Sitting at my desk one day, I glanced across at the nearest bookshelf, and realized that in a single snapshot it tells the story of a writer’s life.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t really have an operating system for book arrangement. I should have, I know. Organized, logical people – those who want to be able to lay hands on a particular volume without a frenzied, chaotic search – arrange their books alphabetically by author, or thematically by subject matter. Though I have known friends (odd people, admittedly) who arrange their books by jacket colour, or height. Still, even that’s a method, whereas mine is simply haphazard. I’m sure I once started with a system (though for the life of me I can’t remember what it was) but life happened to it. Chaos intervened, as chaos will; though I do believe chaos can be a force for good, as well as for upset and mischief.

In my case fate has dictated that my books be spread across two continents: in 2005, while researching THE TENTH GIFT, my 17th century novel about Barbary pirates abducting English slaves, I travelled to North Africa and fell in love with a Berber tribesman and ended up later that year shipping the contents of my London flat, including all my books, to a remote mountain village in the south-west of Morocco.

I was still working at this point, as a publishing director for HarperCollins in London, staying on friends’ sofas till my remote-working contract kicked in. It was my husband, Abdellatif, who collected the contents of my shipping container from the docks at Casablanca, transported them via some secret Berber confederacy 500 miles to our new home and unpacked the boxes and stacked my books willy-nilly on the old pine bookcases I had bought on the Wandsworth Bridge Road in another life. And by the time I’d travelled from London to Casablanca, taken a flight south, then driven three hours over the mountains, the idea of rearranging them all was beyond me, and it just seems to have stayed that way.

Just one glance shows how randomly they were arrayed. THE POETICAL CAT sits beside a translation of a haunting Icelandic saga; Keith Roberts’ classic alternative history novel PAVANE rubs shoulders with Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s CIVILIZATIONS. There is a pretty edition of Rumi’s mystical poetry, adventure-travel tales of the Nile and the Empty Quarter and the Djema el-Fna; hero-myths of the British Isles, some of JRR Tolkien’s critical writing.

And yet… nothing in a writer’s life is truly random. We are all the sum of our influences – conscious and unconscious – our experiences in both the real and the virtual world. Everything goes into the mix, making each writer unique. Your voice, as an author, derives from the narrative structures in which you think: and those in turn derive from the distant voices of all the writers you’ve ever read and digested, each book like a fallen leaf turning slowly to mulch in the forest of your mind.

And so I see THE POETICAL CAT and remember how I wrote a series of fantastical novels featuring cats under the pseudonym of Gabriel King. Tolkien, Icelandic sagas and British hero-tales combined not only in my work as a publisher (for 15 years I was the publisher of the Tolkien list) but also formed the basis of a series of epic fantasy novels under the name of Jude Fisher. Fantasy fiction is a close cousin to historical writing: your job in both cases is to being to full and colourful life for the reader’s benefit an unfamiliar world: and reading travel writers and fiction set in different cultures (like THE KITE RUNNER) helps you marshal your descriptions in both genres. That curiosity about the unfamiliar laid the groundwork for me as a writer, and also as a person, predisposing me to step into the unknown. (Being a climber on the side also added to this predisposition: I’ve often said that setting out on the writing of any novel, but particularly historical fiction, which requires so much research underlying the structure, is much like climbing a mountain: you can see the summit way up high, hazily wreathed in clouds, but you have no precise idea of how you’ll get there or the challenges you’ll face en route, but you know you’ll have to slog it one step at a time, and occasionally take hair raising risks.)

Those travel writers and adventurers into the deserts paved the way for my SALT ROAD; Rumi makes his way into THE SULTAN’S WIFE, for my court eunuch, Nus-Nus, is something of a poet and philosopher and has a great love of Rumi’s mystical musings. Tahir Shah’s THE CALIPH’S HOUSE is a late addition to the shelf, donated by the author himself on a visit to our house in Morocco after I’d written him a fan letter. I have not yet written my own account of amusing interactions with the occasionally unfathomable, always beguiling foreign culture in which I live for much of the year, but I’m working on it.

