Murder and Manuscripts: Interview with Bruce Holsinger, Author of "A Burnable Book"

 The New York Times picks it as a editor's choice. The ongoing book tour covers many cities and at least one included people dressed for the era. There have been many readings and even Simon Vance, perhaps the best voice on audible.com, has narrated it. So what’s all the fuss about?

“A Burnable Book” defies simple classification. What follows is my interview with Bruce Holsinger, the author.  He’s recreated a place in loving detail: London in the time of Geoffrey Chaucer His expertise as a scholar in the field ensures that the world depicted will educate all of us. More importantly, he has given voice to two of the luminaries of the period. One, John Gower, was a noted poet of that era. But what took courage and audacity was his willingness to give voice to one of the greatest writers in the history of English literature—Geoffrey Chaucer.

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You began the book by writing the poem that sets the characters and plot in motion. The idea of recreating medieval poetry would intimidate many. What gave you the courage to do this?

I wouldn’t really call it courage—more like curiosity. I’ve always been fascinated by the differences between various styles of early English poetry, and the kind of poems I wrote for A Burnable Book are modeled on the alliterative long line of the sort you’d find in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or William Langland’s Piers Plowman. Writing the book of prophecies first in Middle English presented a real creative challenge that helped me craft the arc of the story. I’m also a long-time teacher of medieval literature, so I know the material quite well, and it was really just a matter of digging up the historical details about each royal death and then setting those to verse.

I am interested in the genesis of your construction of John Gower. For most of those who have read any or much about him he is defined by the phrase Chaucer himself uses: “Moral Gower”.  In John Gardner’s Chaucer book he sums him up pretty much as a rather priggish Augustinian. You have created a character who is far from priggish and far more interested in using his personality to gain access to information and power. I would almost call him pre-Machiavellian (not necessarily in a bad way).  What made you decide to go against the standard interpretations and do you think your approach should be taken as a new interpretation by academics in the field of Medieval Studies?

 I suppose I’ve always wanted to read that “Moral Gower” line a bit tongue in cheek, and I’m also quite struck by the nihilistic tone that Gower can adopt in a lot of his poetry. I originally used Chaucer as my protagonist, but the writing felt flat to me—and when I switched to Gower I felt challenged and invigorated in a way that really surprised me. I would love my version of John Gower to be taken up by academics, of course, though I’m trying to present and talk about what I’ve done with him as a creative interpretation rather than a forceful, rigorously defended argument of the sort you’d find in an academic article.

John Gower manuscript

Right now there seems to be a resurgence of interest in the Medieval world in popular culture. Why now? How did you first get interested in this period?

 I’ve been interested in Things Medieval since I was a kid, devouring Tolkien (who was also a scholar of medieval literature), C.S. Lewis (who wrote a lot about medieval romance), and various versions of the King Arthur stories. At the moment we have a real fascination with the medieval, though I’m not sure it’s that different from the various medievalist crazes over the last century. Umberto Eco has a wonderful essay identifying the “Ten Little Middle Ages” in the contemporary world, and he discusses a similar obsession with all things medieval. That essay was written in the 1970s.

Barbara Tuchman in her book A Distant Mirror defines the importance of the Church this way: “Christianity was the matrix of medieval life… It governed birth, marriage, and death, sex, and eating, made the rules for law and medicine, gave philosophy and scholarship their subject matter.”  In your book most of the characters are anything but saints. If fact many hold religion up for critique or simply don’t seem to feel its effects down to the core. Are the characters you created more in line with what you think the typical person living in that time thought about religion and the Church or do you think they are more those who had a view both more cynical and perhaps more accurate than most?

I confess to erring on the side of cynicism in A Burnable Book. The contemporary image of the Middle Ages and medieval belief can so often be overly pious, often ignoring the worldly church and the very corrupt way it could act throughout the medieval era.  But the writings of Chaucer and Gower are absolutely bursting with sleazy clerics and wayward monks, and I wanted impart some of that flavor to the characters’ attitudes in A Burnable Book.

Do you think your novel could be used in a history or literature class on the Medieval period?

 Yes, absolutely—in fact it already has been! I’ve visited several campuses this semester where A Burnable Book was put on the syllabus, and I’ve been contacted by a number of colleagues in other departments who want to teach the novel and have asked me to visit as part of the course. The novel is very much a book about books, so I’m thrilled that it’s getting this kind of academic attention—though that wasn’t at all my intent when I wrote it!

Map of London during Gower's lifetime

There is a lot of talk back and forth these days about how most academics write books that are rarely read by anyone others than scholars in their field. Those who attempt to popularize their knowledge are at least, from what I read, not given all that much must respect by their peers. Were you at all worried about this?

