books:: APRIL 06, 2005

Potholes and dragons on the road to the past

By WHITNEY SPOTTS

Even had Winston Churchill not been fully recognized in the annals of history as one of the world’s greatest orators, he had little doubt that he would be well remembered: “History will be kind to me,” he asserted, “because I intend to write it.”

Sharon Kay Penman
A reading and signing at Schuler Books and Music in the Meridian Mall at 7:30 p.m. Tue., April 12. For more information call (517) 349-8840.But sometimes, even in the murky depths of the conqueror’s chronicles, a hint of human bias can seep through, suggesting alternate readings and fresh interpretations. For renowned historical fiction author Sharon Kay Penman, it was the story of Richard III, a man cast in most people’s minds as Shakespeare’s hunchbacked, megalomaniacal king, that sparked a rethinking of the past.

Photo by William Penman Jr. Historical fiction and medieval mystery author Sharon Kay Penman.

“I stumbled onto the story of Richard III and I decided that this poor king had been much maligned by history,” Penman says. “So I started buttonholing my friends to tell them about this, and their eyes would glaze over and they’d say, ‘Richard who?’ At that point I thought I’d better find another outlet for all this moral indignation, and that’s when I started to think seriously about writing his story.”

The result was a finished manuscript titled “The Sunne in Splendour,” the only copy of which was promptly stolen from Penman’s car. The author started over, and the 944-page tome was finally published in 1982, the first in a series of thick, delicious historical novels exploring the explosive events and politics of medieval England.

Penman says stories of medieval times are so fascinating “because it is both exotic and familiar. In many ways, the mindset of the medievals is quite alien to our own world today, so you do get the sense that you’re traveling in a foreign terrain, but at the same time, human nature hasn’t changed that much over the centuries, so it’s quite easy for readers today to identify with the wants and the needs of people in the middle ages.”

In a literary sense, it helps that the people Penman researches and reinvents were such extraordinary characters — figures like Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard the Lionheart and Prince John and Llewelyn ap Gruffydd, the final native king of Wales.

But at the same time, Penman says, “When you read the chronicles, they sound so familiar. They’ll be talking about bad roads, they’re complaining about the high price of bread and suddenly then they’ll throw in something like ‘and there was a dragon found in Kent last fall.’ In my own favorite, one of the chroniclers tells his readers when Richard was released from purgatory.”

It’s these bizarre juxtapositions that fascinate both Penman and her readers, and has kept her fans engrossed through six lengthy historical novels and three medieval mysteries. Penman’s latest mystery, “Prince of Darkness,” was released last month, and the author will visit Schuler Books and Music in the Meridian Mall for a reading and signing on Tuesday, April 12.

“Prince of Darkness” returns to Justin de Quincy, the central character of the previous two mysteries, who is trying to unravel a conspiracy intended to frame Prince John for a plot to murder his brother King Richard. In a bizarre twist, de Quincy finds himself working alongside Durand, a man instructed by John to kill Justin in the last installment.

Penman turned to writing mysteries as a bit of a break from the intensity of her lengthy historical novels. “I had just finished ‘When Christ and His Saints Slept’[the first book in her trilogy about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine] and that was close to 800 pages, and it was a difficult book because the sources are so contradictory. So it was more challenging than many of my other books and I was really in danger of burning out. I thought I just need a change of pace, a different kind of book, and since I love mysteries I thought it was the natural way to go.”

“The Queen’s Man,” her first mystery, published in 1995, saw Penman credited as a finalist for an Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel.

Coming up, Penman plans on writing the final installment of her trilogy about Henry II — “provided that Henry and Eleanor cooperate,” she jokes. “Their noses are a bit out of joint because I had to push them off center stage to do these mysteries. They both are larger than life characters, and they really don’t like sharing star billing with anyone.” She is also thinking about writing a novel about the Third Crusade, finding it particularly topical at the moment.

Penman admits that historical fiction is a bizarre genre, with its blending of fact and fiction, though some would argue that history itself is often constructed that way.

“We get the bare outlines of a man or a woman’s life,” Penman says, “and then we have to fill in the blanks and form value judgments about them based on what little we know, which, of course, isn’t fair, but it’s the only way to write a novel.” .

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