Ruins of Carthage

In a lot of ways Carthage was the obvious choice as the origin for my complicated bad guy. I had never forgotten it. I dug for a season in the city itself, now located on the coast of modern Tunisia. It was one of the most intense experiences of my life. Within days I had succumbed to a devastating food poisoning in a country where the toilets were frequently rare and toilet paper rarer. Additionally, as a young woman as I was exposed to constant and often very physical unwanted male attention, and shopping for groceries, sight-seeing, or even catching the tram to Tunis were all a constant uphill struggle to preserve my sense of personal space and human dignity. We worked backbreaking twelve hour days digging during an African summer, teasing shards of smashed amphorae and burnt wood out of the layered trenches of sand, while watching out for scorpions.

But while there was so much toil and so much pressure, there was, every so often, flashes of extraordinary beauty and true wonder, like lightning strikes through a dark sky. I remember the columned remains of the ancient colonia while the sun set redly over them, the vivid blue-green of the Mediterranean suddenly opening up in a gap in the crumbling sea wall. A kind stranger who smiles brilliantly, wanting nothing from you. Laughter and companionship, gin and tonics on the verandah at the British Embassy, mouth-watering food and juicy wines, redolent of spices and sunlight, in cheerful sunlit terraces or lamplit embroidered nooks.There was a lot to love there, too.

And nobody was stung by a scorpion in the end.

On one day, when most of the others had gone back to the UK, I went with a supervisor to help her check out some sacrificial urns stored at the Museum of Carthage, a splendid building in the heart of the ancient city. For many years debate has raged over whether ancient Carthaginians engaged in the practice of child immolation (the very word is related to Moloch, the Phoenician god and the burnt sacrifices made for him) and while many contest that this is just a blood libel, there’s compelling literary, ancient cultural and physical evidence that this indeed took place, and in large numbers and over a long period of time. Indeed, ancient writers mention the very human variants of animals or slave children being substituted. However, every so often in hard times, the priests would insist upon the real deal, and high-born families would yield up the flower of their youth.

The urns, unprepossessingly grey-brown, were dug up some time in the 1920s and containing no further attribution than tiny hand-pencilled notes with dates and numbers tied around their necks (these were the days when archaeology was a gentleman’s hobby at best). They were piled up in a corner in one of the back rooms when we arrived. They contained a sea of fine grey grit surrounding tiny burnt little human bone pieces. Running it through our fingers, we looked for inclusions, such as amulets of ivory, bronze, and stone. These variously depicted Tanit’s sigil, or the eye of Horus, or ankhs. They had a sad, trinkety look to them, like the geegaws on sale in the souks.

Stelae in the Tophet in Carthage, showing Tanit's Symbol (taken by Michel-georges Bernard (CC))

It was hard to concentrate after a while, and we did not linger long. It has haunted me ever since.

The literature is vast, exhaustive, and polarized, but there is another aspect to sacrificing your children – maybe not just for your own good, but also for theirs. Greek myths feature elements where a baby is passed dangerously through fire or water for immortality – their mortal selves are “burned away”. Achilles is a case in point.

The King and Queen of Doors in Sleepwalker have likewise been sacrificed to immortality, long before they ever come to realise that this is their estate, but as always in such tales, each has a fatal weakness that their rival can exploit. The idea is of long provenance, I have discovered – the terrifying thing is whether I am up to the execution.

Time to get back to it…

Currently Reading: The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw

3 Comments | In: Archaeology, History, Research, Travel, Weird, Writing | tags: ali shaw, authors, carthage, human sacrifice, tanit, the girl with glass feet. | #