 I wasn’t too worried, as I’ve written enough academic work to be a fairly well respected scholar in my field—and I have lots of other academic projects in the pipeline in addition to more fiction. I’m not really concerned about being perceived as a “popularizer.” More people have read A Burnable Book in the two months since its publication than have read the sum total of my academic work throughout my entire career.  But they’ve read it in a different way, for very different purposes, and I want to respect those differences even as I try to find ways of bridging the academic-popular divide.

You also have taught a MOOC. What was this like and do you see MOOCs as having the potential to create great changes in education?

 I taught a MOOC called “Plagues, Witches, and War: The Worlds of Historical Fiction.” Twenty thousand students from around the world enrolled in the course, and it was an absolutely wonderful experience. While it would be naïve to think that on-line education won’t have a continuing impact on higher education, I honestly don’t think MOOCs have the potential to create that change, at least in the humanities. I see them as powerful tools for university outreach more than anything else, though things move so quickly in the on-line world that I could be proven wrong next year...

The lines between academic departments and areas of study are now blurring. For example, creative non-fiction is the fastest growing area of any writing departments now. Do you feel your book participates in this blurring of historical fiction, gender studies, history etc.? Was this in any way an aim of the book?

 No, it really wasn’t. I wrote several novels that didn’t end up getting published, and from the beginning of my efforts to produce and publish fiction I saw my creative writing as completely separate from my academic work: a hobby, a way to escape from the demands of scholarly research. I’ve been surprised, then, to see the two parts of my writing life converge in the way they are at the moment. It’s exciting, invigorating, and a little bit shocking.

Both Chaucer and Gower as you present them are men who have great talent but also great faults. Do you think it is important for readers to understand that hagiography in a writer or a saint is not the best way to approach people in literature or in life?

 Yes, absolutely. Flaws are essential to creating great characters, just as they’re essential in forming all of us as human beings. Flaws are also fun to imagine in the creative process: you end up thinking about all the flawed people you know (including yourself), and how they compensate for their shortcomings—and you get to create jealousies, petty rivalries, anger, betrayal, and so on.

I don’t think you could have written the novel you have 40 years ago. By this I mean that many of your most sympathetic characters are ones that back then were largely glossed over: women (overall), prostitutes and transvestites, especially. You portray the majority of those who were not allowed a voice in modern discourse a chance to speak. Certainly Chaucer wrote about characters like these, so do you see your characters as a return to what was accepted a long time ago, or has the current scholarship encouraged approaches that are radically new?

 Hmmm…I suppose as a scholar of literature I would answer that question by calling on literary history. Virginia Woolf certainly wrote about transvestism and transgressive women (think about Orlando), while James Joyce featured a powerful madam in Ulysses. This is to say nothing of all the pulp fiction from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that features these sorts of subjects. So I don’t think the themes of cross-dressing, obscenity, and transgressive sexuality are necessarily contemporary, though current writers will inevitably inflect these categories through the interests of the moment. My own depiction of medieval prostitution is influenced enormously by the patient archival work of feminist historians over the last two decades who have recreated the lives and cultures of these woman from the past—they’re the ones who have really given these historical figures a voice. 

You have been on a lengthy book tour, have been interviewed many places and your book has been given a noteworthy plug in the NY Times. In other words, you are a star. What is it like going places and reading your work and being given so much attention? Obviously I assume it’s good but has it changed you in any way?

John Gower

 Ooh, I only wish I were a star! It’s been a huge rush, of course, but the novel has only been out for a couple of months, and this kind of attention only lasts so long. I loved being on tour in February and March, and I really enjoy literary festivals, workshops, and so on (I wrote a long blog post about Booktopia, a weekend writer/reader retreat in Vermont, that your readers might find interesting). The best part of it is the thought of thousands of people you don’t know reading your work—that’s the biggest rush of all. But I also appreciate the chance to settle back in and start writing again, and now that the major part of the tour is over I’m hard at work on the sequel to A Burnable Book. 

Do you read your reviews?

 I certainly do—and I don’t understand the mentality of fiction writers, especially very beginning writers like me, who claim they don’t (and I suspect that most of them are lying through their very sore teeth). How can you improve your craft, your sense of story, and so on if you ignore what other very intelligent readers and thinkers are saying about your work? True, reader reviews (on Goodreads, Amazon, and so on) can be a snark pit, but even the most negative reviewers may be telling you something important about what you’re doing wrong, and how you might improve your work. Every reviewer has given your novel time, energy, and commitment—so for me their feedback and critiques are invaluable.

