Eagle in the Snow

"This is the most lowbrow of the five novels I’ve picked. It really is a genre novel. I tend to dislike and dismiss the concept of genre. I’m always quoting John Banville, the Booker Prize winner, who was once criticised for writing detective stories. He said that genre doesn’t exist; there’s just good writing and bad writing. But Wallace Breem was a genre writer. His story is about a man called Maximus—by the way, there are far too many characters in ancient historical fiction called Maximus: I know, I’ve done it myself once or twice. Worryingly enough, the germ of the idea for Gladiator came from a novel called Those About to Die by Daniel P. Mannix . It is widely regarded as being the worst novel ever written set in the ancient world. It is abysmally bad. Its opening paragraph has the Roman Empire “coming apart like an unraveling sweater.” In Eagle in the Snow, Maximus, a Roman general who’s a pagan, is given the impossible task of defending the Rhine frontier with just one legion against six German tribes. It’s a novel that is full of historical mistakes. For example, a real legion at that time would have had 1,000 men. His legion has 6,000. A lot of their kit is wrong. He didn’t get the real externals right at all. And I’m not 100% sure he even made much of an effort to get the internals right, beyond making his hero a pagan, and putting him in the tricky position of defending a Christian empire. “A lot of fiction has used the ancient world to explore contemporary issues of sexuality” But what is so good about Wallace Breem’s Eagle in the Snow is the action sequences. He wrote really good battle scenes. And, although his main character may be a bit anachronistic, he’s interesting and conflicted. He’s a man who is the archetype for all sorts of later heroes in historical fiction. He’s a man going to do his duty even though he really, really doesn’t want to. I read it when I was a child and I loved it. It had a huge impact on me and turned me on to historical fiction. All these years later, I think it probably had even more of an influence on me than I realised, in that the portrait of the hero, Maximus in Eagle in the Snow , this man who is forced to be the hero when he doesn’t want to be, might well, unconsciously, underpin quite a bit of my hero Ballista, who has featured in eight of my novels so far. Once you’ve written a few novels, you look back on things and you have a different perspective. Now and then you think, ‘Blimey, so maybe that’s where that came from, not my native, staggering genius!’ I love writing action sequences. They do pose a huge technical challenge. I don’t want to generalise for what every novelist does or should do, but what I do is I tend to plan out the action sequence very carefully. I choreograph it with maps and bits of cardboard, moving them around to make sure that the characters physically can see and hear what I’m claiming they can see and hear. If it’s a hand-to-hand fight, then—yes, I’m a sad geek—I have replica swords, and I will actually check if it is physically possible to move from position A to position B in one fluid movement. But once you’ve done all this very careful planning to make sure it works, I find it best to write it really quickly, to try and get some pace into the narrative. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Sex scenes, on the other hand, are hideously difficult to write. I received criticism of my first novel Fire in the East that there wasn’t enough sex in it, so in my second novel, King of Kings , I tried to put a couple of pretty adult, raunchy sex scenes in. My editor’s comment in the margin on the first one was just ‘Errr.’ His comment on the second one was, ‘Harry, I’m worried by your gathering obsession with writing Carry on Bonking scenes.’ You’re treading a fine line between writing pornography and toppling over into a Carry On comedy. I didn’t have any problem with my mother or any of my relatives or students reading them. Having said that, it is amazing how some readers assume that all sex scenes are ultimately autobiographical. There’s an element of ‘Oh that’s what you like to do!’ No, it’s what an imaginary character I’ve made up would like to do! No one does the same with the violent scenes, assuming that I actually stalk the back streets of Oxford with a bladed weapon, looking to mutilate people. That’s one of the differences between us nice, modern, Western, not-as-repressed-as-we-used-to-be in our Judaeo-Christian way people and the Romans. A Roman house was full of other people who weren’t your family. There’s an awful lot of Roman art that shows a perfectly loving couple having sex on a bed and there’s a servant happily standing by with the drinks. It’s extraordinary to our way of thinking and, presumably, isn’t just an artistic convention. It presumably did reflect their lives, that slaves were so unimportant you could have sex with your partner in front of them, and who cares what they think or if they’re even there—which is mind-blowing, really."