On the shelf below the one shown lie two books that were key to my development as a reader and then later as a writer: Robert Louis Stevenson’s TREASURE ISLAND and Mary Renault’s THE PERSIAN BOY (simply one of the best historical novels ever written): a combination of adventure and accurate history, of romance and a touch of the supernatural combines with all those other influences in a large metaphysical cooking pot: the resulting stew would give you a pretty accurate recipe for ‘Jane Johnson, writer’.

So that’s a snapshot of my influences: what are yours? Why don’t you post a photo and a paragraph on https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jane-Johnson-writer/59201258923

The past is another country, goes the old saying. But what if you’re writing about the past IN another country? Or in two or three other countries? Or using different time frames for different story strands? I’ve done all this in my previous novels: talk about making a stick to beat your own back with…

Creating a sense of place is absolutely crucial in historical fiction: you have to work harder in this sort of novel than in almost any other (apart from fantasy, with which historical fiction has many parallels) to make your reader see through your eyes.

You can’t rely on a shared world view, because none of us has actually visited the seventeenth century – or if we have, reincarnation has left our memories hazy. It’s not like telling the reader that your character went to the supermarket or caught the bus to work: we all have template images for such mundane activities in our heads and it’s easy to fill in the gaps. If you’re describing Barbary raiders attacking a Cornish market town in 1625, or the inside of a slave hold, or the intricacies of a Moroccan palace, or a Tuareg encampment in the depths of the Sahara, or the view from the walls of Acre as the besieging Christian army digs its trenches, you’re going to have to put some spadework in…

The key in all descriptions is that less is more. A telling detail, a single pivotal image, will do the work of two pages of plodding literal description in capturing the setting and giving your plot and characters an authentic-feeling backdrop. It’s easy to get carried away as you conjure the scene and go on and on as yet more details occur to you. That’s fine – it’s one way of writing yourself into a scene – but remain aware that’s what you’re doing and that the long version is for your own benefit, not for the poor, beleaguered reader, who already has to held in her head the names and appearances and personalities and interactive relationships between your characters, the intricacies of the plot AND the epoch in which the story takes place, which is a lot to carry around.

So go back at revision stage and cut like crazy till you’ve got your descriptive passages down to few simple, striking details to set your scene. And remember, it’s not just about what the eye takes in, but also about other senses as well. The smells in a spice market or on a battlefield are just as likely to capture the sensation of being there as telling the reader the colour of the sky or the configuration of a town.

If you work hard enough, you can make the setting do several jobs at once. The weather can mirror a character’s inner landscape or point up the irony in a situation by being the opposite to your protagonist’s inner weather. Watching a beetle climb a sand dune or having your protagonist forge a hard passage through the desert can become a wider, deeper metaphor, just as the Tuareg saying ‘walking the salt road’ can mean many things, from the literal – following the trading route along which salt is brought from the mines in the Sahara to the markets in the north – to the metaphorical vale of tears, the metaphorical road to death. Physical confinement (by four walls or even whalebone corsetry) can suggest mental or spiritual confinement. Opulent surroundings can point up moral degradation and make satirical comment without being obviously preachy.

Getting that telling detail spot on, though, that’s the killer. Research is important to historical novelists, because authenticity is the lodestone without which your whole apparently carefully constructed edifice will come crashing down. You have to know more about the time and place in which you’re writing your story than any of your readers. There’s simply nothing worse than stumbling over an error or an anachronism as you read for throwing you out of the story. Write as if you have a panel of experts staring over your shoulder. Not in terror, but come well-prepared. Read and read and read your source material — and by that I mean go back to primary sources, don’t just rely on 3rd and 4th hand popular distillations by the latest favoured academic, or other historical novelists’ versions of the past. You have to make your setting your own. Visit the sites of your story if you can, imagine yourself back in whatever century you’re writing about. If you can’t physically visit a place, even Google Earth can get you some of the way. But there’s no substitute for a bit of good, old-fashioned writer’s imagination. Absorb your research till there’s no obvious sign of it as you write, and then cut, cut cut!

Be sparing, that’s the key. Don’t bog your readers down in a churned-up mire of complicated description: it can slow the pace of the book down and make the reading experience painfully hard going. But make it sharp and vivid enough and you can transport them into your story as if carrying them there on a magic carpet.

