Sarah Dunant's Blog

It is a bizarre feeling when, having been locked inside history  writing a novel, you come up for air and find everyone talking about the place you have just been.

I was boarding a plane back from Morocco last Monday when someone in the queue ahead of me said, “Have you heard? The Pope’s resigned!”

The Pope? Resigned!  How can that be, I thought.  This is not a post that comes with a pension: this is a job for life that ends in death. And believe me, I should know. After four years of researching Blood and Beauty, a novel on the Borgias, I have hovered, imaginatively speaking, over a number of papal deathbeds.  Indeed the novel begins with one of them in August 1492  when Innocent X11, old and decrepit is taking his last breaths.  Rumours are flying round Rome that his doctor has been feeding him blood drained from young Roman boys to keep him alive, while a wet nurse in an outer chamber has provided breast milk for desert.  In the end none of it works.  The minute he is pronounced dead, their world’s media – dozens of ambassadors and chroniclers – send out the headlines via messengers on fast horses, with the tastiest gossip tagged at the end of the dispatch.

If the ways of communication may have changed, our appetite for a colourful story certainly hasn’t and back in February 2013  the news is even stranger. The Pope is resigning. We are looking at a moment with no real historical precedent.  And why? Why is he going? Because he’s weak and ill? What does one expect when a man is eighty-five?   But throughout history popes have been old men, many of them old or older than this one.  Calixtus 111 (the first Spanish Pope and Rodrigo Borgia’s uncle) was the same age as Benedict when he was elected. He was also chronically ill. Nevertheless, for three years he managed to rule Christendom from his bedchamber where he spent his time haranguing kings and princes to raise money for another crusade against the Turks.

So what exactly is going on now in Rome? Could this be the Papacy entering the twenty-first century?  It would make some sense. The Church, like any huge global organisation, needs a CEO who is physically and mentally up to the job.  Especially now that that job involves handling a tsunami of revealed corruption. While sex and money scandals in the church are hardly new, what has changed  is our attitudes to children and sexual abuse as well as the willingness of victims to speak  out against the power of the church. Certainly times are challenging and it is possible that a man who needs a mobile platform to get from his bedroom to the council chamber simply cannot give what the job demands.

Except if you believe in the doctrines of the church, you believe that the Pope is the Pope because God, working through the cardinals, put him there and so it surely up to God to decide when to take him away.

I should add here that I have another interest in these things.  I was seven when my first Pope died and family lore has it that I cried for hours.    (Actually I think I quite enjoyed crying – I later saw the film “Spartacus” twice because knowing that it was going to end sadly, I could start crying at the beginning.) Still, my reaction to the Pope was more than mere melodrama. I was a young Catholic girl and, he, as the head of the Catholic flock, was my second father. Of course his going was a reason for grief.

And that surely is the problem now.  Good fathers don’t just up and leave the family because they are getting on a bit.  On the contrary, the way they handle ageing, pain and infirmity is actually part of their role. Just as their life should be example to us, so should their death. Think about John Paul 11.  This much-loved and charismatic Pope met an agonising end from Parkinson’s disease. His decline, marked by growing suffering and incapacity was common knowledge with a public following  who expressed their love and support. I remember watching Italian MTV in bars all over Italy while  messages of love for the Pope from thousands of young people ran as subtitles under the music. Some would say his painful journey to death mirrored that of Christ’s own. Throughout history Catholicism has preached that man can find comfort in pain through the contemplation of the suffering of Our Lord who died for our sins. If you believe that – and millions of Catholics do – then John Paul’s death was inspirational.

So what is Pope Benedict offering in its stead? The pleasures of early retirement? Slipping off to do some spiritual gardening? It just doesn’t have the same potency. Neither does it work in terms of some of the deeper concerns of religion in the west. We are at a moment when secular liberalism is pushing for people to take control of their own deaths,  with the Right to Die movement growing ever stronger.  In the face of threat, John Paul’s way of dying was an act of strategic brilliance.

