Monday, February 08, 2010
Moan renewal
Readers may recall that I like to dilate on current trends in historical fiction. How awful they are and that sort of thing. Prompted to renew the dilation by two items from the TLS. First we have a chap called Bernard Cornwell (http://www.bernardcornwell.net/) who as well has making lots of money from a soldier called Sharpe has also seen fit to pen some 2,000 pages in five volumes about the very real Alfred the Great. So what we presumably have is the various more or less known facts about said Alfred padded out with a great deal of plausible and entertaining speculation. A genre which I do not approve of at all. While Mr Cornwell has very possibly done, or had done, a good deal of homework on his chosen subject and got the period colour about as right as it can be, the result is going to be a blend in which it is impossible to distinguish fact from fiction. One cannot reuse any of the material in the saloon bar in the sure and certain knowledge that one is not peddling porkies. Which means that I cannot make any use of the material at all and so will not use it. But at least the stuff is marketed as fiction, unlike a recent book about the famous lady fossil hunter from Lyme Regis called Mary Anning which is marketed as biography, while containing much the same blend of fact and fiction as the books about Alfred. A far more reprehensible deed. But I was reminded (having once seen a play about this lady for some reason) that she was rather badly treated by the gentlemen who dominated the fossil scene in her day and that she was suspected of being a lush when actually she was doping herself up with laudanum to dull the pain from breast cancer. She died in her forties.
Balzac, I learned recently, took a much better line in his historical fiction. That is, that is was OK to introduce real people into one's costume drama, but they should only have bit parts. To provide a bit of factual backing but not to provide the sort of humanly soap interest which requires invention and speculation.
Yesterday to Sevenoaks to visit the ancient deer park there. A place which it turned out clearly has been very scenic in its day, but a lot of the trees are now rather past their best and with all the deer knocking about there is no natural regeneration. Plus, Thames Water chose the one time we visit the place to do a drains up. It seems that some sewer in need of renewal runs right through the middle of the park. So all in all, the place had a rather battered look. I guess they are going to have to bite the bullet, as the people at Hampton Court do, and go in for a replanting program. Maybe a quarter of the park at a time. But it would be expensive as all the young trees would have to be enclosed in deer proof fences, which I imagine takes the price up to quite a lot of hundreds of pounds a tree. One would need a budget in the small number of millions of pounds ball park. A lot for a place which does not charge entry. Perhaps the National Trust has not got the dosh that Hampton Court has. And while they are at it, they might have a proper heritage deer fence around the boundary, rather than the rather common chain link mesh hung off concrete posts they have now. How about a six mile perimeter ha-ha?
We also discovered that Sevenoaks is home to a giant school, unsurprisingly called Sevenoaks school (http://www.sevenoaksschool.org/), busily metastasizing through the larger houses in its vicinity. I find out after the event that the place was founded in the 15th century and is one of the oldest such foundations in the land. And we had thought that Sevenoaks was a dormitory town built for London when the railway was invented.
PS Google ads on target today. On first closing this post I am told about some outfit which punts out Sharpe fodder on the cheap.
# posted by Jim @ 1:20 AM 
