BOOK TOUR DIARY PT1

Notes and thoughts from the start of my Essex Dogs tour of the UK

I’m travelling the UK for the next couple of weeks, promoting my debut historical novel, Essex Dogs. If you want to order signed copies of the book, The Broken Binding still have a few numbered limited editions and will ship internationally. Or WH Smith have signed copies at half-price and will ship to the UK. Or you could support your local high-street/independent bookseller.

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Bags packed, game face on, a reservation aboard the 10.00 train from London Kings Cross to Edinburgh. Book tour is go! It’s a bright Monday morning, and it only gets brighter as we arrow north towards the Scottish capital. Edinburgh is one of my favourite cities in the world, and the journey there is magical. Or rather, the second half of it is. After Newcastle the railway line hugs the Northumbrian coast and if you’ve been canny enough to book a window seat on the right of the carriage, you have the most glorious views over Lindisfarne, Bamburgh, and the long sandy beaches lapped by the cold grey North Sea.

On a clear sunny day, the combination of raw physical beauty and the rush of a fast train is a combination that makes my arms prickle with pleasure. Living in the twenty-first century we tend to be most excited by landscapes when viewed from high above: from drones, planes or satellites. But remember: there was a time, when passenger trains were first invented, when it was equally novel and thrilling for people to see landscapes move sideways at previously unimaginable speed. We’re so used to parallax today that we barely even recognise it. But not today. Today I’m jazzed on parallax, and I don’t care who knows it.

Actually, having written that, I recall that there is an old argument which says the Renaissance began on April 26th 1336 when Petrarch and his brother climbed Mont Ventoux for the sheer pleasure of seeing the view from above. I wrote about this in my last nonfiction book, Powers & Thrones. I couldn’t resist the drama of the scene and the novelty of the argument, even if I had to then admit that this was rather a tenuous origin story for the entire humanistic revolution in literature and the arts. Perhaps the wider point I’m trying to get at is that we humans tend to be moved by radical changes in perspective: seeing the familiar from a new vantage point.

Which brings me on to historical fiction and – inevitably – Essex Dogs. In the interviews and live Q&As I’ve done so far, one question keeps coming back. Why fiction? Well, there are lots of answers to that, some of them professional and others personal/psychological. But here’s one. Essex Dogs is an attempt to imaginatively reconstruct life for ten ordinary soldiers in an army during the Hundred Years War. When I was thinking about this project I concluded that it would have been impossible to do this in nonfiction form. Yes, there’d be a way to write in generic terms about the experience of ‘the soldier’, but the sources do not permit a deep dive into the day-by-day life of a group of real individuals. In other words, that perspective on the familiar story is not open to the historian. Only through fiction could this serious historical aim be achieved. Essex Dogs is on one level a madcap caper through a medieval campaign. But it is a fun task approached with serious intent, and a determination to find a new way of looking at old things. Would Petrarch have approved? Thankfully, we’ll never know.

Edinburgh is as glorious as ever. Majesty is an overused word, but this city merits it. I have taken an apartment just off the Royal Mile, with a view I adore – looking out towards Princes Street and the Scott Monument. I lived in Edinburgh when I was a little boy – between the ages of six and nine. And I remember very vividly being taken along Princes Street on a Saturday morning, listening to the bagpipes wailing and looking up at the castle perched on its granite crag. With no sense at all that my adult life would bring me back there in so many weird and wonderful ways – making TV shows, promoting books, and so on. All that lay outside the lightcone of my imagination. I was just hoping that we would see my mum when we went to Marks & Spencer. She worked on the tills on a Saturday morning.

Arriving at the bookshop is the first chance I have to see one of Ash Fields’ incredible window paintings of my characters from Essex Dogs. Here it is, naturally, Scotsman: his wild eyes goggling out at passers-by. There’s a neat hidden message in the display, with a clue about the origin of the name Essex Dogs. Very Dan Brown! But I don’t mind it at all. Bringing Scotsman, Loveday and the rest of the Dogs to life has been the most fun I’ve ever had on the page, and people have already asked about postcards and prints of Ash’s portraits. Someone even wants to get an Essex Dogs tattoo. For once, it’s not me. I’m running out of room.

The next morning, farewell Edinburgh, and hello to another spectacular train journey – south to Carlisle and then on over the Yorkshire Dales. I’m speaking at a theatre in Grassington, as picturesque a town as I’ve seen. I pull up in a taxi from the nearby station in Skipton and see posters with my face on them plastered all over town. Which is very flattering, but enough to send you crazy if you stop to think about it too much. I tend not to stop to think about it. As I say to a vaguely tongue-tied well-wisher, I’m just some guy who writes my little garbage about the Middle Ages and hopes for the best. I’m not going to bite.

People are already milling about at the theatre when I arrive. I prefer to turn up borderline late for speaking events, as it leaves no time for nerves. But on this occasion I’m delighted to be early. There’s a young woman in the audience who’s fled the war in Ukraine and is billeted with a family in Yorkshire. We’d spoken online when she was desperately looking for British sponsors – now, here she is. Safe and well. She tells me a little more about her experience of the invasion. You think you’d be brave, and want to head to the front line, she says. After one rocket strike, you change your mind pretty fast. It’s sobering stuff. Here I am, gadding around talking up my book about the experience of invasion and war. And here’s someone who knows far more about it at first hand than – God willing – I ever will. Perspective. That’s what it’s all about.