On the day of THAT(cher, yes indeed obscenely expensive) FUNERAL, a local man in this corner of rural Morocco was also interred. It was a much simpler and far more dignified event to the grand guignol pageant taking place in London. In the local tradition, this gentleman was not even named at the mosque – an announcement being made only that “a man has passed away” – nor singled out for any special treatment, nor buried in a different fashion to anyone else who has died in the area, even though he was deeply respected and dedicated his life to working for this community.

He died only yesterday: by 9am today he had been prepared for burial by prayers and ritual washing, had been wound in a shroud of white cotton, placed on a wicker stretcher and carried by friends and family members to the burial place – an open square of rough ground surrounded by a wall beneath the rose-red granite of the mountains.

The graves here are marked only by small stones without inscription, since all men and women are equal in the sight of God. There are no grotesque sarcophagi or grandiose mausolea adorned with weeping angels; no maudlin verses or ostentatious carvings extolling the individual’s extraordinary achievements in life. No need or requirement here for people to strive for importance or recognition: here you are judged by your acts.

This local dignitary was simply lowered into the ground, the standard prayers were said over the corpse and the displaced earth and stones were replaced on top of it. And then thorn branches were laid on top of the new grave to keep feral dogs or jackals from digging up the body. Those will remain in place for 40 days, until the flesh has been taken into soil and there is no likelihood that carrion animals will disturb the grave, and then a wake will be given (by friends and neighbours, so that the grieving family are not put to trouble), and a flat stone will be placed over the grave.

And that is how all people here are buried. Because death is seen as a natural part of the human condition. Here, people are regarded as taking their place within the cycle of life, not elevated into something pretentious and puffed-up and self-important.

On the roof of every ancient Berber house you pass you will see shards of stone pointing to the sky. They are not there for decoration, but to remind us that although the world seems solid and we are rooted to the earth on which we walk, we are transient beings, and our possessions and houses are only transitory, and that one day our speck of life will wink out of existence.

I find this a great deal more peaceful and sane than a charade of horse-drawn carriages, trumpets, people in fancy dress costumes and theatrical arias. And a great deal more dignified, too.

You don’t expect to go for your Moroccan state medical and fail on mental grounds, but I may just have done that.

Down to the “hospital” I went, prepared for a bit of classic Moroccan bureaucracy (lots of waiting around, desultory questions, forms to be filled out a dozen times by hand, and the inevitable thud thud thud of different coloured ink stamps). All went as one might expect: the usual tedium, lack of queuing or any sense of visible system and then a swift assessment of height, weight, blood pressure, attestation of no transmissible dieases.

So far, so good. Then came the eye test…

After some rummaging, the doctor found a dusty sight chart in a chaos of a cupboard, beckoned me to follow him into the reception area and hung it on a distant door, in full view of the waiting roomful of ladies in their black tamelhafts, with the edges pulled over their faces at the sight of a foreigner, their completely unbashful children, who ran up to me and poked me in the arm or leg to see if my white skin was real, and a number of elderly gents in scuffed babouches and skullcaps who shot sideways glances at me and smirked. Things were looking up: they would have entertainment while they waited!

I was not to disappoint, though it seemed at first as if it was all going to go swimmingly: for the eye-chart appeared to consist entirely of strange squared-off Ms and Es. I prepared myself for an easy test.

The doctor, a man in late middle age with a lugubrious expression and a small and scraggly beard that appeared to have as little energy as the rest of us in the unseasonal heat, told me to cover my right eye and pointed on the chart to an E.

“E,” I said confidently.

He shook his head, pointed to another letter. “M.”

I could pretty much see him roll his eyes from where I stood, so clearly my sight was pretty good: he was a fair distance away. “Oho,” he said (that’s Berber for ‘no’) and then reeled off some long explanation that I didn’t catch at all.

We tried again with the other eye. “Er, E?” I said tentatively.

Furious head-shaking. Utter confusion.

And then, suddenly, I got it, and once I had I couldn’t get the answers out for giggling.

This is a rural area in Morocco in which, until recently, few people have been literate. The chart showed only Es – on their sides, their backs, their fronts. You just point in the direction of the tangs of the letter.

