Writer Andrew Greig who guests at Nairn Book and Arts Festival talks about his latest novel Rose Nicolson – named after the young fisher lass who steals a student's heart in 16th century St Andrews
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If you speak to writer Andrew Greig for five minutes about the world of Scotland in 1574 he has created in his latest novel Rose Nicolson, you see why that era comes to you in technicolour not as a dull sepia distant ‘past’.
At Nairn Book And Arts Festival on Friday, the Scottish writer and poet will describe how he thinks of his characters from so long ago, who live in a fascinating and dangerous time for Scotland.
Andrew has created a living world which seems very real as you read the story of love, espionage, a Borders raid, an unfolding political plot and exile to Paris to ensure the safety of our hero Will Fowler, a St Andrews student and would-be poet.
Andrew says: “You don’t want the book to be like a history lesson. You have to remember for people then, it is not in the past but in the present. For them, it is the modern world and they are not backward or ignorant. And you have to keep remembering that they don’t know what is going to happen.
“I remember my mother once saying to me that living through the Second World War ‘We didn’t know in 1941 that we were going to win!’.”
As you read Rose Nicolson, named after the startlingly bright young fisher lass Will becomes infatuated with, it’s hard not to warm to Andrew’s funny, fallible Will, based on some fascinating things he discovered in his research about the real man. Once the writer had been alerted to the existence of a real person, the few facts suggested an interesting figure whose life was as random and contradictory as any of our modern ones and allowed Andrew to “fill in the gaps”.
Even how the writer came across Will is a story in itself.
“I wrote a novel called Fair Helen set at the time of the Border Reivers and during the middle of the Scottish Reformation. And I got an email from an Italian woman, a professor at Padua University. She loved the book.
“She then said ‘And do you know these characters? Walter Scott of Buccleuch had matriculated at Padua University in 1591 with a Scottish poet called William Fowler and a lackey called Tom Nicolson?’.
“I said ‘No I did not know that but I am very interested to hear it’. That is how it all came up. I started researching.
“He is very much a real person but luckily not everything is known about him so there was room for me to invent and fill in the gaps. He was a Scottish poet on the edge of the court of James VI and I, being a spy and reporting on people – and dealing in used furniture. Doing what he needs to do to get by.”
When you read about Will’s later sequence of sonnets with its unusual title, The Tarantula Of Love, it sounds like something that Andrew might have made up. But in fact, it was a real work.
Andrew said: “He was also the first person to translate Machiavelli’s The Prince into Scottish English. And he wrote another book called The Triumphs Of Petrarch. So he was quite noted and he wrote a very indignant political pamphlet [Ane Answer To The Calumnious Letter And Erroneous Propositions Of An Apostate Names John Hamilton] which made his name – after he was beaten up in Paris by some Catholic supporters, the Hamiltons and that helped make him some friends [the Reformists].”
In the book, Will becomes part of a group of poets who meet to share their work – and which includes the young king, later James VI and I, a talented poet in his own right.
As the story progresses, Andrew lets us see Will’s ambitions as a poet and his use of words reflect his growing skill, such as the grandiose description “Trade greases the squeaky wheel of the shoogly handcart of time … ” – or the way language fires him up – “I could feel a set of appositional tropes coming on”.
Will is also trying to look like one of his favourite poets, the Italian sonnet-specialist: “… I had rather fancied a slim Italian moustache, as in portraits of Petrarch, hoping it might make me more poetical”.
And as well as inspiring him, Rose herself and what he calls her “sea-dark eyes”, and his feelings for her “… I was hooked by the heart, and dragged aboard most willingly”, Will is not above borrowing some poetic thoughts and phrases of Rose’s own for his poems, as here with Will: “...she pointed to the pier where students took their post-kirk walk. ‘Are they no a straggle of red ants, carrying their crumbs of learning!’ … ‘A striking image,’ I managed. She laughed, ‘You may have it. (I did, I did! One of the more successful lines from The Tarantula Of Love.)”
Andrew discovered that in 1591 Will, Walter Scott and Tom Nicolson had been banished from Scotland and had had to flee to Padua, though they were allowed back at some point in the next year and a half.
“I knew I wanted to find out how these three people from very different social classes knew each other and were truly bonded together.
“They shared various incidents and skulduggeries and carry-ons so closely together and formed this quite complicated but tight bond – Scott, one of the gentry, William Fowler – who is a burgess of Edinburgh, as his late father was, and the poor fisher Tom Nicolson.”
Andrew has some fun with Will, who is not your standard hero, possibly tall, dark and athletic. Will is presented as quite plump, according to what others characters reveal and also short in stature.
At one point he buys some fancy shoes that elevate his height!
So was any of that physical appearance based on real life?
Andrew laughed: “That is purely me. There is a mention of ‘wee Fowler’ but that could just have meant he was a junior member of his family. His mother was a notable ‘wad-wyfe’ or moneylender and she could keep all the money because she was a widow and after Will’s father was killed on the edge of the Siege of Edinburgh, his mother wisely didn’t marry again and stayed in control of her finances, quite canny – there was nothing better to be in those days than a widow!”
It is part of Will’s dilemma as to where he stands in his own heart and mind on the religious question, with his mother being a staunch Catholic while his late father was a Protestant.
In Paris, Will slips into Notre Dame to witness a service where Andrew writes about the allure of the Catholic rituals and pomp the young Scot witnesses: “Acres of stained glass, unbroken! Huge candles, the magnificent rood-screen, the saints in painted ranks, air thick with incense unwinding in speckled sunlight. The sumptuous, sweeping ecclesiastical robes of white, green, purple and gold. These giant frescoes of distant lands and Biblical scenes, dying Christs, and chaste Marys. And the music from the choir, not intoning bleak Psalms but vaulted edifices of song, flying buttresses of Fancy, intricate curls of decoration and delight. I couldn’t think for the beauty of it all. Ah, but wasn’t that the point? And with that notion, the bishop with his pointy hat and mitre, the robed priests, the tortured, exultant saints, even the soaring choir, seemed but an army of necromancers preying on my Reason, aided and abetted by music and incense.”
The good news for anyone caught up in Will’s world and his frustrated feelings for Rose set against the dangerous and quickly changing power struggles in Scotland, is that Andrew is continuing the story which will partly be set in Padua.
“Can Will find her again – and that is what I am writing now, it is going to be a trilogy,” Andrew confirmed.
But he admits he doesn’t always know how or when exactly things will happen in his writing.
“Sometimes in a novel, you just don’t know what is going to happen, until it does. Then you think ‘Oh yes, of course!’. You are not in control but I think that is what I trust about it. If I was in control and just playing God, it would be fairly predictable to me.
“It would be like a colouring-in book, things all drawn.
“But it is honestly the case that for a long time I didn’t know what was going to happen next,” he said regarding the novel.
“Knowing the history, I knew some things that would happen, but with a lot of the book, I didn’t.
“It’s like an immensely satisfying puzzle to work stuff out. It took a long time it took about four years. There was a lot of research and a lot of dead ends.
“But I have started another one – the last one – now.”
Andrew appears at Nairn Community & Arts Centre on Friday (Sept 2) at 4pm. More details: nairnfestival.co.uk
