Ovid - Background to the Book
Ovid was the first Corvinus book. After I Virgil
(which isn’t historical crime but should’ve been) what I wanted to do
was ‘solve’ a historical mystery, plausibly and keeping firmly within
the framework of the historical facts, neither altering nor inventing.
I wanted, too, to use real people as far as possible.
Corvinus and Perilla are (were) both real. Ovid’s chief patron was
Marcus Valerius Corvinus, ‘my’ Corvinus’s grandfather; Perilla was
Ovid’s stepdaughter, mentioned in the poems. By Roman convention, a
request to the emperor – in this case for the return of the poet’s
bones for burial – would go through the patron, so this gave me both
the start of the story and my two main characters. Great. Perfect…
Only it wasn’t, because Corvinus as a stodgy Roman patron wouldn’t come
alive for me, and as any writer will tell you if your characters are to
work they have to have a voice of their own, independent of yours. It
took me three days not
to write the first chapter. On the fourth day I was sitting in front of
my computer with a glass of red wine. I took a mouthful of it and slumped…
And Corvinus started talking. I don’t know if, when he writes, a writer
puts the character on like a glove or vice versa – perhaps a bit of
both – but that’s what happened, and it’s essential that it does.
Corvinus, it turned out, didn’t fit my picture of him at all. He was
very young (he’s 19 in Ovid,
much younger than the ‘real’ Marcus Corvinus, who was consul in the
following year, AD20), immature, cocky, self-centred and opinionated; a
laid-back, spoilt, over privileged Roman lad-about-town who didn’t
think much beyond that night’s partying. On the plus side, he was
good-hearted, generous, well-meaning, more sensitive than he gave
himself credit for or was willing to admit to himself, and – most
important of all – he had a very strong sense of justice and a streak
of hard determination a yard wide…
He
carried on talking, and the book virtually wrote itself. Fortunately –
touch wood! – he still does. I can’t, at book launches etc, read
Corvinus aloud: he’s not me, and although I can hear him I can’t speak
him. Perilla, incidentally, isn’t my wife Rona, either: I don’t know
who she is, except for herself, and in that sense she’s just as real as
Corvinus. I’d find it very difficult to put ‘real’ people into my
books, simply because they are real, and so have an existence outside my head.
I hope you enjoy Ovid.
It has its faults and shortcomings, certainly – I’ve never yet written
a book which, later, after publication, I haven’t wanted desperately to
go back and edit – but it was fun to write, and, I hope, will be fun to
read.
David Wishart
|