So much for my three degrees in literature, ancient languages and lecturing! So much for being an official cultural ambassasor between my two countries! The word IMBECILE has now probably been enshrined on my national identity card…

Jewellery is enshrined at the heart of the culture in North Africa. Every woman has her own trove of treasured pieces, often reserved for weddings and special occasions. Here I am, wearing a Berber wedding crown and lots of local jewellery. In past times, when people were nomadic, or less settled than they are today, jewellery was your portable wealth: easy to pack up and take with you wherever you went. And in marriage contracts, jewellery always remained in the woman’s possession even when she divorced, so to acquire good pieces, and to persuade your husband to buy them for you, was a shrewd strategy for ensuring continued solvency in uncertain times.

You’ll remember that a Tuareg amulet was at the heart of THE SALT ROAD: we’ve had several requests from readers to find them something similar, but authentic amulets are hard to come by. My husband Abdel has been trawling the markets and tracking down traders of Tuareg jewellery, and has found a number of lovely pieces made by local and Saharan artisans. Some are for women, but some work equally well on men, as you can see:

The workmanship on the traditional jewellery is lovely, full of symbolic detail, meaningful within the culture. Here, for example, a detail from a traditional necklace, are symbols – sharp and pointy – for warding off the Evil Eye:

Abdel has set up a Facebook page for anyone interested in these beautiful objects, and included many that are for sale.

https://www.facebook.com/#!/BerberTuaregJewellery

(you’ll need to paste this line into your browser)

Here, for example, is a truly stunning Berber collar made of solid silver (it’s very weighty, but not uncomfortable) turquoise and coral:

And here is a selection of earrings. I wear a pair of Berber silver earrings every day – they seem to go with everything. As do the pair of slim silver bracelets once given to me by an old lady when we visited her house. I was wearing very little jewellery and she took pity on me, thinking me poor, stripped two of her twenty-odd bracelets from her wrist and gave them to me. An extraordinary gesture of generosity so typical of Morocco. I wear them alongside a silver bangle made by a friend in Cornwall and another made by talented jeweller Hannah Willow, featuring one of her trademark hares and a nubbin of turquoise and another of amber. The collection is remarkably complementary, which says something quite unexpectedly profound, I think, about the commonality of our human experience.

So, you’ve written THE END on your magnum opus: what next?

Everyone will have their own rituals for coping with this momentous and (be honest) traumatic time.

Conflicting emotions converge: relief (at last, at last!), triumph (I’ve just written the best book in the world!), doubt (or have I?), terror (oh no, now someone else will have to read it)… And that odd sense of being uprooted out of a place you’ve inhabited for months or years. The world yawns out into a void before you. What am I going to do with myself now? How can I escape all those chores I’ve been putting off? Empty hours stretch forbiddingly ahead – well, they did for me this weekend. Last weekend, I wrote those two little words at the bottom of the 493rd page of my epic manuscript and sat there staring at them, feeling… well, if truth be told, a little bleak.

As a publishing editor as well as a writer I know only too well that THE END might as well read THE BEGINNING. Because ‘finishing’ your text means there are a whole lot of other things that don’t have much to do with the white heat of the creative process but a great deal to do with professionalism and the business of being a writer.

As I say, everyone will have their own rituals when finishing a novel manuscript, but here are the ones I’ve settled on after finishing 15 of them now:
1.CELEBRATE

By God, you’ve earned it! Treat yourself, mark the occasion somehow. I work during the week so I only write at weekends: it can take a long time to complete a project, and this particular epic has taken the best part of 3 years’ researching and writing. However, in the Moroccan village where I live for half the year and where I happen to be at the moment, there are not that many opportunities for frivolity. I can’t nip out and buy some nice shoes, or go out for a meal, or a bottle of champagne, or visit the cinema. So I had a large glass of red wine and settled down to watch Homeland on DVD, which I’d been saving for just such an occasion. It was a disappointment, actually, but don’t get me started.
2.TAKE SOME TIME OFF

Give yourself a couple of days of not writing anything at all. Yes, your story-brain will be chattering away trying to catch your attention; all those other ideas that were stashed away and told to wait while you finished this beast suddenly think it’s their turn at the head of the queue. Tell them to shut up and leave you in peace, because this novel’s not finished yet. Those two little words – THE END – are just sitting there, mocking you.

