A Difficult Girl: Frances Thomas

The first two volumes in my Girls of Troy trilogy tell the stories of young women caught up in the events of the Trojan War. They were people whom I found sympathetic – in the first, Helen’s Daughter, Hermione wrestles with the problems of having a famous mother and feeling deserted by her; in the second, The Burning Towers,  Eirene, slave to the princess Cassandra, observes the terrible war in Troy at first hand.  I knew that the last story, now called The Silver-Handled Knife, would have to deal with later  events in Mycenae; when Agamemnon returns from the war, his wife Clytemnestra murders him, and his daughter Electra and her brother Orestes plan their  revenge.

The story would have to be told, as the other two were, in the first person, and for a long time I determined that I couldn’t tell the story through Electra’s voice.  A girl who is implicated in the killing of her mother; what  sort of a story for young people is that? So I was going to use her younger sister ,Chrysosthemis , as the narrator  – Chrysosthemis would observe what was going on, and report on it.  The only problem, I began to realise as I embarked on this, was that Chysosthemis didn’t really have a story of her own. It was boring. I was bored.

            

And something else was tugging at my writer’s conscience. If I was finding the story of Electra a difficult one to come to terms with, then that was the story I should be writing, and the story that my readers would want to know about.  Electra makes an appearance as a rather strait-laced teenager in Helen’s Daughter – Hermione doesn’t like her very much.  How does this young girl change into the person who hates her mother so much that she hands her brother the knife used to murder her?  It’s this transformation that’s interesting, and only Electra herself can tell this story – it’s not something that can be observed by a third person.

                        

So I gave Electra a voice and let her explain herself to my readers.

           

Personally, I feel some sympathy for Clytemnestra. As well as being an unfaithful boor, Agamemnon had ordered the sacrifice of  their eldest daughter Iphigenia  just so the goddess would grant him a favourable wind. I reckoned if anyone killed my daughter I’d want to take terrible revenge too. And her lover Aegisthus, although he wanted to take over the kingdom, was nicer to her than her own husband had been. But Electra had to feel none of this sympathy; the hatred she developed for her mother must override all other feelings.

There are softening elements– her relationship with her brother Orestes, and her cousin Hermione. Electra and Hermione find themselves drawn together by the difficult events in their pasts, and end up almost  good friends. And there’s a romance in the air for Electra too – I didn’t make this up; it’s to be found in the mythological sources from which I take my story. (one of the nice surprises when you write historical fantasy is if you’re ever a bit stuck for a plot development, you can often find a solution in mythology, rather than inventing something from scratch)  Electra finds it hard to be in love after the experiences she’s had at the hands of her mother and Aegisthus, but she learns to allow this strange new feeling into her heart.  The story ends at this point, but I hope she’ll be happy.

So, does it work? Will my readers find some sympathy with Electra, in spite of what she does?  I hope so; but what I’ve found out over the last months, is that there are benefits as well as problems in writing about a difficult girl.

The Silver-Handled Knife will be published by SilverWood Books on September 1^st.  Helen’s Daughter and The Burning Towers are available on Amazon. For more details about them and my other books, please see my website at www.francesthomas.org

                       

A Bracelet of Bright Hair - Frances Thomas

This was a book I never meant to write. When I say ‘meant’ there were none of the usual scribbled plans and dodgy diagrams and imaginary family trees that usually precede starting a book. I hadn’t dreamed about writing it, or worked out various versions of it inside my head. It simply started as a plan for myself, as I realised with a jolt that I’d more or less stopped reading poetry and it was about time to start again. So – a new poem every day – that was my plan. Still didn’t mean to write a book. Of course I had to keep a list of the poems I’d read, and I had to jot down my impressions, otherwise with my fairly rubbish memory, I’d forget everything.

But then a strange thing happened. The poems I chose and the day’s events started to become closely linked together. Sometimes it was obvious – a snowy day, so a poem about snow. Sometimes less so; I found that a particular experience in my mind was always bound up with a particular poem. For example, as I sat in a speeding express train, a child’s poem would always be running through my head in time to the rhythm of the wheels; Faster than fairies, faster than witches… Sometimes a line from a half forgotten poem just flashed into my head and I had to track it down – only to find that it too was linked to what I was doing that day. Sometimes I found a poem new to me and was so excited I couldn’t wait to share it. By now, I was starting to imagine a reader. The thing is, even though I’d forgotten it, poetry hadn’t forgotten me; it was embedded in my bones, entwined in my DNA.

And I knew that I wasn’t alone in this; most people of my generation have had poetry instilled into them at school. We didn’t always like the poems, or appreciate having to learn them by heart, but they’re still there, inside us. And maybe there’s a younger generation who feel more tentative about approaching poetry – I hope this might be a book that will open a door into traditional poetry for them. Traditional – because I had to regretfully take the decision to exclude copyright poems from the finished book; it would have added too many costs and complications. But though I lost some lovely poems that way, so many remain. Here’s a poem that I remember first reading as a student – I loved it then and I love it now. The image of a lonely Caesar in the tent poring over maps - even though he’s probably planning to slaughter hapless Gauls – is one which has haunted me for years: the intense concentration of a moment that’s a turning point in history.

Long-legged Fly
W.B. Yeats

That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.

That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most slowly if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That no-body looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.

That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope’s chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on the scaffolding reclines
Michael Angelo,
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
Like a long legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence