Brewing Up Tasmanian Fiction

BY MYFANWY COOK

Karen Brooks Shares Some Secret Ingredients

Karen Brooks has written many historical novels, including The Brewer’s Tale / The Lady Brewer of London (MIRA Australia, 2014; William Morrow, 2020), set in 15th-century London; The Chocolate Maker’s Wife (William Morrow, 2019); The Locksmith’s Daughter (William Morrow, 2018); The Darkest Shore (HarperCollins Australia, 2020) based in 18th-Scotland; and now also The Good Wife of Bath (forthcoming July 2021). All share one main ingredient, and that is the role of women in history.

Her experience as an academic, actress, army officer and a “checkout-chick” have undoubtedly all helped to add flavour and depth to her novels. She explains, “It’s important to reflect the social and political issues of the period the novel is set in, and that includes the popular culture of the time – the music, theatre (if any), books and stories circulating. It gives the novel authenticity – providing these aren’t overplayed to the detriment of the story. It can be a bit of a risk raising issues that are contemporary in historical fiction just to highlight them, but the interesting thing is what disturbed and challenged people in the past, sometimes making them advocate for change, are not that dissimilar to what we deal with in the present day. For example, gender issues, bigotry, intolerance of difference, and politics. And, of late, because I’ve been writing about the impact of plague on my characters (and the plague rears its head in The Lady Brewer), there’s a real frisson with contemporary events and how we cope with isolation, mass sickness, fear, recovery, and a desire to help. Like the past, these enormous events bring out the best and worst in human I think nature. As the saying goes – plus ça change – the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Her female protagonists are all in some way specialists in their own fields. Brooks clearly immerses herself in the trades they work in, but why was she fascinated by the art of brewing and the role of women in the history of ale-making? For Brooks it is “everything,” and she adds, “This from someone who doesn’t really like beer/ale! The first thing that fascinated me about women’s roles was that they were the primary brewers. Brewing was a domestic industry, and ale was made in local houses and shared (for coin or exchange) among neighbours. Made from the basic same ingredients as it is today, water, grain and yeast (wild in medieval times), the brew would sour fairly quickly, so couldn’t travel far.”

As she discovered, “It wasn’t until hops was introduced around the 15th century in England (it was being used long before that in Europe), and was found to preserve the ale/beer, that it was able to travel distances and even be exported. It then became a very profitable business.”

It was at that point that, she says, “Men began to take it over and push women out. As historian Judith Bennett politely notes: ‘When a venture prospers, women fade from the scene.’ I wanted to examine what it would have been like, as a medieval woman, to enter a trade that men were governing closely, and which was on the brink of dramatic change. It was absolutely enthralling – as was the brewing process! There’s something a little magic about the transformation that occurs with such basic ingredients – it’s no wonder many connotations of witchcraft and devilment hounded female brewers.”

Learning to brew beer didn’t inspire The Lady Brewer. Instead, says Brooks, “It was the other way around. I found the story, wrote the novel, and then business blossomed (my husband and I now own a brewstillery – a brewery and distillery – Captain Bligh’s in Hobart, Australia. My husband is the brewer, our son our distiller. I am the not-so-silent partner). It’s hard work but, when it’s going well (i.e. no Covid) very rewarding.”

Perhaps the most important part of brewing and writing novels is the fermentation process. For the novelist this may take the form of sleepless nights and dreams. Brooks dreams about her novels as she writes them. “Oh yes! I really do. So much so, when I was writing The Chocolate Maker’s Wife, I didn’t have a name for the leading man. I knew what he looked like – he was very clear to me. But he came to me in a dream and introduced himself, saying, ‘Hello, my name is Matthew.’ I have also been dreaming of the characters in the one I am currently writing. It’s wonderful and a little uncanny.”

All the elements that season any novel are its subject, place, setting and characters, but which is the most important for Brooks? She states: “They’re a package deal. I love writing about historical women in trade, but unless you have appealing characters and an authentic setting and time period, then no-one would really care about them or the subject matter. With The Lady Brewer, the setting and place came with her tale – though the first half of the book is set in a fictitious coastal town with a small port on the east coast – which fitted Anneke’s father’s work, etc.

“The Chocolate Maker’s Wife, because it explores the introduction of chocolate as a drink, came with a time and place as well – including the plague, Great Fire and the birth of modern journalism – the characters, well, they burst into life. Likewise, with The Locksmith’s Daughter which is set in Elizabethan times and the birth of modern espionage – where locks and keys were paramount. So, for me, they all come together – thank goodness!”