3.GET RID OF THE EMOTION

By now, if you’re anything like me, you’ll be feeling revulsion for your text. It is, quite clearly, fit only for the Trash icon. Or, if you’re not like me, you’ll be thinking it’s the best thing since sliced bread and congratulating yourself on the tumultuous reception it’s going to achieve, taking the book world by storm. Neither of these emotions is useful to you at this stage: get rid of them. Because now it’s time to get down to the nuts and bolts.
4.SPELLCHECK

Yes, it’s boring. You think you’ve been doing it all the way through, that there’s nothing left to catch, but you’ll be wrong. It’s boring but it’s necessary. Good impressions – on your agent, your publisher, your readers – are crucial, and nothing makes a worse first impression than sloppiness. So go through with your spellchecker: you’ll be amazed at what you catch. Keep a piece of paper at hand and jot down things that catch your eye as you go. There will be plenty. Did that character really have brown eyes? Didn’t I spell that name differently in Chapter 9? Is that date correct? Did I make that up or is it actual history? Oh, no, didn’t I kill that character in the battle on page 276? Don’t worry: all these things can be caught and addressed in…
5.THE GO-BACK POINTS

That bit of paper kept at your elbow is a very handy thing. I keep mine there through the writing process too and jot down things I need to fix but can’t afford to address at the time for fear of breaking the flow. So now’s the time to catch the beggars and sort them out.
6.THE READ-THROUGH

This is the Big One. The read-through and final edit. If you’re going to do this properly it takes time, so set a weekend aside, because reading it properly means reading it aloud to yourself, and then fixing the million-and-one vexatious repetitions, clumsinesses, unnecessary adjectives, adverb and general frippery we are all guilty of. It’s a horrible, painful, cringe-making business. You will castigate yourself as the world’s worst writer. You will despise anyone who ever saw anything worthwhile in your work. You will feel, again, like consigning it to the Trash.

Don’t.

By the time you’ve done this you’ll have the entire book in your head in its complete and shaped form. For the first time ever. Now’s the time to walk around it and really appreciate what you’ve made out of nothing but your own great big beautiful imagination. Cherish this moment: it’ll never come again. At this point you could go on Mastermind with your novel as your specialist subject and win. But there will come a time, maybe even days hence, when you will forget the reason you kept a vital piece of information up your sleeve, the date of a crucial battle, the need to have the material in Chapter 5 separating that in 6 and 7, even the name of a key character.

7.SLEEP ON IT

Not literally, of course. Go to sleep instructing yourself to have a last gentle think about your book. If your brain is suspiciously quiet in the morning, ie. that it isn’t screaming at you that you forgot something vital, I reckon you can consider your novel finished.

And that’s when the really tough stuff begins. But that’s a subject for next time…

Authorial Voice In Historical Novels

 

Finding the voice that conveys the story you want to tell in the way you want to tell it is the key behind the writing of all fiction, but there are perhaps more minefields for the writer of historical novels to pick their way through than any other genre, except perhaps epic fantasy, with which the genre has a great deal in common.

It can be fatally tempting to show off your knowledge of the period in which you’re writing by peppering your work with an immense number of historical words and phrases, to adopt an archaic tone or sentence structure to remind the reader that they are in a different place and time. And the surfaces of fiction can be very addictive. You can self-edit and embroider to your heart’s content, tightening your prose word by word until you tie yourself up in knots, or until the reading experience is like wading through treacle. Oh, you may want to avoid mixed metaphors too.

Believe me, I know the dangers, and have come across these errors as an editor and tumbled into these pitfalls a writer! But the trouble is, there really are no rules. So much of the voice in which a historical novel is told has to do with personal taste. Just take a look at the four examples below, taken almost at random off my bookshelves:

1.

“Are you asleep now?”

“No. Thinking.”

“Thomas,” she says, sounding shocked, “it’s three o’clock.”

And then it is six. He dreams that all the women of England are in bed, jostling and pushing him out of it. So he gets up, to read his German book, before Liz can do anything about it.

2.

“You ain’t a bad dancer at all, Kit. Dashed if I don’t think you’ll shine ’em all down!”

“Oh!” cried Kitty, a little out of breath, but triumphant. “Do you think so indeed, Freddy?”

“Shouldn’t be at all surprised. What I mean is, when you’ve rid yourself of this devilish trick you have of treading on me every now and then.”

3.

“Go to bed, you.”

I tell her to take a lamp to the library.

