The Invention of Fire

"That’s a really interesting question. Detective fiction, as we know it, really gets going in the 19th century, and then develops a lot in the 20th century. I would be making a big stretch if I tried to push earlier texts into that model, but there are medieval texts where there are mysteries. I think Gawain and the Green Knight , which I mentioned earlier, is a good example of a text where there’s suspense and there are puzzles. I wouldn’t call it detective fiction, but it appeals to some of the same things that detective fiction appeals to for us. The Invention of Fire is a very clever work of detective fiction. Bruce Holsinger is himself an academic, and really knows this 14th century world. For someone like me, who also really knows this world, it’s quite satisfying to read because he gets it so right. The book really is rooted in the medieval period. There are lots of references to legal cases, which if you’re a non-specialist reader, you wouldn’t know were based on real cases. For example, one part of the book talks about a cross-dressing prostitute in medieval London. This was a real person, John Rykener, known as Eleanor Rykener. Lots of people would think that we don’t have records like that from the 14th century, but we do. Holsinger then adds some fictionalized elements. He does so many interesting things like that in this book and it is extremely effective. I don’t think he does over the genre as a whole because the medieval period is so long. If you think about the books that I’ve talked about today they’re set in quite a few different periods. Also, probably quite a lot of writers might be reluctant to put real people into their fictions because it can be a real risk. You do get Holsinger’s books where Chaucer is a real character, and he completely pulls it off; and in Pilgrims there’s a kind of Canterbury Tales riff going on. But medieval historical fiction is a very varied genre; there are a lot of different things going on so I don’t think it is particularly Chaucerian overall. The Invention of Fire, though, is set in Chaucer’s lifetime. Chaucer is a character, and one of Chaucer’s contemporaries, John Gower, is the main detective figure. Lots and lots of the characters are real people whom Holsinger has then fictionalized in various ways. One of the things that I really like is that Holsinger upsets people’s expectations about what’s going on in this world. So the plot is partly based around the fact that handguns are being invented at this time. Gower also has spectacles, which are a new thing at that moment (Eco in fact, also uses spectacles in The Name of the Rose ). I like it when authors of medieval historical fiction remind us of scientific or technological advances. At the beginning, we were talking about the ‘Dark Ages’ idea. A lot of people do think that it was like Monty Python and the Holy Grail : ‘How do you know he’s the king?’ ‘He hasn’t got shit all over him.’ There’s this idea that people in the Middle Ages are all going around mucking out pigs and grubbing food out of the ground and that’s it. In fact, this was a very sophisticated era when people were travelling, thinking, writing—and there were all kinds of technological inventions. It depends what the author is trying to do. If the author is trying to be historically accurate, then it matters that they get it right. In most of these books, the authors are trying to be historically accurate, and they really nail it. With Ishiguro’s book, that’s not what he’s trying to do. He’s trying to be imaginative and mythic. And I think that’s great as well. So, no, I don’t think that books have to do that, but if they are writing in a realist genre, it’s annoying if there are anachronisms, for example. From the 14th century onwards, there’s some very dramatic writing about the plague. There is the Italian writer Bocaccio’s Decameron , which is written immediately after the plague hits, and it’s about people fleeing Florence, going to a country house, and staying there and telling stories to keep away from the plague. So there are some texts like that, directly responding to the plague. We then see it dripping into other texts. Chaucer mentions the plague. He has a story about people who, when they find out the plague is killing everyone, want to go and kill death. There is this symbolic death figure who also represents the plague in all kinds of ways. In medieval art, a focus on decaying bodies develops at around this time. There’s also a broader sense in which the plague, because it caused a lot of social change, affected the fabric of medieval life. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In terms of medieval historical fiction, it varies a lot, because it’s such a rich genre, and there are so many different things happening. So it depends on precisely when the book is set. Only two out of my five books are set after the Black Death hits. I read another book recently, James Meek’s To Calais, In Ordinary Time , which is set in the period when the plague is coming. If you’re writing a book that’s set after 1348-9, and particularly in the half century after that, it’s probably quite hard not to talk about the plague and have it in there because it caused such massive social upheaval. There are obvious parallels to draw, but one thing to say is that the Black Death was so much worse than what we’ve experienced. We’re talking about perhaps one third, maybe a half of the population dying of a disease that hit people of all ages indiscriminately. One thing that we have been spared in this pandemic is the sight of many children dying. Though in this pandemic there’s been terrible individual trauma, the mass trauma was on a different scale in the 14th century. So I think that the way people responded was different in all kinds of ways as well. Still, in my lifetime, I hadn’t experienced this kind of global catastrophe, something that is so collective. I suppose it happens with big, world wars but, luckily, many of us alive today have not lived through that. That sense of, ‘how do we respond collectively?’ is a really interesting parallel. “It’s a mistake to read historical fiction as a history lesson” Also, one thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is how you build back. Are we going to be able to build back better? Because after the plague, a lot of things did improve for the people who survived. They were horrifically traumatized, but wages went up for the poor because there were fewer people to do the jobs. Things improved for women in lots of ways, they moved to town, got jobs, delayed their marriages, had more options. That all happened organically and not because of government policy. But in our current situation, things at the moment are worse for women and worse for the poor than they were before Covid. The question then is, how much do people see the parallels or how much do people want to try to learn from an experience which, while not the same, has comparatives? Not only is the experience different, but the way we can respond is different because, with our relatively interventionist government, there are many more ways in which our responses as a society can be controlled and can help restructure society. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. Also, if people do indeed want to think about this or if it’s also just a bit too depressing to think about the medieval plagues. I really do think that all of these are fantastic books that aren’t just good within the genre of medieval historical fiction, but good in all kinds of ways. I think even people that don’t necessarily love that genre might enjoy all of these books. I think if I were going to pick one, I would pick The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. The reason I would pick it is, in a way, precisely because of its mythic qualities. There is something about it that aims to be timeless in all kinds of ways, in the themes about memory and reconciliation that that we talked about before. There’s a lot about that book that I haven’t really plumbed or got to grips with yet because there’s so much going on in the images that he uses, and in the characters that he reinvigorates. So I feel like I’ve got more work to do with that book."