| Novelist Edward Rutherfurd, looking every bit the English country gentleman in wool jacket and tie, sits in a Calgary restaurant and ponders his choice of beverage as the waitress hovers. Surely, it will be tea.
"Could I please have a latte?" he asks, in perfect Cambridge English.
"Certainly," says the waitress, who hurries off to fetch it.
So much for the stereotype.
Rutherfurd is in town discussing his latest work of historical fiction, The Rebels of Ireland. Although he was born and raised in England and now lives part-time in Dublin, he is also getting settled into a house in Connecticut – hence, no doubt, his taste for a Starbucks favourite.
The Rebels of Ireland should please Rutherfurd’s faithful readers, continuing the engrossing tale of early Irish history begun with The Princes of Ireland. The new book, written in an engaging, straightforward style, begins just before the great Irish rebellion of 1641. It follows the fortunes of several families, across generations, into the 20th century.
His characters represent the full range of Dublin society: Celtic clans, "old English" families, newcomers from England and Scotland, and even Huguenots and Quakers.
After a succession of highly popular, weighty books (Sarum, Russka, London and The Forest), all based to a great extent on exhaustive research, you’d expect Rutherfurd to look a bit more, well, exhausted. But as he sips his latte, he seems to grow increasingly energetic just talking about the process of creating his books.
"The first thing I tend to do is walk the place (a novel’s setting)," he says. "The story usually comes out of the landscape. One’s imagination gets inspired. For me, there has to be a magical quality about the place, because otherwise I won’t be able to bring this sort of story to life.
"Once I get started, I do a burst of pretty heavy research into the general history. I talk to my historians and I put together a big synopsis. That framework is necessary for something like this – If you haven’t got one, it’s going to fall apart. Also, I couldn’t carry that much stuff in my head."
While his characters’ actions are sometimes pure invention, the underlying history is accurate, and major figures of the era play their part.
In Rebels, he details the "plantation" system the English rulers imposed on Ireland — huge tracts of Irish land grabbed from the traditional owners and handed to English and Scots immigrants for cultivation, in an attempt to increase Protestant domination. Then we see the invasion by Oliver Cromwell’s army during England’s brief republic phase, further encroachments later by restored monarchs and the imposition of harsh anti-Catholic penal laws.
Thankfully, this isn’t presented in a foaming-at-the-mouth frenzy of hatred for those anti-Celtic oppressors, as some other books have done. Rutherfurd injects emotion into his characters, who, while coming down on both sides of the obvious injustice, simply get on with their lives by adapting to the realities foisted on them. No doubt, that’s pretty much what happened at the time, in spite of periodic surges of rebellion.
"When I’m stuck for a plot, I usually find that the history itself, the research, provides real people," he says. "Most of the fictional families and fictional characters in the book are actually based on real people and real families."
Rutherfurd also likes to toss in a "historical surprise" here and there, such as the fact that the Pope supported the Protestant side in the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 for political reasons.
The author has been fascinated with history since an early age, he says, partly because he grew up in Salisbury, England, amid its famous cathedral’s Salisbury Close medieval neighbourhood. He enjoyed tales of Victorian and earlier times passed on by elderly relatives, who themselves had eagerly soaked up family lore dating to the time of Admiral Nelson. Later, he devoured historical novels – Arthur Conan Doyle, C.S. Forester, Gore Vidal’s tale of a Roman emperor, Julian.
The present is an excellent era, Rutherfurd believes, for interest in his genre of work. Record numbers of consumers are exploring historical subjects, including their own genealogy.
"A lot of the people who write to me actually send me their family trees, because there’s so much fascination now with people’s roots," he says.
"The sense of being Irish, even if it’s only an Irish great-grandmother or something, is very strong in the diaspora all around the world. It’s an important connection for many, many people." |
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