A Novel Point of View?

Schools in Argyll and Bute finished for the summer holidays yesterday, so at one o’clock I found myself singing my annual rendition of Alice Cooper’s Schools Out for Summer, although with a little less enthusiasm than I perhaps used to when I was a classroom teacher. At least I have six weeks ahead of me without an alarm going off at seven in the morning even if I do have to entertain my kids more often!

As soon as the girls were home, they wanted to go to the beach and, as it was too choppy for the paddle boards, they went swimming while I took my kayak out. After a rather dodgy attempt to get into it, I finally managed without either capsizing or being washed up onto the beach. I did, however, discover that my plan to paddle leisurely up and down the shoreline was simply not going to happen. The waves were high enough that the safest option was to head directly into them at ninety degrees, then turn as quickly as possible and head back to shore the same way. (The photos were taken on better days!)

This meant that I found myself further out into the sea-loch than I usually go, giving me a different perspective of the peninsula I live on. This idea of looking at the place I am so familiar with from a different point of view (a novel point of view?) has always been intriguing to me. It was when I discovered that there had been a Viking fort on the site of a friend’s house, and human remains found in my parent’s garden (in Victorian times — thankfully I didn’t have to even consider the possibility of Mum having buried someone under the patio — maybe I'll save that idea for a future book…) that I thought about setting a Viking series here.

So little is known about the ancient kingdom of Strathclyde that it doesn’t often feature in novels and it’s divided from modern Scotland by language — they most likely spoke Brythonic or Cumbric, a language closer to modern Welsh than modern Gaelic — but nevertheless, there are remnants throughout the area of links with the Norsemen if you know where to look. (Knockderry, Luss, Carrick Golf Course, Dumbarton Rock and Govan, to name but a few.) These remnants may not add up (yet) to a significant relationship between the two peoples, so I have kept these interactions minimal in my novels, but there are enough to suggest that there was definitely some level of significant contact.

It’s not until you are actually out there on the loch that you see the water as forming a connection, rather than it being a division. Places that are far distant by road suddenly become the closest town. People that you would be unlikely to meet on land suddenly become the very people you are most likely to bump into. The long fingers of the peninsulas that form the northern banks of the Firth of Clyde suddenly become accessible to one another, rather than separated by hundreds of miles of long, narrow, winding roads.

Perhaps this is something writers always do — distance themselves from places and people and perhaps even themselves — so that they can tell these other stories, but I think, for me, anyway, that it’s more pronounced when writing historical fiction. Looking back at the landscape in front of me from far out on the water, I imagined what it would have looked like then. There would, of course, have been the same basic bare bones of the landscape, but what areas would have been attractive to live on? Where had the best access to the sea-loch and streams? Where is the flattest land for building? What would those buildings look like? Sadly, my artistic skills don’t extend to me drawing an image, so I have to use words and hope that readers can picture it roughly the way I have — or maybe that doesn’t matter? Maybe it’s okay for them to picture it their own way?

Our new schedule for the Novel Points of View blog has meant that, rather serendipitously, I have ended up being the one to blog the weekend prior to the release of book three of my series. The Viking’s Princess Bride will be released on Tuesday July 5th. Thanks to various delays, it’s not particularly seasonal as it’s set at Imbolc in early February and features the two main characters snowbound in a shieling high on the moors. Shielings were dwelling houses used primarily by women during the summer when they took the sheep up onto the moors to give them access to richer grasslands. This is Scotland, however, so I’m not going to jinx our summer weather by saying that the presence of snow indicates that the events couldn’t happen in July!

I hope everyone has a lovely summer and sees the sun at least once or twice!

Mairibeth