In Conversation with Brian Van Norman

The room is softly lit, the walls lined with deep rich mahogany shelves filled with books and as you enter you notice there are still a few empty seats. A low murmur of amiable voices gently greets your ears and immediately you sense you are among friends. You sink down into the arms of a luxuriously padded wing back chair savoring the feel and scent of its buttery soft leather as all your cares drift away.

A hush falls over the room as a well modulated baritone voice begins, “Welcome to the Reading Room, my friends. We’re glad you could join our conversation. At the considerable risk of appearing sycophantic I am excruciatingly aware of punching above my weight class in this conversation.

Please join me in welcoming Brian Van Norman, author of the recently released novel Against the Machine: Luddites and, as you will learn, its sequel coming this fall with Guernica Editions: Against the Machine: Manifesto.

James: When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?

Brian: Always a voracious reader from the age of three I was fascinated by the world presented to me through books. I first attempted writing when I was in a band at age 15 and wrote lyrics to our original songs. The concept of storytelling evolved from lyrics and I began to write short stories. I was a bit of a rebel and dropped the idea of writing for years in the pursuit of new experiences and eventually a university degree. Once I became an English and Theatre teacher I wrote some prize winning one act plays, short stories and poetry while I worked on research for what I hoped would be my first novel. So I suppose there was no one time when I consciously considered writing as a profession.

James: It sounds as if you were born to write.

Brian: Actually, thinking about it, it was always on my mind.

James: If you had a book club, what would it be reading and why?

Brian: I enjoy almost all genres of writing. I would suggest “War and Peace” by Tolstoy but in translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. This translation captures the simplicity of language Tolstoy employed as well as the power of his characters and plot. Simply put, one of the best novels ever written.

James: “War and Peace” 1,296 pages, I am impressed. I’m afraid that my attention span is too woefully transitory.

What do you like to do when you're not writing?

Brian: Before covid when I wasn’t writing I travelled. Both Susan, my wife, and I enjoy long stays in foreign parts. We’ve travelled to every Continent (including Antarctica) and sailed nearly every ocean or sea we could reach.

James: My wife, Christine, and I have enjoyed travel as well but our wanderings throughout most of North America in our motor home, a few islands in the Caribbean and Belize, Britain, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea and Hong Kong pale in comparison. Perhaps we could swap stories sometime?

Brian: That would be fun! I’d enjoy that too.

James: What tactics do you employ when writing? (For example: outline first or just write)

Brian: If I’m writing historical fiction I always look for ‘holes’ in history; those unexplained moments which allow me to fill that gap with both imagined and factual characters. For instance, Juan Ponce de Leon’s log from his second voyage to la Florida was lost. This allowed me to create that voyage in fiction with Immortal Water, my second novel. I tend to use a rough outline but the characters often lead me another way. That is the strangest thing about writing, how so often characters start to tell their own stories.

James: How very astute of you, Brian. You make it sound almost elementary but I know it is anything but.

Do you use any special writing software? If so what is it, and why do you like it?

Brian: I use Word for both writing and editing. I like it because it’s flexible.

James: I too use Word. I’m still using the 2007 version.

Tell us three things about yourself that might surprise your readers.

Brian: I have had three careers in my lifetime: as a teacher, a theatre director and adjudicator, and as a writer.

James: Why did you choose to write in your particular field or genre?

Brian: I have always had a strong interest in history and historical novels. It’s fascinating to know where we come from and how we arrived at the place we are now as a species. I enjoy the exploration of how ordinary people actually lived in their different societies, cultures and civilizations. Writers are often told “write what you know”. I love Canadian history, and since grade 7 when I was introduced to early French Canadian and Quebec history, I’ve always wanted to write about Wolfe and Montcalm. It turned out I found a ‘hole’ in history there. Too involved to explain here but it let to my first novel The Betrayal Path.

James: How would you describe Against the Machine: Luddites to someone who has not read any of your previous novels?

