This year, 2014, the Historical Novel Society has introduced for the first time, an annual award for the best Indie / Self-Published Historical Novel, with winner and runner-up prizes kindly sponsored by Orna Ross, bestselling literary novelist and director of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) and Geri Clouston of Indie B.R.A.G. There were eight eventual short-listed writers, from which four finalists were chosen by Orna Ross, with award-winning historical novelist Elizabeth Chadwick selecting the winner and runner-up.
Our judges found it very difficult to make their selections as the quality of writing
was excellent, and to thank the authors, I would like to feature them all here on my Blog
So please welcome Finalist
Linda Proud and her novel
A Gift for the Magus
A Gift for the Magus
I began writing what turned out to be a trilogy set in the
Florentine Renaissance back in 1974. The final volume was published in 2008. It
was my life’s work. I’d dedicated everything to it, been a little obsessed,
shall we say (on one embarrassing occasion I’d dated a cheque ‘1476’ and got a
kindly note from Lloyds saying they were not the Medici bank). So what happens
when you finish your life’s work? Do you retire? Die? In a slightly panicky
fashion I didn’t dare take so much as a day off, but what was going to be next?
A friend
supplied the answer. ‘How about a novel on Cosimo de’ Medici?’ Now that caught
my interest, for he was the grandfather of Lorenzo the Magnificent, a major
character of the trilogy, and so much of the glory of the second part of the
fifteenth century was rooted in Cosimo’s age in the first half. The idea of a
biographical novel did not appeal. Where’s the story? Where does it begin and
end? But then I remembered another story of the time, one that had made a cameo
appearance in the trilogy. One of the characters is Filippino Lippi, apprentice
to Botticelli and bastard son of a liason between a friar and a nun. Now,
there’s a story. And it could act as a prequel to the trilogy.
Naturally
it has already been written, many times, most famously by Robert Browning in
the poem, Lippi. He’s a loveable
rogue, our Fra Filippo Lippi, and the Victorians enjoyed his naughtiness. But
what was the real story here? After all, this gambling, womanising friar of the
order of the Carmelites had painted some of the holiest, most beautiful images
of the early Renaissance. The one I used on the cover, of the Madonna and
Child, is so beloved by the Florentines they call it ‘la Lippiana’.
Leon
Battista Alberti, who wrote ‘On Painting’ (1436), said that to be a good
painter you must be a good man. This is the kind of conundrum I enjoy solving.
Either Alberti was wrong, or Lippi was good, because there is no denying the
quality of his art.
Research
was difficult. The life of Lippi has been written by art historians who, like
all historians, only have to give you the facts and are not obliged to make
sense of them. Almost immediately I learned that Lippi hadn’t abducted just one
nun from her convent: he had abducted them all. Five nuns. All living in the
house of a painter in the centre of a gossipy little town near Florence called
Prato, a place where they liked to birch whores naked. On the same square, what
is now the cathedral and its ecclesiastical administration. So Fra Filippo
lived with five nuns under the eye of both church and town. How on earth did he
get away with that?
On such
questions, novels are built.
The
relationship between Cosimo and Filippo, his favourite painter in an age which
boasted such alpha males as Masaccio and Brunelleschi, is brought to life by
Vasari in his Lives of the Painters.
I only had to contextualise the stories, such as the one where Cosimo locked
Filippo in a room in his house so that he would finish a painting, and Filippo
escaped by knotting bedsheets together and climbing out of the window. I had to
find out where in Lippi’s life these things happened and make a guess as to
which painting he was being made to complete. A tradition that as a young man
he was captured by pirates and spent two years as a slave in North Africa I
made part of the story. Novelists can do that.
There
are self-portraits of Filippo. He was not a handsome man. Pudgy-faced and
portly. But he was beloved by the very beautiful Lucrezia Buti (to whom he was
not faithful). I had to put this humpty dumpty of a story back together again
and make all the contradictions in one character psychologically plausible. In
the end Lippi made sense through the eyes of his apprentice, the fourteen year
old Alessandro Botticelli, who loved his master while standing appalled at much
of what he did.
Are good
painters good men? If so, then perhaps our ideas of what constitutes goodness
need examination. It is the philosopher, Marsilio Ficino, who in the story
takes Filippo apart, examines the details, weighs his heart and does not find
him wanting.
With A Gift
for the Magus my time in the Florentine Renaissance is over. I loved every
moment of those thirty years of research and writing about Italy, but my
research trip to Prato was probably the last. I am wearied now by air travel
and, besides, the Tuscany of my imagination is a whole lot more wonderful than
the real thing with its autostrade, valley industries, poverty, government
corruption, triple-dip recession. In my writing life, I’m into injury time, and
I’m spending it in Iron Age Britain where research trips can be done in a day,
or even just walking out from where I live. It’s here, right here, under my
feet. All I have to do is make sense of what facts are known and find the
story.
It looks like it might be turning into a trilogy…
THE ART OF THE SPIRITUAL INTELLECT
Lindsay Clarke praises the remarkable work
of a seriously under-rated novelist
[Review for Resurgence
magazine]
A Gift for the Magus
Linda Proud
Godstow Press (www.godstowpress.co.uk) 2012
ISBN 978-1-907651-03-8
Since the
monetary values of the corporate world began to dominate the mainstream
publishing houses several fine novelists who are neither celebrities nor
mass-market best-sellers have found it increasingly difficult either to get
their work into print at all or for their books to receive much attention from
the media. Fortunately a number of small independent publishers have found courage
to do something about this unsatisfactory state of affairs. As both co-founder
of Godstow Press and an excellent novelist whose work has largely been ignored
by the literary establishment, Linda Proud is a significant figure in this
development, and her strong, beautifully presented new novel demonstrates
precisely why it matters.
