S.J. Parris: HERESY

In today's guest post, S.J. Parris, the author of Heresy talks about where in history she found her main character, how she was able to re-create him by adding her imagination to the facts and why she has grown so attached.

Whenever I’ve been involved in book groups, I’ve noticed that the books we’ve had the most fun discussing have been those that divided people’s opinions, or at least worked up a bit of debate. It’s great if everyone’s enjoyed a book (and that’s certainly the author’s hope!) but as a reader it’s always livelier if you find yourself defending a character or incident against someone else’s very different interpretation of it.

As an author, you grow very close to your characters over the course of writing a book, and naturally you hope that your readers will grow to share some of that affection; it’s hard to take much interest in the outcome of a story if you haven’t grown to care about the protagonists. I was fortunate enough to find a great character in the history books, which made my job much easier: all I had to do was reinvent him as a hero that modern readers would find sympathetic.

I first encountered Giordano Bruno, the central character of my novel Heresy, when I was studying the Tudor age at university. I thought at the time what a fantastic character he would make for a novel, given his rich and varied life: Bruno was a Dominican friar whose appetite for unorthodox ideas meant he had to flee his monastery and become a fugitive from the Roman Inquisition. His own writings and contemporary accounts of him suggest he was witty, charismatic, stubborn and often difficult, but that everyone wanted him at their dinner table for his brilliant conversation and daring ideas. He must have been quite some talker; in five years he went from fugitive heretic to personal philosopher to the king of France. There is some speculation among historians that while he lived in England, he worked as a spy for Elizabeth I’s government, and this theory gave me the springboard I needed to create a series of stories around him.

The real-life Bruno seemed to have equal talent for making powerful friends and enemies, and I wanted my character to reflect this. But I also wanted to show his more reflective side and give a glimpse into how vulnerable he feels at times. Bruno lives in exile, unable to return to his own country because his original and unusual ideas (he believed that the universe was infinite, and dabbled in ancient Egyptian magic) would earn him a death sentence from the Holy Office. He is desperately ambitious for his ideas, but as a foreigner, without a family name, land or title of his own, his very existence is a precarious balance, always dependent on his wit and personality to attract a powerful patron who will support and protect him.

Being a spy also necessarily presents Bruno with a moral dilemma: for his own survival, and indeed the good of the Queen and the Protestant faith, he is obliged to deceive the people around him in order to find out what he needs to know. But his own conscience struggles with this when it comes to betraying the trust of individuals. Ruthlessness does not come easily to him, since he knows better than anyone that matters of faith are never black and white.

Another consequence of Bruno’s precarious status is the impossibility of forming lasting relationships with women. Almost nothing is known of the real Bruno’s personal relationships, so I was free to invent anything I wanted. Sophia Underhill is a fictional creation, though at the time the story is set, Oxford did appoint its first married head of a college, so it’s not entirely impossible for the Rector to be living there with his family. In Elizabethan times, very few women were educated to a high degree, and then only the daughters of the nobility—universities were strictly for the boys—so I have stretched the imagination a little in making Sophia as well-read as she is. But I could not imagine Bruno really falling for any woman who was not his equal in intelligence, and Sophia presents him with another dilemma—he knows that he has no means to marry her, so by rights he should not even attempt to pursue any relationship with her.

Usually when I finish a book I feel rather sad to leave behind characters I have spent most of my time with for the best part of a year, so the really great thing about writing a series of novels is that I don’t have to say goodbye to Bruno just yet. I felt I’d grown to know him better over the course of Heresy, and I’m looking forward to taking him through his next adventure. I hope readers will feel the same.

--S.J.Parris - www.heresybook.com