John Dickinson

The paperback of The Lightstep came out at the end of last month.  They’ve changed the cover.

What they’ve done is taken an image from the back of the hardback edition and put it on the front.  The old front cover image, a candle, has gone.  Here’s the old and new together, for comparison.

Votes?

We had this debate when we were preparing the hardback.  Which should take precedence: the Candle or the Feet?  I was asked for my opinion.  Now, I have views on this process.  Certainly the publisher should consult the author.  (I may be unusually fortunate in that mine actually do).  But there are limits. I am a wordsmith.  I will fight to the death over the placing of a comma.  I am not an artist and I am not a salesman.  When it comes to what works best visually I’m probably clueless.

But I was asked, and so I said…

I like the feet.  The photographer and I had great fun finding that dress and those shoes, and inventing the man’s uniform, all in a cavernous costume warehouse in north London.  The image is clear in what it says about the book.  “Historical Romance”.

But I also liked the candle.  A candle in a dark place is a powerful image.  It resonates with frail hope.  It speaks of life, of death, of mystery and faith.  It says there are depths to the novel that go well beyond mere romance.  And I think that’s true.  If you just want a historical romance, maybe you had better look further along the shelf.   So I voted for the candle.

Rather to my consternation, they took my advice.

Roll forward nine months.  The hardback has had its moment.  The paperback is now.  We want to shift this thing in thousands.  So guys, what do we do about this cover?  Who’s going to buy this book?  And what might persuade them to buy it?  If I had been asked I would probably have said the same as before, with a bit less conviction.  But this time they didn’t consult.  They made the change.  The Candle has gone into history.  The Feet have it.

And I’m not complaining.  The cover is there to make people want to pick the book up.  I think the Feet will do that.  Anyone who then turns the first pages will find maps, chapter headings and a cast list that would be worthy of War and Peace.  They’ll quickly realise what sort of novel it’s going to be.  And if they get as far as the story itself…

Well, that’s where I come in.

I love maps. Except when they are mine.

I’ve always loved maps - road maps, historical maps, maps in books showing places that have never existed. One way of passing time as a child in the family car was to get out the road map and see if I could find home. (I always could. If I hadn’t been able to it would have been less fun. That’s what I was like.) An early inspiration for The Lightstep came from looking at maps of the Holy Roman Empire. If The Lightstep is a complicated novel it may just be because it was stimulated by one of the most complicated pieces of political geography ever invented by man. And maps in fantasy novels were best of all.

A map is a half-told story. A trailer. It isn’t the real thing, but it allows you a tantalising guess at what the real thing might be like. And because maps are detailed, they imply that the story or the land that they illustrate will be rich in detail too. What they say is - you could go here. You could go and have a look at all these places. Maps are Very Exciting.

Except, as I say, when it comes to my own. I’ve explained before this (in “Putting Fiction on the Map (or not)”, 17 March 2008) why The Lightstep was supposed to have a map, what kind of map it was going to be, and why it didn’t get one. Now, about the maps in The Cup of the World and The Widow and the King… I think we were just too ambitious. We tried to put too much detail onto them. What’s more, the technique the artist used did not lend itself well to scanning and reproduction. So the result - well, you can find on them the places that the characters visit in the narrative. And there are some nice pictures of castles too. But everything is swimming in a sea of not-terribly-well-defined penstrokes, some of which are clearly rivers and some terrain, but it’s a bit hard to tell which is which.

The map for The Fatal Child arrived through the post yesterday. At first I was delighted.  It is much clearer than its predecessors, and beautifully illustrated with castles and heraldry and knights galloping romantically about - just what I would have asked for, if I had thought of it.  And then the awful thought dawned.  It was sent to me for proofreading.