If there is more to Pope Benedict’s resignation than meets the eye, then it will take a while to find out what it is. Meanwhile, as the rumour mill spins its wheels in the dust and the world’s media stake out their places in that Cecil B de Mille Square outside the Vatican, the power of history and tradition now take over.  We are about to experience a papal conclave: the oldest boys club in the world. While the cameras stay outside, our imagination can get in anywhere. Even to the Sistine chapel itself.

History has bequeathed to us some wonderful stories. Watch this space.

I have just managed ( such talent!) to erase a whole set of recent posts to the site. I did answer you all, but I know can’t find the answers published. So if you wrote within the last two week, please let me know and i will answer again.

I suspect i am more suited to the technology of cannons and horse messengers than the net. Ah well…..

Sarah

So, after a resounding silence of almost two years I am coming up for air to say thank you to all who have written. Forgive me if my replies have been slow. Writing is the most all consuming job and I find it so painful to have to leave and return to it, that while I am “in” everything else gets a little lost. I wish I could do it differently, but I can’t.

Blood and Beauty is now finished ( bar a few proof edits and a better map – this is Italy as you have never seen it before) and the clock ticking on publication; May in England. July in America and Canada. Many of you will come to this family with images and thoughts from things written , old history or the recent sky TV series.  All I can say is – suspend everything you think you know and let the novel paint the world and the people for you.  In so far as it is possible ( of course we never know everything about the past – and this is certainly so when it comes to the Borgias) I have set out to be as true to the real history as we know it , even down to real words spoken or written by and about them.  And the story that emerges… well I really I think it is more complex,  more satisfying and more compelling than anything you will have learned in the past.

There is a big debate to be had on how far historical fiction is fiction or history. And what is the responsibility of the novelist to balance imagination with facts.  As those who know my work will appreciate this is the first time I have written entirely about “real people” and that has been the biggest challenge. To bring them alive for a modern reader while still being true to their roots and moment within history. ( which despite all of having the same emotions, often makes them “different” in some ways from us). It has been an exhausting but  fascinating journey.  I hope the result is worth it.  I have no doubt you will tell me.

My web site will be moving within the next month to a different format, but I will move with it. And talk as I go about the journeys I made through modern Italy to find the past – and how much of it is still there for you to see. I hope you will join me for the ride.

Thank you all

Sarah

So, after a resounding silence of almost two years I am coming up for air to say thank you to all who have written. Forgive me if my replies have been slow. Writing is the most all consuming job and I find it so painful to have to leave and return to it, that while I am “in” everything else gets a little lost. I wish I could do it differently, but I can’t.

Blood and Beauty is now finished ( bar a few proof edits and a better map – this is Italy as you have never seen it before) and the clock ticking on publication; May in England. July in America and Canada. Many of you will come to this family with images and thoughts from things written , old history or the recent sky TV series.  All I can say is – suspend everything you think you know and let the novel paint the world and the people for you.  In so far as it is possible ( of course we never know everything about the past – and this is certainly so when it comes to the Borgias) I have set out to be as true to the real history as we know it , even down to real words spoken or written by and about them.  And the story that emerges… well I really I think it is more complex,  more satisfying and more compelling than anything you will have learned in the past.

There is a big debate to be had on how far historical fiction is fiction or history. And what is the responsibility of the novelist to balance imagination with facts.  As those who know my work will appreciate this is the first time I have written entirely about “real people” and that has been the biggest challenge. To bring them alive for a modern reader while still being true to their roots and moment within history. ( which despite all of having the same emotions, often makes them “different” in some ways from us). It has been an exhausting but  fascinating journey.  I hope the result is worth it.  I have no doubt you will tell me.

My web site will be moving within the next month to a different format, but I will move with it. And talk as I go about the journeys I made through modern Italy to find the past – and how much of it is still there for you to see. I hope you will join me for the ride.