A Gift
for the Magus is a prequel to her Botticelli
Trilogy of novels and this review wants to draw to all four books the
serious attention they deserve. Mostly set in Renaissance Florence, the Trilogy
follows the fortunes of a young scribe, Tommaso de’ Maffei, in his encounters
with the friends and enemies of Lorenzo the Magnificent and the artists and
thinkers who lent his court such glittering distinction. True both to the
spirit and dramatic history of the Quattrocentro,
these engaging narratives offer convincing portraits of such luminaries as
Botticelli, Simonetta Vespucci, Poliziano, Leonardo da Vinci, Pico della
Mirandola, Savonarola, Erasmus and the English Platonists and, behind them all,
the intriguingly elusive figure of Marsilio Ficino, whose wisdom and
scholarship inspired one of the most important evolutions of European culture.
Yet all these formidable characters and themes are imagined with the
confidence, fidelity and good humour of an author so deeply engrossed in her
material that the novels almost read as an artistically satisfying act of
channelling. One might equally well say as an act of love.
A great painting by Botticelli inspired each
volume of the trilogy (La Primavera,
Pallas and the Centaur and The Birth
of Venus), and each of them sticks to the known facts of history
supplemented by the vigorous activity of what the author calls the ‘rational
imagination’, which is both highly intuitive and capable of deeply
compassionate understanding. By the end of the third volume Lorenzo is dead and
the glory of Florence has been scourged by Savonarola’s bonfire of the
vanities; but Tomasso has recovered what he had lost - the courage to love -
and his story affirms that ‘the divine world is here, now, but we clothe it in
temporality, in desire, in misery, and know it not.’
One might have thought the demanding task
completed there, but Linda Proud’s questing imagination was drawn deep into her
fascination with the morally complex character of Fra Filippo Lippi and a
compelling new novel, A Gift for the
Magus, emerged. Set earlier than the trilogy, it tells the story of an
artist who combined an angelic vision and the skill of a master craftsman with
a talent for procrastination and for frequently falling in and out of trouble. While
offering masterful depictions of the worldly-wise Cosimo de Medici and the
saintly Fra Angelico, the novel’s main concern is to interrogate the true
nature of goodness through a humane appraisal of a man whose appetite for life
rendered him incapable of fidelity to his monastic vows. Like the books of the
Trilogy it’s a terrific read.
Novels which offer a beguiling narrative
while exploring the ambiguities of experience, the rich symbology of great art
and the claims of the spiritual intellect are rare these days. Linda Proud’s
historical novels stand up well beside those of Mary Renault, Zoe Luxembourg
and Marguerite Youcenar. They deserve much wider public attention than they
have been afforded.
About the Author
Born in 1949 in
Hertfordshire, UK, Linda Proud started writing historical fiction early, in
school exercise books. Around the age of 14 she had discovered the novels of
Mary Renault, set in ancient Greece, and fallen in love with the genre which
brings the past to life.
In 1971 she began a
career in picture research in publishing and, after a few years, went freelance
in order to devote more time to writing. The Botticelli Trilogy had seeded
itself as an idea in 1974, but it was to take 11 years to do the research and
develop writing skills. The first volume, A
Tabernacle for the Sun, won a bursary award from Southern Arts and a
month's residence at the writers' retreat of Hawthornden Castle. It was
published by Allison and Busby in 1997. The publisher, however, refused the
second volume, Pallas and the Centaur,
forcing Linda to go independent. Pallas
was the first publication of Godstow Press, which she founded with her husband
David in 2003.
Linda gave up picture
research with the twentieth century, her skills and experience made redundant
by the advent of the new technology. At that point she began a career in
creative writing, teaching American students studying at Oxford University,
working primarily for Sarah Lawrence College, Stanford University and,
latterly, Shimer College.
Blog
HNS Indie Award Short List 2014
judged by Orna Ross
1. The Sower of the Seeds of Dreams by Bill Page
2. Blackmore’s Treasure by Derek Rogers (withdrawn, author deceased)
3. Jacobites' Apprentice by David Ebsworth
4. A Gift for the Magus by Linda Proud
5. The Prodigal Son by Anna Belfrage
6. The Bow of Heaven: Book 1: The Other Alexander by Andrew Levkoff
7. Khamsin: The Devil Wind of the Nile by Inge H. Borg
8. The Subtlest Soul by Virginia Cox
9. Samoa by J. Robert Shaffer
and the 2014 Four Finalists are:
judged by Elizabeth Chadwick
1. Jacobites' Apprentice by David Ebsworth
2. A Gift for the Magus by Linda Proud
3. The Subtlest Soul by Virginia Cox
4 Samoa by J. Robert Shaffer
full details and rules can be found here
and related article
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| Elizabeth Chadwick: website |
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| Indie B.R.A.G. website |
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| website |
Related Article: 'I am delighted to announce...'
Details of how to submit an Indie / self-published historical novel for review can be found here
