Some of Tilla's relatives seem to think I'm personally responsible for it. The natives still can't understand why the military are building Hadrian's bloody great wall across their farms. “My former employers in the military want to know why I've gone native. It's a dichotomy Ruso himself ruefully sums up at the start of Memento Mori: In the first book in the series, he's a medicus attached to the legions, but his marriage to a Briton is only one of the many factors pulling him in the opposite direction. Right from the beginning of Downie's wonderfully fine-grained and well-researched series, Ruso has often felt like a living embodiment of those tensions between native and conqueror. Naturally, Ruso agrees to travel to Aquae Sulis and do what he can to comfort his friend and investigate the death. Ordinarily, townspeople contented themselves with throwing small metal tablets containing curses into the hot waters of the spring the discovery of a body would be a catastrophic scandal as well as a tragedy and a crime. The town priests and politicians had built the temple around the spring and, in an attempt to ease frictions between the English and their Roman conquerors, had given it a hybrid name intended to honor both the Roman goddess and the local deity. Underneath our feet.Tragedy strikes close to home in Ruth Downie's new novel Memento Mori, the eighth in her series featuring medicus (think one part medical man and nine parts very skilled butcher) Gaius Ruso and his wife Tilla: the wife of Gaius' best friend, Valens, has been found murdered in the allegedly healing waters of the sacred hot spring in the town Aquae Sulis – modern-day Bath. When I’m not researching or writing the Ruso novels, I spend the occasional joyous week grovelling in mud with an archaeological trowel, because Roman Britain is still there. We have two grown-up sons, two three two cats at the last count, and an unknown number of badgers who live down a dark hole in the garden. I’ve been accompanied throughout this impossible mission by a patient husband. All I had to do was find out everything there was to know about Roman Britain, invent things to fill the gaps, and work out how to put it all together in a novel… Sheltering from the rain in a museum, I read, “Roman soldiers were allowed to have relationships with local women, but they were not allowed to marry them.” Obviously, here was a terrific story waiting to be told. I wasn’t looking for them: we only went to Hadrian’s Wall because we thought our children should do something educational on holiday. Finally I took the plunge and started working on my own material.Īnd then came the Romans. As secretaries were replaced with computers, and my higher-flying contemporaries discovered to their horror that they were expected to type their own letters, there were fewer and fewer outlets for creativity in the office. Some of my earliest ventures into creative writing were attempts to type up my indecipherable shorthand in such a way that the boss wouldn’t realise I was making it up. I fear this will upset some readers, but I left university with an English degree and a plan to get married and live happily ever after. Some people know from a very early age that they are going to be writers: I wasn’t one of them. I was lucky enough to be born in the West Country, in beautiful North Devon.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |