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| (photo: Ruth Crafter) | |
Kate Mosse is the author of eight novels and short story collections, including Labyrinth, the first in the bestselling Languedoc Trilogy, and The Taxidermist's Daughter. Her latest novel, The Burning Chambers (available June 18, 2019), is the first in a planned quartet from Minotaur Books that spans a 300-year history of the Huguenots, starting with the early days of the Wars of Religion in 16th-century France. Mosse is the co-founder of the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction, and she divides her time between Chichester in West Sussex and Carcassone in the southwest of France.
The Burning Chambers is the first in a planned quartet, which is not a structure you see very often in planned novels. Why four?
I knew straight away that the book was going to finish in South Africa in the 19th century. But then I also knew that to get there, I needed to go back to the beginning of the story, which is the eve of the Wars of Religion starting in France in the 16th century. I planned an epic saga, a Romeo-and-Juliet-type story, with one Catholic family and one Huguenot (or French Protestant) family. There would be a missing will, a missing relic, a missing inheritance and a feud between these two families for 300 years. So I had the shape of the big story I wanted to tell, but I needed four books to fill that time period with a reasonable length of peoples' lives in order to get from the first generation to their descendants standing in a graveyard in Franschhoek, South Africa, in 1862.
The prologue to The Burning Chambers features one of those descendants in that same graveyard in 1862. Does that mean you had the prologue--which is also, it sounds like, the ending of the quartet--planned before you started?
I was at a literary festival in South Africa, in the town of Franschhoek, a beautiful town in the wine district of South Africa. As I was being driven towards the town, I noticed a sign with the word "Languedoc," which is the region of France that I write about. It just blew my mind. I couldn't understand why this sign was here on the other side of the world. As we got nearer, I saw that all of the names of the vineyards were French names and, in town, the main street was called Huguenot Street. And at that moment, it was like a chill went down my spine; I needed to know what the story was, what was behind this French connection to South Africa.
I went to the local museum and learned the most extraordinary bit of history. The people of the Dutch East India Company realized the land was the same as the land in the southwest of France, so invited any French Protestant refugees in Amsterdam who were winemakers to come to South Africa. Seven families sailed, and that is in part how the South African wine industry started.
Then, I went out to the Huguenot graveyard outside the museum, looked up at the amazing Franschhoek Mountains, and they looked exactly like the mountains of my beloved part of France. And at that moment, I suddenly had an image of a girl standing in a graveyard, in Franschhoek, in 1862, having carried the story of her family and their flight from persecution and their journey all over the world. I knew how I could tell the story of Huguenots, through women telling their stories going back generations.
And then of course it was years of research and getting the real history sorted, but it started in that graveyard. I don't decide to write about something. There's something that taps me on the shoulder; it's like a whispering in the landscape.
What went into your years of research for this book?
I divide my research into two types, and both are essential. The first is the book-learning research: in the archives, in museums, in libraries, reading all the texts. Investigating particular moments in the Wars of Religion. You have to know all of the history before you know what matters and what doesn't.
Once I've done that, I do foot research, as I call it. We've had a little house in Carcassone, in the southwest of France, for 30 years now. When I'm writing I go there for five days of every month to reconnect with the landscape. I have to have all of the research in my files: maps, photographs, detail, all of that. But the real emotional heart of the story begins as I walk the streets, and climb the mountains, and watch the sun go down, and I see the history in the place itself.
The Burning Chambers is rich with this historical detail, but it's also very much about everyday people.
I feel very strongly that historical fiction helps us stand in other peoples' shoes. It helps us to deal with really strong emotions that maybe, when we're reading about them in the contemporary world, are just too hard to face. But with the benefit of hindsight, and with the benefit of history, sometimes we can engage with all those very strong emotions: love, envy, war, faith.
Peoples' circumstances change from generation to generation. Peoples' opportunities, what they think is appropriate or right, what they believe. But the human heart doesn't change very much. This is what drives my writing.
For me, I want people to fall in love with the history of the Huguenots, and to admire them. I want people to fall in love with my characters, to understand what happens to them, to really feel what they feel when their world is under threat, when war destroys everything they know. That's the true history. It's those forces of history that dominate our lives now.
Readers will bring everything that's happening in the world around them when they sit down to read The Burning Chambers. I think that's one of the things that is so powerful about historical fiction. We read it in the contemporary time, but we're reading about a different period of time. The emotions, though, are the same.
Do you think that's why we've seen such a surge in popularity of historical fiction books of late?
Yes. I think it's also part of people seeing how, in many countries now, we have enormous advantages compared to the people of the past, particularly in terms of health and vaccines and opportunity. Given that, why don't things feel better? We go back to the past to try and find what happened, because everything that's gone before influences what's happening now.
A lot of people don't want to read a history book about the Wars of Religion in France, for a whole lot of reasons. But forging that human connection between characters and our own selves makes it much more pleasant--and pleasurable. We're always interested in other people. --Kerry McHugh