Is that a problem?  Yes it is.  All the places in the story have to be put in the right place. At the moment they are distributed fairly evenly, in situations that are roughly correct at first glance and look very nice. But when you get down to it with the text in one hand and the map in the other - hey, surely that place has to be north of this one? And the other one, here, can’t have an outlet to the sea. And it’s got to be consistent with the last map, hasn’t it? Why did we do that on the last map anyway? In theory none of this is difficult, but it’s got to be right. And that’s what really gets me about my own maps. They aren’t tantalising hints any more.  They’re complicated engineering diagrams, like blueprints of the space shuttle.  I can’t just put stuff in fuzzily and leave the rest to the imagination, which is the way I like to work. I’m supposed to know every blade of grass in this land.   This is where I have to give it to the reader and say ‘Look - this is how it is.’ And if it’s wrong, there’ll be hundreds of people telling me so.  And no one to blame but me.

Deep breath. No excuses. Pass the pencil. And the rubber.

And the coffee.

I met a book group yesterday in the coffee shop in the Gloucester Waterstones, to talk about The Lightstep.

This about some of the ideas that underly The Lightstep. So WARNING - SELF-APPOINTED INTELLECTUAL IN PROCESS But bear with me because I like this stuff.

It is 1797. The Enlightenment has been going for more than a century. (The Enlightenment - what’s that?) It was a European intellectual movement which held that man was capable of understanding the universe, and God, and of improving his own condition, by the use of Reason. The aristocracy of the state of Erzberg - Lady Adelsheim, Baron von und zu Löhm, the Prince, the First Minister Gianovi etc - are creatures of the Enlightenment. They may bicker with each other but fundamentally they believe in the power of human reason. (Theirs, especially).

One segment of the Erzberg aristocracy is suspicious of this line of thinking. They are the so-called “Ingolstadt set”, who take a more medieval view of the universe, divinely ordained and not to be questioned. They stand for superstition, obscurantism and blind obedience. Their chief exponent in the novel is the Prince’s secretary Bergesrode, a fanatic who late on in the novel organises an armed band of priests and beggars “clanking with pikes and relics” to defend the cathedral. These figures represent the backward-looking schools of thought that were forced into retreat by the Enlightenment.

By the time of The Lightstep, however, the Enlightenment is itself in retreat. The romantic writers and poets have begun to celebrate the overpowering nature of human emotion. (Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, which Lady Adelsheim claims to understand and Baron Löhm claims not to, was an immensely popular account of a man who eventually kills himself for love.) Worse, the French Revolution, seen initially as a new political order based on Reason, has sunk into the bloody excesses of mob violence, The Terror, and a war that can only be sustained by continuing the war. Against this force, the novel’s hero Michel Wéry concludes, the only answer is an equal and opposing passion - one that leads to self-immolation and a terrible human price. One by one the Enlightenment figures flee. “I believe I am the last shred of reason in this city” sighs Gianovi to the heroine Maria as French cannon sound outside the wall. “Now I must yield it to the romantics.”

The romantics do not get the last word. The final step in the process is not slaughter but submission. The agent that demands submission is Love. It is Michel’s love for Maria that allows him to see that the people around him are more than just pawns in his desperate game. But there is also a spiritual element to the submission. The figure of Christ is a recurring presence in the story. The judge Jürich, wrestling with the impossible dilemmas of serving an occupying force, seeks guidance from the Bible. The words he finds also guide Maria at the moment of moral crisis. Christ is present in a painting when Maria and Michel embrace.

I’ve had some stick for this. A number of readers would have preferred a last-ditch defence of the cathedral against the ravening French hordes, with a rescue mounted by a force of good guys on white horses at the finish. Why not? (Apart a from slight problem of plausibility and historical accuracy). Well, because that’s not what I think the story is about. It’s about a progress. From Reason we passed to Romanticism. Now, as ideals are corrupted and all efforts turn to evil, we pass from Romanticism to something else. We arrive at Faith, and Fatalism. We are no longer trying to improve the world. We will accept it as it is, enduring the evil, and loving the good. In fact we are not very far from the beliefs against which the Enlightenment itself was reacting. We have come full circle.

