story with poetic writing and complex
characterisation. Sutcliff suffered from Stills disease
and was wheelchair-bound for most of life, so her
own experience of pain and chronic disability may
well have lent realism to her character’s suffering:
‘The pain, which had been first white and then red,
was still there, no longer filling the whole universe,
but reaching all up and down his right leg: a dull,
grinding throb with little sparks of sharper pain…’
However, the perception with which she follows
her characters’ extremely active, sometimes violent
lives is a testament to the original virtual reality: a
powerful imagination fed on books and stories.
This was the book that more than any other, led
me to the realisation of, in the words of historian
G.M. Trevelyan, ‘the quasi-miraculous fact that
once, on this earth, walked other men and women,
as actual as we are today, thinking their own
thoughts, swayed by their own passions.’
I didn’t express it so eloquently at thirteen. I
simply knew that this was how I wanted to write –
to fully inhabit a character’s life from a different
time and place than my own – and that I would start
by writing my own version of the story of the lost
golden eagle. I’m not sure if the story was ever
finished, but it led to another realisation: the
importance of historically accurate detail to flesh
out the world and characters that the author is
creating. On the first page of The Eagle of the
Ninth, we’re taken straight to this unknown world:
‘traders with bronze weapons and raw yellow amber
in their ponies’ packs, country folk driving shaggy
cattle or lean pigs from village to village;
sometimes a band of tawny-haired tribesmen…'
The setting started me on a lifelong passion for
research. (It would be many more years before I
learned that good historical fiction depends on
selecting the relevant details from the mass of
fascinating facts. The novelist’s job is to evoke the
world of that particular story, not to show off their
own esoteric knowledge – I’m sure that Sutcliff
could have given us many more details about the
travellers on this road, but she chose only what was
needed to paint the picture.)
My father was an exchange officer with the US
Air Force in Colorado at the time, so my longsuffering mother used to drive me to the library at
the nearby Air Force Academy, so that I could
research Roman military history. I still have the
notes, although I haven’t used them. It now seems
to me that there are enough men writing about
battles and armies, and I am more inclined to
explore a story through female eyes (although that
doesn’t necessarily rule out the need to know about
wars!)
Now, after twenty-seven years of publication, I
am writing the sort of book that the thirteen yearold me thought I might grow up to write. Dragonfly
Song, to be released in July 2016, is set in on a
Aegean island in 1450 BC – a very different setting
and roughly fifteen hundred years earlier than The
Eagle of the Ninth. My mute outcast girl has very
little in common with the stalwart Marcus – except,
perhaps, resilience and courage through adversity:
traits that remind us all of our common humanity,
no matter where and when we live. For that I will
always be indebted to Rosemary Sutcliff.
www.wendyorr.com