Category: Books

A Fun Read, Terrible History: Roger MacDonald’s The Man In The Iron Mask

Just finished The Man in the Iron Mask by Roger MacDonald, which purports to solve the mystery of that enigmatic prisoner of Louis XIV.  If you’re as much of a Dumas nut as I am, it’s a blast.  What makes it fun is that d’Artagnan, M. de Treville, and even Cyrano storm across its pages along with mentions of Athos, Porthos, and Aramis.  Much of what he suggests is even plausible, which adds to the fun.  As an actual historian, the man is an utter putz–his conclusion about who the Mask actually was is based on approximately zero evidence and fairly bad speculation–for example, he never answers the question, “Well, then why didn’t the king simply have him killed?” which is an appropriate question if MacDonald’s solution is accurate.  Of course, he doesn’t cite sources except in the most cursory manner.   And he does that thing bad historians do when looking into a mystery: constantly going, “Here is the TRVTH!” rather than, “Here is why I have come to this conclusion.”  It added to the fun for me that, at his worst, he sounds a little like Paarfi–not in the way he writes, but in his insistence that, “No, really, this is what happened, honest.”

Toward the end, he discusses the French Revolution, where he proves his complete lack of knowledge (the French revolution, it seems, occurred because of the royal family’s sexual habits, and the storming of the Bastille happened because they were too slow in getting information out.  Uh huh).  But still, there are delightful moments.  “…Germain de Saint-Foix, whose shortcomings as a dramatist were rarely exposed because of his reputation as a duellist…” and I do quite agree with his conclusion that even if the story of Voltaire’s deathbed statement (when asked to renounce the devil, “Is this a time to make enemies?”) is apocryphal, he’d have said it if he’d thought of it.

So, anyway, it’s a fun ride, worthless history.

Writing Update

I’ve finished the first draft of Hawk and am presently polishing it for my critique group who will tell me it needs polishing.  And probably that it’s hopelessly broken.

But I think it came out well.  If I don’t discover, during this pass, that I left a huge plot hole or something, then I think it did what I wanted it to.

I am never, ever, writing a book that way again.

For those who want to know when it will be available, I don’t know, but when I do I’ll post it here.  Best guess would somewhere on the order of a year.

 

Another Update on Hawk: Now I’m Scared

I’m significantly past the halfway point in the rough draft, and I’ve trimmed most of the flab from it, which means I feel good about what’s left.  It’s a more dense book then some of the recent ones, I think just because the nature of the story demands a certain compression of events; it wants to keep moving.  And I am really packing on the hope-this-works stuff. By which I mean, “I’m going to throw this in as key plot point; I sure hope by the end I know why it’s there.”

In the past, I’ve pretty regularly done that, and it’s worked out well.  Sometimes I’ve had to chop things that ended up not fitting, but more often than not throwing something in just because it felt cool worked out: my subconscious would come charging in on a white horse and say, “You need that thing! Thank god it’s there!”  With this book I am, quite deliberately, piling a lot of them on top of each other; not since Taltos have I been this worried about whether the stuff I’m setting up will all come out.

I’m having fun.  With any luck, the reader will too.

I picked up the bloody pile and made my way down the stairs, passing through my lab, where I took the opportunity to burn it all before continuing out onto the streets of Adrilankha, where waited death and, you know, stuff like that.