“What you work on?”

“Tragedy,” I say.

“Hey, f*** you. You don’t want to tell me, I’m nothing, don’t tell me. Your wife tell me the other day, maybe. She like to talk.”

My wife likes to talk? “Goodness.”

4.

As their pursuers swarmed after them he bombarded them blithely with geranium pots, chanting, “Ding ye the tane and I the uther” as she helped him, so that children screamed and dogs barked and a man in his night shirt, opening shutters, discharged an arquebus into the night air and dislodged an entire family of Jupiter, Ganymede and an eagle from a cornice. “A sangre! A fuego! A sacco!” sang out Francis Crawford: and seizing her hand, set off running again.

In what period is that first small scene set? You’d be hard pressed to know from reading it out of context: this could be a married couple from any time in history, or from a completely contemporary novel.

On the other hand, the second excerpt feels very specific (to me) in its time and setting: the phrasing, the use of archaic terms – ‘dashed’, ‘shine ’em’, ‘devilish’ tells me we’re firmly in the Regency period.

Example three, though, with its use of an Anglo Saxon expletive and its modern phrasing could easily throw you off the scent of its time and setting.

Excerpt four, adopting the most mannered style of all, tells me a great deal more about who the author is, if not necessarily the setting or period.

All four of these very different writers are quite brilliant in their own way, and all have the confidence and experience to tread dangerous paths through their own personal minefields. Two of these writers (2 and 4) are known for the arch playfulness of their authorial voices – an extremely dangerous game unless you are quite a virtuoso in the use of language, and completely at home in the period in which you set your stories. I don’t recommend it to newcomers! And it must be said, it requires a good deal more concentration and investment on the part of the reader.

The other two writers (1 and 3) have opted for a first person, present tense narrative, and at the same time a very economic, simple and contemporary voice. It’s a device I adopted for the telling of The Sultan’s Wife, and it’s really useful for plunging the reader immediately into the reality of your historical world, and into the head of your protagonist – particularly useful if you are voicing your story through a character who might otherwise be tough to identify with – in 1) Thomas Cromwell, in 3) Aristotle and in The Sultan’s Wife a black eunuch in the Moroccan court.

But experiment to your heart’s content: it’s huge fun playing in the enormous sandpit of history, and no one can tell you what to do: your authorial voice is yours and yours alone. Trial and error is your best policy, so go forth with a brave heart and a sharp sword, or an arquebus, or a QWERTY keyboard, and good luck!

So, have you guessed the titles and authors of the excerpts I chose?

1. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

2. Cotillion, Georgette Heyer

3. The Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon

4. Checkmate, Dorothy Dunnett

Writer and blogger Andrew Buckley has posted this hour-long podcast with me talking about Tolkien, fantasy, publishing and the writer’s life. It was great fun doing the interview, Andrew asked some great questions and I thoroughly enjoyed chatting about my life as a young savage and how I came to ge stuck on a Moroccan mountain and met my Berber husband!

http://www.planetkibi.com/write-out-loud.html

As some of you know, occasionally I write under names not my own. Jude Fisher is one of my pseudonyms, and apart from an epic fantasy trilogy called FOOL’S GOLD published in the 1990s, it is also the name under which I have written three Visual Companions to Peter Jackson’s magnificent LORD OF THE RINGS films, and now one for the first of his HOBBIT movies: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY. This role derives from my utter love for the works of JRR Tolkien, a passion that has steered much of my life, providing me with entry into my career as a publisher (during which time I was responsible for publishing the Tolkien list for well over a decade, including commissioning artists Alan Lee and John Howe to illustrate the books, artists who were then destined to become the movies’ Conceptual Artists), with my fascination with Iceland and Old Norse legends and literature, with becoming a writer, with providing me with some of my best friends and waking in me a great love of the wild outdoors and a sense of adventure.

All these elements come together in THE HOBBIT and are faithfully served by the film-maker and his epic team. I’ve been lucky enough to see The Hobbit movie twice this week, once on a special early viewing for staff at HarperCollins at the Vue in Westfield, and rather amazingly the following day (on the auspicious, once-in-a-lifetime date of 12/12/12) at the Royal Premiere at the Odeon in London’s Leicester Square.