The most frequently asked question is no longer “Where do you get your ideas?” With The Lightstep it’s “Did you have to do a lot of research?”Research. Ah, yes. You hear historical writers saying things like “You can do too much research” or “I never do any research before I start writing” and it sounds smug. Even lazy. I wonder how many of them found out the hard way. I did.

I have been promised for some time that the finished versions of The Lightstep would be sumptuously beautiful. Copies finally arrived with me last week. And they are. They’re a credit to the designers and a vindication of those who looked at earlier proofs and said that “good” wasn’t good enough.

But nothing’s ever perfect, is it?

We had thought quite hard about the map. There’s some travelling in the story, and we knew that most English-speaking readers would need a reminder of the relative positions of Mainz, Frankfurt, the Rhine and so on. The problem was that the some of the geography in the book - the most important part, centred on the state of Erzberg, is fictional. To put it on a map, we would have had to plump this imagined state down on top of a real city somewhere on the upper Main. Granted, it wouldn’t have been difficult. I know exactly which city it would have been - I’ve visited it, of course. But whereas I was perfectly happy to create Erzberg in words, to do so on a map at the expense of something that actually exists seemed to me and to my publishers to be going too far.

The solution we hit upon was a compromise. We would put the map on the end papers, as if it were a piece of decoration. If the reader chose to glance it they would find Frankfurt, the Rhine, Mainz, Heidelberg and so on - enough to make them that little bit more comfortable as they read the story. But there would be no sign of Erzberg. And because the map would be presented as decoration rather than information, the reader would be less likely to feel cheated by that. It was a tricky balance, but the best we felt we could do. And a very handsome map was drawn up by the artist Neil Gower, for the purpose. Alas! It did not make the cut. When I opened the cover of my first copy I found that the endpapers were beautiful, maroon, and blank. I don’t know why the map was omitted. I suspect it got forgotten when control of the cover passed from one set of designers to another within the Random House Empire. Or perhaps some power on high decided that the balance we were trying to strike was just a little too tricky to work. (But if so, the power in question thought it unnecessary to inform the author). So that little blend of fact and fiction will not be presented to the public. Readers who want to know where Maria’s coach is taking her will have to put down the book and reach for an atlas. And putting down books is not something I like to encourage.

The Lightstep will be published on 10 March. It has been a while coming. Three years, I think, since I first started making notes.

There have been the normal publishing lead times. To an outsider, it seems incredible how long is the interval between the production of proofs and the final publication date. But the sales forces know how they do things and I have no basis to argue. It took months even to get the sales force. This is because my editor, David Fickling, is mostly known as a publisher of children’s fiction, and his product is normally handled by the Random House Children’s Books side. But The Lightstep is an adult novel. We needed to find a champion in one of the adult imprints of the Random House UK empire. And we did. In fact, David found more than one, and while it was very flattering to have two substantial publishing imprints bidding for the novel, it did slow things down further while we sorted out which way to go. I’m delighted that The Lightstep is being launched with the support of Transworld, and that Black Swan will be handling the paperback edition.

And I can’t complain about delay, because it had already taken me a while to do the actual writing. I had thought, after the quasi-historical world of The Cup of the World and The Widow and the King, that writing a full historical novel would be a relatively short and easy step. It wasn’t. All sorts of questions beset me. How would an eighteeth century (catholic) gentleman have referred to a specific psalm? What was the correct form of address for a canon of a cathedral chapter? Would an officer have presented a card when calling unexpectedly at a country estate? I made the beginner’s mistake of doing too much research - or rather, of trying to put too much of the research into the book. The early drafts were… well, challenging for even the most well-disposed of readers. But with time and rewriting the detail got cut and the pace quickened. It was an extraordinary world, that convoluted, stratified society of the last years of the Holy Roman Empire. I couldn’t get it all in. I was never going to. But I think there’s enough left in the book to open a window on a time that was both very different from and yet still relevant to our own.