Would you permit your students to write a fictional piece instead of an academic essay for one of your courses?

 Yes, in an appropriate context. I taught a class on historical fiction last fall and gave students the option of writing a creative piece of historical fiction rather than a final critical assignment—and every one of them took the creative option! But that doesn’t mean they didn’t have to do a lot of research: I demanded the same level of rigor and attention to detail that I would if I were requiring a seminar paper on a historical or literary subject.

Canterbury Tales Manuscript

There is a lot of talk that students today don’t read much and if they do, then they often skim. Do you find that students’ interpretive and writing abilities have changed much since the paradigm shift of social media as the way to communicate? Do you think academics need to think more about to be a part of the paradigm shift?

 That’s a great set of questions. Yes, I do think students’ attention spans have lessened in the last fifteen years. It’s hard to get them to sit down and read a long novel, and I often feel that I’m having to try more things in the classroom to get that desire quality of attention from them. But our students (and increasingly ourselves) are creatures of on-line ecologies, and I do think we need to reflect on what that means for how we teach and learn—as many great colleagues of mine at UVA are already doing.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Do you think the book would make a good film or miniseries? Are you talking with anyone about this?

 I would love for A Burnable Book and its sequel(s) to be made into a miniseries—that would be a dream. I’ve had a few offers for rights and options though there hasn’t been any big push to get a series or film going. But it’s still early days…

You are already in the process of writing novel number two. Any details you want to share at this point?

 I’ll say two things about the sequel (still untitled): it begins with a pile of bodies being discovered in the London sewer channels in 1386; and it imagines the early history of gun violence in the Western world. My hope is that it will appear sometime in 2015.

If you had to choose between having dinner with John Gower or Geoffrey Chaucer whom would you choose?

Chaucer, hands down. I don’t know whether Gower was at all interesting, but I’m pretty sure Chaucer was. My only condition? I do the cooking.

Medieval kitchen

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The opening of A Burnable Book begins with a poem It is enigmatic, hermetic, and well written. The book centers on this poem in ways we discover slowly as the plot unfolds.

But the book is not simply about Chaucer and Gower and textual exegesis. The book proper opens with a murder. The intersection between words and acts and words as acts forms the art of A Burnable Book. Churchill’s famous quote about Russia seems applicable: a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. The poem is a riddle, there is more than one murder mystery, and the main character through whose eyes and mind we see the world, John Gower, is an enigma, even to himself. Gower is an enigma trying to solve a mystery with the help of a riddle that turns out to be mystery: who wrote the prophetic words?

Tomb of John Gower 

Gower is a man who trades in information. In this the book is both a kind of detective story as well as a more profound exploration of epistemological issues. What do we really know?  Our introduction to Gower sets the stage for the unfolding of secrets and knowledge:

If you build your own life around the secret lives of others, if you erect your house on the corrupt foundations of theirs, you soon come to regard all useful knowledge as your due. Information becomes your entitlement. You pay handsomely for it; you use it selectively and well. If you are not exactly trusted in certain circles, you are respected, and your name carries a certain weight. You are rarely surprised, and never deceived. Yet there may come a time when your knowledge will betray you. A time when you will find even the brightest certainties— of friendship, of family, even of faith— dimming into shadows of bewilderment. When the light fails and belief fades into nothingness, and the season of your darkest ignorance begins.
Holsinger, Bruce (2014-02-18). A Burnable Book: A Novel. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Rather than try to give hints about the plot I will simply encourage people to read the book on this level. To me, however, the exploration of knowing what we know is just part of what makes the book worth reading. I found the detailed descriptions of those who are far below the station of court poet enlightening and educational. Holsinger knows the details of the lives of those left out of most histories. His sympathetic portraits of those who must sell their bodies in order to survive gives the book a historical view that we rarely get to see. The King gets his share of scenes but it is the ‘lost souls’ who have the eye and ear of some of Holsinger’s best passages.

I think that books like these should be used in classroom. Like works by Mantel and Eco, we learn more about an age from fiction than we often do from history. For those who believe in fate, just yesterday I happened upon Bruce in a coffee shop. I asked him what he was working on and he was writing the sequel to A Burnable Book. If the sequel is as good as this book, he may well become far more well known for his fiction than for his expertise as a highly lauded professor of medieval studies. I am grateful he took the time to answer my question and hope that his words and mine will encourage more readers to enter the labyrinth, if not of solitude, then of the winding paths of London and the threaded clues that lead to a satisfying emergence into the light of understanding of Gower, Chaucer and the way we think we know.

Bruce Holsinger