Seeing it twice has been very useful. This is – after a slightly overlong beginning – a fast and busy first film with a great deal of work to do: introducing us to a large cast of new characters, as well as reacquainting us with returning personnel and setting up a story that not only follows (largely faithfully) the events in Tolkien’s classic novel, but also setting up the great big, dark, complex chapter of Middle-earth history that pre-dates by sixty years events in THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

If you read the two novels – one a classic children’s adventure story, the other a massive epic romance – you’d be hard pressed to fit them together. The tone of each is different, the former being jokey, conversational, simplistic in its structure, the latter lyrical, dense, multi-stranded. I think one of the great successes of this first HOBBIT movie is the way the two stories weave together, bridging that sixty-year gap by some lovely back-and-forth shuttling with Ian Holm as old Bilbo and Elijah Wood returning as Frodo on the day of the birthday party, by showing us the nascent evil that will soon infect Middle-earth, dipping into the appendices of LORD OF THE RINGS and even into THE BOOK OF LOST TALES to fill the large gaps between the two books and weaving the trailing threads of each into a coherent whole.

The performances are excellent. Andy Serkis steals the entire show as Gollum in the Riddles in the Dark section, picking up the schizoid character he created so powerfully in the original movies to marvellous effect, by turns comic and sinister. The improved technology developed in the intervening decade enables a Gollum with beautifully nuanced facial expressions which are recognizably the actor’s. Martin Freeman takes Bilbo on a proper journey, from being a fusty stay-at-home hobbit more concerned with his mother’s crockery than going on an adventure, through bumbling, horse-hair allergies and hankerings for home, to a true hero: one who understands the peril in which he places himself and even so takes the decision to face down evil against unimaginable odds.

Richard Armitage takes Thorin Oakenshield – the grim, burdened, sometimes obtuse character Tolkien created – and invests him with such determined heroism and nobility that on meeting him you cannot help but want to fall to your knees to hail him as the Dwarven King. Magesterial.

The Company is nicely varied, each dwarf individualized in looks and character, though it would have been nice to have a little less frenzied action and a little more time in which to appreciate their differences. But we do have two more movies to come in which I hope there will be more opportunity to get to know them better. Barry Humphries’ Great Goblin is a treat, with his gross wattle and nastily urbane manner; Sylvester McCoy is a batty, bonkers Radagast, as you’d expect, with birds nesting in his hair and a crazy bunny-drawn sled. The Wargs slather, the Orcs snarl, the Eagles are sublime; Galadriel and Elrond look even better than they did a decade ago and Gandalf is the ur-wizard once more.

After the slightly overlong introduction in Bag End the action is fast and frantic and the two and three quarter hours whizz by. The additions to the original in large part smooth out some of the original storytelling and work very well: there are far fewer liberties taken than you’d imagine. If I have any criticism at all it is that there is just too much action, and all of it dialled to the max. There is just too much to look at, and in 3D that means bits blurring and being indistinct, a great shame given the spectacular work put in by Weta and the Art Department on the meticulous scene setting and special effects: there’s simply not enough time for the audience to appreciate it, no time for the eye to linger: the Company is immediately off on another chase, being menaced by yet another peril. This is where the original novel shows its limitations, and where, by being faithful to the bead-on-a-string linear structure, the movie is similarly limited.

But when all is said and done I don’t believe there is any other moviemaking team in the world who could have brought the story to life in the way that Peter Jackson and his cast and crew have done, and although a Guillermo del Toro-directed HOBBIT would surely have been an intriguing oddity I for one am happy to see a recognizable Middle-earth back on our screens.

And I can’t wait to see that vast eye – opening for a few chilling seconds beneath the dwarves’ lost, glittering gold-hoard – reveal itself as the ‘furnace on wings’ that is that great and magnificent fire-drake from the north, the mighty Smaug. What treats we have in store.

Review copyright Jane Johnson 2012, images copyright Warner Brothers 2012, except for A Conversation With Smaug, copright George Allen & Unwin Publishers 1937

Here’s Penguin’s lovely paperback cover for release in February 2013. I must thank Katie Fforde, Essie Fox, Daisy Goodwin, Ben Kane and Stuart MacBride for giving it such lovely quotes. It’s nice to know it appeals to such a wide audience, working for writers of romance, historical fiction and thrillers.