For several years now, ever since my doctor advised me to forget about buying green bananas and put my affairs in order instead, I’ve been experimenting with short forms of fiction that, for years, I had left unexplored. I don’t know why that was. It may simply have been because my publishers, throughout the world, were predominantly top-tier, traditional houses that published “big” books. For upwards of two decades, then, on both sides of the millennium, I researched and wrote a string of hefty novels that included two trilogies and the four concluding novels of the nine-volume Arthurian cycle, set in Roman Britain in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, that is known in Canada as A Dream of Eagles and in the US as The Camulod Chronicles.
Then, faced suddenly in 2017 with the strong probability of imminent death, I was forced to choose between continuing to write as I had before—which would entail more years of research than I might be able to handle—or tackling another form of writing altogether, that indistinct, hazily defined form I had never understood and always avoided: short fiction, or the world of short stories and novellas.
With the exception of a single period when I was physically and mentally debilitated and unable to write at all, it never once crossed my mind that I might simply give up writing entirely. Plenty of time to stop writing, I remember thinking, once I’ve stopped breathing.
It didn’t take long for the pleasures and the challenges of writing in the new format to kick in: I quickly discovered the practical importance of brevity, tension, terseness, tightness of focus, and shorter word counts, all dictated by the enormous discipline entailed in switching from long, discursive narrative to tight, succinct storytelling. Both forms have their own rules and rigours, and both demand the same expertise and skill: the deceptively easy-looking techniques of using and manipulating the nuances of our magnificently complex language to generate structure that is silken and transparent in its smooth integrity.
But where to begin?
That was a tough one, because I had no idea of where I actually wanted to go. I found—and sometimes I still find—the prospect of “shortness” intimidating, never having felt a need to constrain the free-wheeling narrative style that I had developed over a lifetime. Reorienting myself to work with greater focus in order to say as much with fewer words was, almost instantly, an existential dilemma for me. How could I abandon all my stylistic quirks and still remain the writer I had been? I fretted about that for months, beating myself up, until I remembered a short story that I had written years earlier for a long since defunct American publication called Paradox, a magazine of speculative and historical fiction. It was the only short story I had ever written, and I wrote it because I was intrigued at the time by how the kernel of the tale had first occurred to me. And it had actually been published! And long afterwards, just before I fell ill, someone had wanted to reprint it, though nothing ever came of that because other things came to usurp my attention about then.
I dug up that story and read it, and was surprised to discover that it held together remarkably well for a one-off side trip. I took the time to analyze it, paying attention to what made it work, and quickly realized that it worked for precisely the same reason that my novels worked: it brought its characters instantly to life, presenting them as credible and, above all, genuinely human. And so I decided to have another go at short stories.
Since then, I’ve been beavering away happily again, confident in what I have done in creating this collection, and that original story, “Power Play,” is part of it. I have discovered, to my absolute, unanticipated delight, that this “new” medium is one to which I’ve been able to adapt with far more ease and mental satisfaction than I had ever thought possible, and the result is a growing collection of new material, far different from anything I’ve done in the past—a new body of work I’m looking forward to publishing.
This particular collection came into being because I realized that, in the course of a long and fortunate career as an internationally published author, I had never written about my boyhood in Scotland in the 1940s and ’50s. The more I thought about that, the more strangely disloyal it seemed, and as my boyhood memories returned to me, sometimes with stark clarity, I began to discern how several seminal moments had influenced the man I later became. Since then, in writing these stories and revisiting the memories that kick-started them, it became clear to me that I had been indelibly influenced by several recurrent notions and preoccupations that I had never recognized were there inside me.
I came to realize that the Elysian Fields I played in as a boy—vast tracts of cultivated, manicured acres that we took for granted and thought of, simply, as “the Estates”—were among the twentieth century’s last remaining traces of the society of aristocrats, known as the landed gentry, that had, for hundreds of years, deemed our families to be beneath them: the working classes, unfit to pass through their privileged gates except as menial servants. And even then, it was not until much later that I became aware that common working people had no rights in the face of that same sense of entitlement and privilege: no working man’s word had any validity against the laws governing property or trespass; working people, at the end of the Second World War, still had to do as they were told, and I remember seeing, in 1944, the intolerant, patriarchal old laird whose dilapidated manor house was far fallen into tree-screened decay less than half a mile from our house lash his whip across one of his farmhands who had not been quick enough to open the gate for the old man’s pony and trap. “Old Cummy,” as he was known (for Cummings), was typical of the local power brokers who owned the surrounding lands and employed working-class policemen to safeguard both their privileges and their prejudices. And so, decades later, I found myself consumed with the idea of power and how it can be exercised tyrannically by small numbers of self-serving people manipulating others on a grand scale in order to protect their own narrow interests.
Working-class people, for example, were banned from first-class railway travel in those days. Working-class people didn’t register in the awareness of the governing classes. They simply couldn’t win at anything significant until they experienced two successive world wars and returned home from each of them only to discover that nothing had changed and their sacrifices were largely perceived as useless, taken for granted by their so-called betters. Only then, like the angry Samson, did they mobilize twentieth-century socialism and use it to pull the entire patriarchal edifice down around them in ruins, in Scotland, anyway. But as recently as the early 1950s, the same old rules applied: in religious matters, in the administration of criminal justice, in banking, in school segregation, in dress and deportment, and in the carefully engineered “sectarian violence” fostered by leaders on both sides to keep Protestants and Catholics constantly and increasingly at odds with one another. All of these things were endemic to the class system practised in Scotland—and throughout Britain, if the truth be told.
One of the most telling condemnations I ever heard on that topic of class distinction was voiced by the actor Michael Caine. He had been receiving plaudits from a TV interviewer on 60 Minutes for his standout performance in the movie Zulu—his first major film role—as the young lieutenant who received the Victoria Cross for his heroic defence of a river ford called Rorke’s Drift, on the border of Natal and Zululand, where he rallied a tiny garrison of 137 men to withstand a 4,000-strong force of Zulu warriors in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. Caine said that the situation was ironic, because had the movie been filmed in the UK, he would never have been allowed, as a common Londoner with a Cockney accent, to play the role of Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead. And there, in a nutshell, he encapsulated the suffocating, pretentious hypocrisy of the British class system and the powers of perception, patronage, and paternalism it was established to defend. The mantra of that system, “Do as you’re told,” is the very antithesis of “Here, let me show you.”
That paternalism, combined over centuries with the British mythical stiff upper lip and dour Scots-Calvinist puritanism, generated in Britain, and far more noticeably in Scotland, a national inability to express emotion or to display love, warmth, or affection, even among close family members. Anger and resentment were easy. Love or tolerance, not quite so simple. The alienation between fathers and sons is a time-honoured trope in literature, but nowhere, I believe, has it ever come close to depicting the total lack of overt affection, or even visible paternal pride, that existed in the Scotland wherein my friends and I spent our boyhood. For affection, understanding, and real companionship in the late 1940s and early 1950s, all of us, without exception, turned away from our families and looked outside. Not much has changed today in that regard; the old rules hold true everywhere. But I’d still bet the farm today, fifty years later, that it’s worse where I came from than it has ever been where I am now.
That’s where all these stories sprang from, and I had no idea they were ready to emerge. I wrote them remembering the way things had been in my own boyhood, and the more I recalled, the deeper I dug and the more conscientiously I wrote. And now all those themes, memes, and dreams are no longer locked inside me. They are out in the open, in this collection, because every story in here had its genesis, one way or another, in wartime and postwar Scotland.
I hope you’ll enjoy them. I’ll have more for you soon.
Jack Whyte
Kelowna, BC, Canada
July 2020