DELICATE BALANCE
Fantasy meets Irish history
Author Jodi McIsaac came up with a unique solution after struggling to decide what period of Irish history to concentrate on for her new series of novels. She decided to cover them all. On paper, it seemed like a reasonable idea.
“I made a whole lot of work for myself in the research department,” McIsaac says in an interview from her Calgary home.
It’s all part of the delicate balance for writers who mix fantasy and historical fiction.
The fantasy gives you freedom. The history gives you a lot of work.
Summon the Queen (47North, 337 pages, $21.95) is McIsaac’s second novel in the Revolutionary Series, a followup to Bury the Living and a continuation of the timetravelling exploits of Irish revolutionary Nora O’Reilly. McIsaac began the series last year after the publication of the three-novel, and one prequel novella, Thin Veil ad- ventures, which mixed snippets of ancient Celtic mythology into its supernatural tales.
The New Brunswick native spent a few months waiting tables in Belfast as a young woman in the late 1990s, when Northern Ireland was still very much a global hot spot for political turmoil. But while she found Irish history fascinating, she also quickly discovered she was “pretty clueless” about it.
“There’s so much there,” McIsaac says. “There’s war, there’s conflict, there’s drama, there’s romance, there’s a lot of mythology woven into it, especially the further back you go. And there’s the fact that it’s still, in a sense, occurring. We see the conflict in Northern Ireland has its roots in the 1600s and the Plantation of Ulster during the Tudor Conquest of Ireland. To see that this conflict started over 400 years ago and is still playing out in many ways is pretty remarkable.”
The good news is that McIsaac loves research, although she admits it has a tendency to take over her life once she has committed to it.
“For me, it’s worth it,” she says. “It’s one of the most interesting parts of my job. Even though I found it quite daunting, I soon got into the rhythm of it. I pretty much become fully immersed in whatever the subject is for several months. I’m constantly reading books, mostly academic, scholarly books about the period. Interlibrary loans are my best friend. If I want to find out what the people in Ireland eat in the 1500s, there’s not a whole lot of popular history books about that. I would also read a lot of novels set in the same time period.”
Stage 2, after the initial draft is done, is to track down experts of Irish history to read the manuscript. This time around, she gave Summon the Queen to a PhD student from University College Cork who specialized in the time period.
So despite having one foot in a fantastical world, McIsaac is clearly a stickler to detail. So much so that when she does stray even slightly from history for narrative purposes, she owns up to it in a “historical note” found at the end of her books.
“Writers of historical fiction debate how much liberty can you take with the facts,” she says. “I feel a certain amount of responsibility to my readers that I shouldn’t misrepresent the facts or take advantage of the facts unless it’s absolutely necessary to the story. I do believe the story has to come first. But, if I can be as historically accurate as possible I strive to do so. Because I know a lot of people learn their history from novels.”
Bury the Living, released last year, introduced readers to Nora O’Reilly, whose brother was killed during the Northern Ireland conflict in the 1980s. She joined the IRA as a teenager and is eventually given an ancient relic that whisks her back 80 years to the height of Northern Ireland’s civil war.
In Summon the Queen, the same relic takes her back to the 16th century where she joins Irish warrior Fionn mac Cumhaill and attempts to track down pirate queen Granuaile in hopes of enlisting her in the fight against Queen Elizabeth’s iron-fisted rule of the Irish people.
Clearly, much of this takes McIsaac safely beyond the “writewhat-you-know” theory of fiction. But McIsaac did draw from some real-life experiences, even if they were second-hand.
“A lot of (Nora’s) story came from this unnamed woman who I knew when we worked in Belfast,” McIsaac says. “We waited tables together. She would tell me these stories about the IRA coming and taking her away and accusing her of being a drug dealer and being held in this warehouse when they questioned her. I borrowed that story for Nora. A lot of it is not made up.”
Her brief period in Belfast is just one of the intriguing aspects of McIsaac’s own history. She also worked in a refugee camp in Kosovo, was briefly a speech writer for former New Brunswick premier Frank McKenna and, until she was 16 years old, was determined to become an Olympic speedskater.
She moved to Calgary with her two children after her then husband found a job in the city. Eight years ago, at the age of 30, she decided to try writing as a career, which had been a dream since she was five. She self-published the first Thin Veil book, Through the Door, which was eventually picked up by Amazon Publishing’s Seattlebased imprint 47North, which specializes in fantasy, sci-fi and horror.
Much to McIsaac’s surprise, Amazon not only liked the book but asked for the sequel. At the time, she hadn’t planned on writing one.
As for The Revolutionary Series, McIsaac says a third book is a possibility, although not a guarantee. While fantasy stories, even those rooted in historical fact, don’t always get the respect of the literati, McIsaac says she is seeing a shift when it comes to appreciation of genre fiction such as fantasy, sci-fi and horror.
“People are realizing you can still be a good writer and write about magic or write about space ships,” she says. “When I started, I remember going to a certain literary event and somebody asked me what I wrote. I said I wrote fantasy and you could see the nose curl up. They asked who my publisher was, and I said Amazon. The person literally turned their back and walked away from me. They couldn’t even talk to me because: A, I write genre fiction; and B, I’m published by Satan. But I’ve also had marvellous encounters with people who don’t care what you write. They are just interested in good writing, good stories and good characters and there is room for everybody in the big tent of literature.”