Jan052010

Guest Author: Heroes and Villains in The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar

by Carolyn • Posted in Guest Author

Today I have the pleasure in welcoming Lavie Tidhar to Book Chick City. His new novel, The Bookman, is a steampunk adventure and will be published this week by Angry Robot Books. Here’s a bit about the book to whet your appetite:

When his beloved is killed in a terrorist atrocity committed by the sinister Bookman, young poet Orphan becomes enmeshed in a web of secrets and lies. His quest to uncover the truth takes him from the hidden catacombs of a London on the brink of revolution, through pirate-infested seas, to the mysterious island that may hold the secret to the origin, not only of the shadowy Bookman, but of Orphan himself…

So, without further ado, I give you Lavie Tidhar…

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Heroes and Villains in The Bookman

Lavie Tidhar

Probably my favourite character from the Sherlock Holmes canon is Irene Adler. The woman, as she always was for Holmes. There are others, of course – Mycroft, the unforgettable brother who resides at the Diogenes Club, of whom we’re told that “occasionally he is the British government.” Or Dr. Grimseby Roylott, the murderous step-father appearing in the speckled band episode…

Part of the fun of writing a steampunk novel – and it is a lot of fun – is visiting – or re-visiting – familiar characters not only from the fiction of the period but from the fiction that followed. No one does the sly cameo better than Kim Newman, of course – his Anno Dracula and sequels remains a venerable Who’s Who of Victorian literature, not to mention Italian horror movies and so much more besides – but in writing my own The Bookman I took great joy in introducing, sometimes in significant roles, sometimes only in passing, some of those loved characters that still draw us to read books long after their authors have died.

Irene Adler, of course, had to be in The Bookman. Inspector Adler, to be exact, of Scotland Yard, who has an important part in trying to solve the mysterious events – and knots of conspiracies – that follow the young poet, Orphan, much to his distress. Mycroft, of course, remains irresistible to writers, and had to be included… while Dr. Roylott of the Indian swamp adder fame has a tiny cameo in the second book.

There is something wonderfully childish in revisiting loved heroes one would have most likely encountered first in the children’s library (as I did). There’s Prince Dakkar of the Nautilus, better known as Captain Nemo – but there is also his creator, Jules Verne himself, and who could resist sending Verne on his own extraordinary voyage (as the series of books were called?). And who could fail to love George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman novels, and incorporate at least a nod to the bully of Tom Brown’s Schooldays?

But the other joy of steampunk characters is that the entire historical record is open to you for the choosing. The Bookman begins, aptly I think, with a quote from that great spirit of the Victorian age – Mrs. Isabella Beeton, the immortal authoress of Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, who wrote:

I must frankly own, that if I had known, beforehand, that this book would have cost me the labour which it has, I should never have been courageous enough to commence it.

A sentiment I shared entirely at the end of writing my own book. One of the tragedies of the Victorian era is that Isabella died, far too young, at twenty-eight years of age. I got to resurrect her, and give her a conspirational role that I think would have pleased her. She is not alone in her plotting – London was always a city rich with discontent and always, it seemed, on the brink of rebellion – and she is joined in The Bookman by that other great rebel: Karl Marx, who wrote and drank in Soho’s Red Lion pub, just around the corner from Orphan’s (the hero of the book) place of work and rest, Payne’s Bookshop in Cecil Court – then, as now, the capital of London’s rare book trade.

The minor characters are often the most enchanting. Victorian London was a city of magicians and body-snatchers, of automaton-builders and dodgy politicians (is there another kind?). Also appearing in the book are the notorious body-snatchers, Bishop and May – whose dialogue includes such slang terms as “Thing” for a corpse, and a “big small” for a child… In Whims and Oddities, Thomas Hood wrote:

The body-snatchers, they have come

And made a snatch at me.

It’s very hard them kind of men

Won’t let a body be.

You thought that I was buried deep

Quite decent like and chary;

But from her grave in Mary-bone

They’ve come and bon’d your Mary!

It was a city of death, but also of poetry, a city of poverty, but also magic. The magician Maskelyne makes an appearance in the pager of The Bookman, as does the Mechanical Turk, the famous chess-playing automaton. As does Lord Byron, or an incarnation of his, of sorts… and others, heroes and villains, though none is exactly the one – or the other.

And I’ve just finished writing the second book, Camera Obscura, where I got to play with both The Three Musketeers (with Milady de Winter – my absolute favourite character from the novel – taking centre stage), and with Chinese Wuxia, or martial arts stories.

And what more, as a writer, could you possibly ask for?

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Thanks so much Lavie!

Lavie will also be visiting the following blogs on dates shown below:

6 Jan

7 Jan

8 Jan

11 Jan