The Horse Coin - Background to the Book
The
Horse Coin stands on its own. It’s not a crime book, let alone a
Corvinus, it’s set in Britain (at the time of the Boudiccan revolt),
and it’s written in the third person.
The original intention - which explains the forward-looking ending -
was to make it the first book of a series taking a Roman family through
the history of Roman Britain and possibly beyond; the trigger (for me)
being the clash of two mutually-alien cultures and their eventual
fusion. The left hand - Celtic - way of looking at things has always
fascinated me just as much as the right hand Roman: each has its own
contribution to make, its own strengths and flaws, and its own lessons
to teach if the other will only accept their validity. This balance -
this equality - was important: what I emphatically didn’t want to do
was choose one side, Roman or British, and whitewash it while
blackening the other. The choice of the coin as both a title and a
leitmotif (it would have appeared throughout the series) was intended
to reflect this: it actually exists (Cunobelinus, the pro-Roman Celtic
king, struck it at Camulodunum) and is a beautiful blend of Celtic and
Roman features.
All very well, but whether the idea worked or not in practice I’m not
at all sure: I’m always surprised when someone tells me - and they do,
occasionally, completely unsolicited! - that they enjoyed the book,
because on the whole I didn’t. Certainly it was uncomfortable to write;
not in the sense that Nero was, but just awkward, in places like wading
through glue. It’s the only book I’ve ever written where I didn’t
altogether feel on top of things, or that the characters were telling
the story rather than me. Partly, this is because it’s in the third
person, and I’m a natural first person writer; this, for technical
reasons, was unavoidable (it’s difficult to use a first person narrator
when your plot demands several things happening at virtually the same
time in different places, which The Horse Coin’s did). As a
consequence, it felt like suddenly finding yourself driving an
automatic car when you’re used to a manual: you don’t feel at home, you
have to think consciously about what you’re doing. Perhaps the best
thing to have done - and what I’d do now - was to leave the story to
rest for a while, or, more drastically, to have junked it in its
current form and waited until it resurfaced. But I did neither.
One detail about the writing, though, that suggests that the characters
could take off when they liked. In my original plan Dumnocoveros the
druid had a very minor part which ended with him being chased by a
Roman detachment, caught and killed. In the event that wasn’t what
happened: he was chased, fine, but I couldn’t make him be caught.
Instead - and despite my best efforts - he escaped and became one of
the story’s linchpin characters. That, to a writer, is a promising sign.
I’d be interested to know - if you have read or do read the book - what
you thought of it; genuinely interested, so adverse comments are just
as welcome as favourable ones.
David Wishart (May 2006)
|
