Hunting Wild Boar
Mar. 28th, 2004 12:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloI began the new novel yesterday by sending my characters out on a boar hunt.
The inspiration came from a late medieval tapestry we saw at the V & A. My research for this quasi-historical novel is very haphazard. I can see it, smell it, feel it- why should I need to grub about in books? After all, no historical fiction ever really reflects the age it is dealing with. If it did it, it would be irrelevant and probably unreadable. Our ancestors- even our quite recent ancestors- thought in such very different ways.
Sebastian Foulkes' Birdsong for example. That's not really a novel about WWI. It's a novel about a clutch of modern people who have been transported to World War I. Foulkes can't scrub his consciousness clean of its 20th century accretions. He cannot forget the sexual revolution or the holocaust or- indeed- the fact that he's read Wilfred Owen and Goodbye to All That.
I started this blog as a way of doing some creative doodling between novels. Now that I've got a novel on the go again, the character of the blog will change.
The inspiration came from a late medieval tapestry we saw at the V & A. My research for this quasi-historical novel is very haphazard. I can see it, smell it, feel it- why should I need to grub about in books? After all, no historical fiction ever really reflects the age it is dealing with. If it did it, it would be irrelevant and probably unreadable. Our ancestors- even our quite recent ancestors- thought in such very different ways.
Sebastian Foulkes' Birdsong for example. That's not really a novel about WWI. It's a novel about a clutch of modern people who have been transported to World War I. Foulkes can't scrub his consciousness clean of its 20th century accretions. He cannot forget the sexual revolution or the holocaust or- indeed- the fact that he's read Wilfred Owen and Goodbye to All That.
I started this blog as a way of doing some creative doodling between novels. Now that I've got a novel on the go again, the character of the blog will change.