Each brewer, chocolate maker, locksmith and writer develops their skills and explores new avenues for their creativity. For Brooks it was switching from writing young adult fantasy fiction to historical fiction for adults. Her YA fiction was “fundamentally, historical as well – and fantasy.” Her agent suggested she “move into pure historical fiction.” Then, she relates, “I came up with the idea for a female brewer, well, moving into the adult market followed. I didn’t decide so much as the stories I wanted to tell decided for me.”

See https://karenrbrooks.com for more information about Karen Brooks.

Myfanwy Cook is the editor of HNR's New Voices column; visit www.myfanwycook.com.

MARIE CURIE'S MANY LIVES

BY KATHERINE STANSFIELD

Jillian Cantor's Latest, Half Life

Jillian Cantor’s new novel Half Life (Harper Perennial, 2021) is the story of scientific pioneer Marie Curie, whose discoveries about radioactivity led to a Nobel Prize. Curie was the first woman to be awarded the prize and is still the only woman to win it twice. But the novel is also the story of another woman, another version of Marie: an imagined woman named Marya who might have existed, had history played out differently.

Marie Curie was born Marya Sklodowska in Warsaw in 1867. In 1891 she was engaged to a budding mathematician named Kazimierz Zorawski but, due to the clashing economic status of the two, his parents forbade the marriage. Heartbroken, Marya left Poland for Paris, where her older sister was living. There, she began to study chemistry and physics. She adopted the name Marie, met Pierre Curie, and the rest, as they say, is history. Cantor’s novel asks a captivating question: what if Marya had stayed in Poland and married Kazimierz? What would her life have been like? For Cantor, this point in Curie’s life is a way in to thinking about larger ideas of fate and agency. She notes, “I think we all make choices in our lives, small and large, all the time, and these choices send our lives and our futures in certain directions. It’s always kind of fascinating to consider the what-ifs. But I also always wonder if there are some things and people in our lives that are maybe meant to be no matter what choices we make.”

This idea of ‘meant to be’ plays out through the novel’s structure. The story is written from the points of view of both Marie and Marya, each chapter alternating between them and covering the same time periods so that the reader experiences two versions of one woman’s life in tandem. Cantor refers to this as a “puzzle” to write, but a hugely enjoyable one: “I loved the way I could have elements echo in both storylines, only in slightly different ways. This was actually one of my favourite parts of writing the story this way – having Marie and Pierre ride bicycles together or walk along the water in Sweden or hike in Zakopane, or having Marie and her sisters visit the beach, but having the scenes play out differently as an echo in the opposite timeline. It was a really challenging and fun writing exercise to consider the way the same scene would take on a very different meaning because of point of view and how the characters’ choices had changed them in one storyline versus the other.”

Characteristics of the historical figure at the heart of the story also had a part to play in working out the novel’s structure, as Cantor makes clear: “What inspired me was looking at how her real life was filled with so much career success, but also offset with this deep personal tragedy, again and again. Marie was very logical, very much a scientist, in every aspect of her life. So I imagined she would always believe that her choices, her actions, should lead to very specific reactions. It felt right for her character, that she would want to believe she had ultimate control in this way, to choose everything she wanted.” In Marya’s fictionalised narrative, the reader sees how a single choice made differently could alter so much.

The form of the novel didn’t present it itself immediately, and Cantor had two false starts, first with a “straight biographical/historical novel about Marie’s life” which faltered fifty pages in, and then a second attempt which told the story of Marie’s daughter Ève but which also failed to fire. The solution came from a “tidbit” of information Cantor had come across early in her research for the novel but had been unsure what to do with. The real-life Kazimierz, who Marie had left behind in Poland after his family insisted their engagement be called off, is reported to have spent the last years of his life outside the Radium Institute in Warsaw, staring at the statue of Marie Curie erected there. This resonant image stuck with Cantor as she worked on the earlier versions of the story: “In all that time in my mind I kept coming back to that one detail about Kazimierz, staring at the statue of Marie, and wondering how I could incorporate that into my story. Six months and two false starts later, it finally occurred to me that this tidbit was actually the key to the story I really wanted to tell. And so, I started the book over for the third time, in the parallel timelines that exist now”.

The effect of the parallel timelines is to provide an alternate history of Marie Curie, one which offers the reader another way of understanding this famous historical figure. This approach is one Cantor has been drawn to in previous novels: “I’m always very interested in the way point of view can shape or change a story. In The Hours Count, for instance, my character is a fictional neighbour of Ethel Rosenberg, and so I got to reimagine her real story through the eyes of my fictional protagonist. Margot allowed me to explore the point of view of Anne Frank’s sister, and imagine how it might’ve