Germanicus - Background to the Book
Germanicus is the second Corvinus book and came, to me, as a bit of a surprise since I’d intended Ovid as a one-off. As with Ovid,
what I wanted to do was take a real-life historical puzzle (in this
case, the death at Antioch under suspicious circumstances of the
Emperor Tiberius’s adopted son) and - keeping within the historical
facts - ‘solve’ it.
The ‘solve’ is
firmly within inverted commas because - as I'm careful to point out in
all my Author's Notes - I’m a writer, not a professional historian or
an academic; nevertheless, I hope that as with all the ‘political’
books anyone reading Germanicus who is
a professional in the field will come out the other end of the book
thinking, ‘Hmm! Interesting!’ Certainly, it was a very interesting book
to write, since to start with barring my classics graduate’s knowledge
of the broad sweep of events I knew next to nothing of the details and
didn’t have a ready-made solution; with the result that as I did my
research and theories and unexpected links began to form both Corvinus
and I were getting very excited about the implications of what we were
finding out. I hope some of that excitement comes across; certainly, I
hope the results provide a tenable backup for the eventual 'solution',
at least in its fictional context.
Maybe I should say something here about my attitude to topographical
research. I’ve never been to Antioch (I’d never, for that matter, been
to Rome, until very recently. The topography of all the earlier books
is based on a map of the city given in an ancient - but very good -
classical atlas published in 1894). For me, research in general - not
just topographical - is like an iceberg: only about a tenth of it
actually goes into the book, but the other nine-tenths is needed to
provide stability. In the case of Antioch's topography, my research
file had lots of maps, sketches of buildings etc and descriptions of
places which I never used and never intended to use; but since I prefer
to get all my background research done before I start writing it was
all necessary: once you’re writing you don't know which direction the
character will take, and so you have to be familiar with the place as a
whole, not just the parts of it you think will be relevant. If Corvinus
had decided, for example, that he really, really
had to see the inside of the Temple of Zeus Bottios then I’d have had
to follow him in, and if I didn’t know already what the interior was
like the effect would be the same as looking through a pair of these
coin-in-the-slot pier binoculars when the money runs out and the
shutter comes down, leaving you blind.
One little anecdote re the writing of Germanicus
which says something about the weird way a writer’s mind works. I wrote
chapters 18 and 19 (the voyage to Syria) in three or four days, which
is par for the course; however, it took me another two weeks not
to write chapter 20. Now I never - touch wood - get writer’s block, and
once the two weeks were over the writing flowed as usual, so this
puzzled me. It was only after the book was published that I realised
what had happened, and then the solution was obvious: Corvinus had
taken two weeks to get from Italy to Syria, and I had to wait until he
got there before I could take up the story again. Weird, yes? That,
though - I’m convinced - is the explanation.
If you haven't read Germanicus yet then I hope you do; and that you enjoy it for the story it is.
Best wishes
David Wishart (May 2006)
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