CULTURE FEATURE
Tim Mackintosh-Smith
and His New Historical Fiction OXFORD-EDUCATED ARABIST, WRITER, TRAVELLER AND LECTURER IS BACK WITH A PHENOMENAL HISTORICAL FICTION, BLOODSTONE. WE ASKED THE BBC PERSONALITY ABOUT HIS TRAVELING ADVENTURES, WRITING AND THE BOOK OF COURSE.
I looked more into the surrounding history, I saw how utterly unexpectable the whole historical setting of the stone is: how the Muslim sultan of Granada and the Christian king of Castile were, in their strange way, mates.
Q: Why and when did you decide to become a travel writer? A: I’ve written creatively almost since I could first shape letters, and writing and travel are in the blood. One of my grandfathers was a poet; he wandered and worked his way round the American Wild West in the 1880s. A branch of the family lives an Out-Of-Africa life in Malawi. So I don’t think you ‘decide to become’; rather, you realize you are.
Q: In your opinion, is the book particularly relevant at this time? Why or why not?
Q: How many years have your worked as a travel writer? A: I chucked the job-with-the-salary in 1992. By the way, ‘travel writing’ is a bit confining. It makes one think of guidebooks, which is certainly not what I’m about. What I’ve always written is a blend of travel and history in the tradition of writers like Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh Fermor. I think I don’t write about travel so much as about time. Book available at FNAC bookstores
A: Hard to choose; there are thousands. I could possibly single out tracking down the exact spot where Ibn Battutah saw a widow burn herself to death in the wild west of India – and realizing that the rocks still had scorch marks . . .
Q: What do you hope to achieve by having the book published? A: I hope to spread a bit of ‘lust and lore’, as medieval English writers used to put it: fun, with a feeling of discovery. And – of course – I hope to achieve sales: ‘No man but a blockhead,’ as Samuel Johnson said, ‘ever wrote, except for money.’
Q: What was your favourite region to travel to and why? A: Again hard to choose, but I think Sri Lanka.
Q: What inspired you to become a fiction writer? A: Partly a big-headed wish to fill in some gaps in history. Partly because I thought it would be fun (it is).
Q: What inspired you to write about the Middle East/Norther Africa region? A: I suppose it was learning Arabic, finding myself in the region where it’s spoken and written, and then living there for over a third of a century, as I still do.
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Q: Where did you get the idea for the book Bloodstone? Is the Bloodstone a real historical artifact? A: The idea came from the ‘Bloodstone’ itself, which is an absolutely real, visible, tangible, historical object, usually known as ‘The Black Prince’s Ruby’. It’s a 170-carat balas ruby (aka a spinel) and is set in the crown worn by British monarchs at their coronation. You can go and see it in the Tower of London. I was fascinated by the way it had got there from the sultan’s vaults in Granada, Spain. Then, when
Q: Do you plan to continue to write historical fiction novels? Any more about the adventures of Abu Abdullah? Abu Abdallah has a whole saga of adventures in my head. If people want to read them, I will write them down. Besides, I want to discover more about the real star of the stories, Sinan, the slave/son with a dark past on the banks of the Niger, and I can only find that out through writing: he has no plot; he only reveals himself in glimpses. I am also too fond of Lubna, the brilliant, beautiful poet, to leave her behind. Their road leads to Egypt, India, China. If readers want to, they can come along too.
Photography by: Denyse Woods
Q: Describe a unique/memorable experience during your career as a travel writer?
A: The book wasn’t written to convey a message, but to tell a story. The story of the stone, of course. But also the story of an entertaining but very vulnerable older man (Abu Abdallah) falling in love with a brilliant younger woman (Lubna), who herself falls in love with Abu Abdallah’s slave (Sinan) – whom Abu Abdallah, in turn, loves to bits as the surrogate of the son he has never had . . . So there’s a triangle of conflicting loves, and such triangles are eternal and relevant for all time. Between the lines there may be messages about the dangers of extremism, of whatever sort; but these are not the point of the book. The point is the triple one – of that triangle, of the love-hate-love between sultan and king, and of the stone.