My
writers’ critiquing circle companions are starting to accuse me of mimicking
George R Martin, author of the Game of
Thrones. I’ve probably invested hundreds of hours reading the lengthy Game of Thrones novels and watching and
re-watching the forty episodes of the Game
of Thrones TV series. Therefore, I’m taking my friends’ comparisons to
Martin as a compliment, even though Game
of Thrones is medieval fantasy with dragons, and my novels are Civil War
tales without dragons.
This is a good place to mention that
dragons appear to have a long abiding place in genre fiction. I fondly remember
Anne McCaffrey’s fantasy dragon book series, Dragons of Pern, from three or four decades ago, and more recently I’ve
been hooked on the Temeraire Napoleonic War novel series by Naomi Novik.
Temeraire is a Chinese-bred war dragon in the service of the British army, a
part of the Brits’ “dragon air force,” if you will.
Temeraire speaks and thinks and is quite
personable, and is one of the main characters, not just a prized flying horse. It
takes a lot of bravado to write an alternate history of the Napoleonic Wars to
include dragons on both sides, but dang if Ms. Novik doesn’t pull it off well
enough to make the series widely popular. I suspect more of my books would be
“flying” off the virtual shelves at Amazon if I had included dragons in my
Civil War tales, instead of the expected sex, slaves and intrigue-as
personified by Faith, Levi, and the evil Lieutenant Samuelson.
Nonetheless, the comparison with George R. Martin wasn’t about dragons, sex, slaves, or intrigue, but was noting that Martin and I both kill off characters with regularity. To which I reply, gosh, I’m writing about the American Civil War, not the American Civil Peace, and lots of people die in wars and war zones. It seems to me that the anguish of killing and dying is an essential element in a good war story. Along with sex, slaves, and, alas, no dragons.
Last week I learned a new literary term
that addresses the phenomenon of killing off stock characters to underline the
danger of the environment in which the main characters are engaged: Red shirts. The Red Shirts were the
security guys in the original Star Trek
TV series, the big guys who wore red uniform blouses and often got zapped by
the bad guys when they accompanied Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Doctor McCoy to
some newly discovered planet. We in the audience generally didn’t even learn
the poor guys’ names, as their purpose was just to die near the show’s main
characters, to stress that someone has to die, and but it couldn’t be our
heroes.
All serial novelists, like I’m working at
becoming, have to protect their main character. I still remember as a teenager
who read every James Bond paperback as soon as it came out, being shocked when
Ian Fleming killed Bond’s new wife – but notably, not Bond himself. Then came
George R. Martin, who holds no character sacred. When Eddard Stark’s head
tumbled off the chopping block, I probably had to put the book down for a
while.
What about the Red Shirts in Whittled
Away and the McBee books? I think I’ve at least put names to the poor
guys who die early and often. I’ve been through the rosters of the real
companies of Confederate infantrymen that are featured in the books and culled
names of men that died. I’ve sometimes killed them in the same battle where
they died historically. Other times, I need a name for a fictitious scene and
pick a fellow who died in the hospital of disease or wounds, and plug his name
in.
If someday an old Reb’s descendent writes
me all indignant that I maligned his ancestor in my book, I’ll apologize and
thank him for buying a copy and reading it so closely.
Unrelated, except that my novels are set
in time of open racism, yesterday I watched the movie To Kill A Mockingbird for the first time. I grew up in northeast
Texas, which was part of the old south, for sure. Harper Lee, a southern girl who
had moved to New York City, won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1962, while
I was in junior high school. It was a segregated junior high school, as was the
rest of the culture of my youth.
While To
Kill A Mockingbird grew to be a staple for classroom reading and study,
that was after my years in school, and I’ve never read the novel. No teacher in
the schools of Longview, Texas from 1961 when the book was published to
immediate national acclaim, until my high school graduation in 1967, used the
novel to instruct us on the evils of racism. I suppose the theme was just too close to home
at that time and place.
Therefore,
I shouldn’t have been surprised yesterday as I watched the film to think that
Harper Lee could just as easily have set the story in 1961, contemporary to
when she wrote it, instead of setting the scene in 1931, thirty years earlier. I
saw the same unapologetic, pervasive racism in the film that I grew up with in
the 1950’s and ‘60’s.
That was over fifty years ago, and things
are better now, mostly. With lots of bumps in the road we are moving in the
right direction. We’ve left behind most open racist practices that were
commonly accepted in fifty years ago, but we aren’t there yet. Not yet.
I’m hoping that young Jackson, my new grandson,
will grow up in a culture that looks back in disbelief and disgust at the
racism of my growing-up days of the 1950’s and ‘60’s.
As always, interesting blog. And my oh my did you cover some ground. I too, hope it's better for my kids. For me it's like taking a step backwards, moving to Texas. I have observed much more race division, (I won't go so far as to call it racism (?)) in this little town than I have in all the other places I've lived, but this is the FIRST small town I've lived in.
ReplyDeleteGood food for thought. Thanks.
~ Tam Francis~
www.girlinthejitterbugdress.com