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It is the strangest feeling, sitting at my computer in a little room in North London, watching spring 2011 outside the winter, surrounded by leaning towers of history books, as I sink myself into Rome five hundred years ago. At this moment I am in the coliseum,  1494, where on Good Friday they put on a great passion play , with roman nobles playing most of the parts and half the city crammed in to watch, transfixed by the double drama: the death of Christ , and the martyrdom of the first Christians which history had told them took place right in this very arena. Also in the audience,  the characters of my novel.  the Pope: Alexander V1 and members of his family, The Borgias.

The Borgias have been my life now for over a year now, this passionate, colorful, clever, violent, powerful family who have suffered so much at the hands of history , their detractors reading gossip and propaganda as truth. My job, to create credible   imaginative, believable characters which are rooted in the time they lived, and which makes you understand their behaviour and enjoy the drama of their lives, without overdosing on sensation and scandal.

Imagine then my amazement when some weeks  ago someone alerted me to a big new drama series about to go out on America television. Neil Jordan (great director and writer)  and Jeremy Irons as the Borgia Pope.  The question of course.  Do I watch it or not?

The answer:   oh no no no…. , or certainly not now.  I am 50,000 words into my own world and my own vision.  The one thing I do not need is someone's pictures getting in the way of my own. But once the book is finished, I shall watch…. with trepidation  but also great excitement.

The  Borgias. What a family. One could have twenty versions of them and they will still be ripe for more. And now back to the Vatican…..

The place is the city of Ferrara in Italy – in itself one of the best kept secrets of renaissance history when it comes to tourism. Ten days ago I found myself walking its streets again towards the convent of Sant 'Antonio in Polesino, with its deeply peaceful exterior coutyard and cherry tree ( famous in the city for those intense blossoms once a year) framing the entrance to the outside chapel and the forbidding green door with its grille which leads to  the enclosed convent itself.   The o...

I suppose the best thing about life is the challenges it throws up. And if you had any idea quite how hard it might be, you would be tempted to say no. So maybe sometimes better not to know.

Last weekend in the one of the most surprisingly lovely churches in the city of Brighton a group of women – and a couple of intrepid men – got together to put on a mad adaptation of Scared Hearts: an attempt to abridge the novel for three voices (myself included) and highlight the fabulous music which the ...

Having been having the time of my life on this book tour. I wish I could say it has come from selling books (I fear the days of book shops gigs are numbered)  but also because the time you actually get to do that – to really talk to people  and start a conversation about writing and the book  – is so limited. ( There is a Jackson Brown song that contains the line. "And the only time that seems to short is the time that we get to play" Well, that is how it feels on a book tour. )

But in cities ...

Having been having the time of my life on this book tour. I wish I could say it has come from selling books (I fear the days of book shops gigs are numbered)  but also because the time you actually get to do that – to really talk to people  and start a conversation about writing and the book  – is so limited. ( There is a Jackson Brown song that contains the line. “And the only time that seems to short is the time that we get to play” Well, that is how it feels on a book tour. )

But in cities like Portland and Nashville after the gig is finished I’ve been lucky enough to find good music to listen to.  (Thank you Jan for driving me round the edges of Portland!)  And i have been knocked out by the bands, and especially,  given what I have been writing about, the women. There are women out there with fabulous voices, great action on the guitar and such stage presence. And it has made me think deeply about Sacred Hearts and how relatively recently it has been that women have the freedom and the respect to be appreciated and noticed as musicians and public performers

In my convent in Sacred Hearts women sung because they were praising God. But what was clear to me researching the book is that they also sung because they loved music and many of them have fabulous voices. They would never be allowed to perform outside the convent, as at the time I am writing it was simply not a respectable job for a well bred woman.

So, as I sat in those bars in Portland and heard Tama belting out Stormy Monday I just wanted to raise a glass to how far history has  brought us

If you know any women out there who like to sing get them to read Sacred Hearts to find out how the managed to subvert the rules,  and then listen to what they sounded like on the podcasts.  You will not  be disappointed

And if you happen to live near Brighton in England , then come to St Batholomews church on May 3rd and hear the book being dramatised with myself and actresses and a whole choir of women who five hundred years ago, might have been nuns.! It will be something. I can promise you.