Brian: The novel is literary historical fiction based closely upon events and people in Yorkshire, England, in 1812. The story is told from the points of view of characters, both real and imagined, on both sides of the uprising by the Luddites.

James: What was the source of your inspiration for Against the Machine: Luddites?

Brian: I have a strong interest in the tools we humans have developed over the course of our history and the resulting consequences of invention, both positive and negative. As a result of discussions with Guernica Editions I have embarked on a somewhat unusual trilogy which features interactions between humans and machines in varied locations but 200 years apart. That said, Luddites was the initial novel set in Yorkshire in 1812. The sequel is Against the Machine: Manifesto, and is set in my home of Waterloo Region in 2012 (I am thankful I didn’t choose 2020) and will launch this autumn. The trilogy should culminate in a third book set in 2212… so I am writing in three different genres approaching this topic which I feel is so significant to our past, present and future.

James: What was your hardest chapter or scene to write?

Brian: In Luddites, the most difficult were the first four chapters which introduced quite a number of characters. I chose two separate social occasions on either side of the English class divide and used as much action as I could to garner interest in these individuals. The chapters contained many names which somewhat countered the purpose of most opening chapters: enticing the reader into the book.

James: Your characters are meticulously drawn, strong and well developed, although I must admit, the large number was somewhat challenging. However, from Mellor, the protagonist, down to the seemingly most insignificant character, I found myself empathizing with their profound moral dilemma in pursuit of freedom, justice and basic human rights.

Brian: I hope you found most of them interesting as you got to know each of them through the novel.

James: Which part of researching Against the Machine: Luddites was the most personally interesting to you? Were there any facts, symbols, or themes that you would have liked to include, but they just didn't make it into the story?

Brian: Most interesting to me were the moors of Yorkshire, their beauty and their menace, and a man who became a personal friend. I was lucky enough to meet Alan Brooke, whose ancestors were Luddites, who lives today in the cottage they built and is an expert on the subject. Without him to take me around to the old overgrown mills, or explain the complex geography, or guide me up into the moors, I really don’t think this book would have been finished.

As to what I would have liked to include, there are too many to name. The editing process, and the editors at Guernica Editions are masters at it, involves the removal of whatever is not furthering the novel’s impact. Every writer out there knows the pain of rejecting the words you’ve worked over, and then the delight when the edit process proves so effective.

James: Out of the protagonists: Juan Ponce de Leon or Ross Porter in Immortal Water; Alan Nashe in The Betrayal Path; or Ned Lud or George Mellor in Against the Machine: Luddites, that you’ve written about so far, which one do you feel you relate to the most?

Brian: Ross Porter. He is a mix of myself and a colleague, more so than any other of the characters I’ve written.

James: What are the ethics of writing about historical figures?

Brian: It’s important, I believe, to research historical characters as deeply as possible. It would be difficult to make Joseph Goebbels, for instance, an upstanding character. However, there’s a quote from Gabriel Garcia Márquez: “All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.” I think that most people do not believe they are evil or cause evil; they will rationalize their actions to make them agree with their moral code. A historian can cite the facts of a character and come to conclusions. A historical novelist is allowed more room to interpret, perhaps in bringing the secret life forward.

James: A most insightful and thought provoking premise, Brian.

What advice would you give to a writer whose manuscript has been rejected several times and told he or she will never make it as a writer?

Brian: Keep writing. Keep submitting. I have a filing cabinet shelf full of rejections.

James: What is the most important tip you can share with other writers?

Brian: Be careful of vanity publishers or anyone who wants you to contribute financially. I made that mistake years back when I was desperate. They feed on fed up writers. Fortunately I got out of the contract due to a publishing flaw.

James: What was one challenge you had to overcome to become an author? How did you overcome that challenge?

Brian: I had to fight the negativity I received from so many rejections. I did stop writing for years at a time but always returned to it.

James: We’re very glad you possess such fortitude, Brian.

What question do you wish that someone would ask about your books, but nobody has? Then answer it.

Brian: Question: Who is real and who isn’t in your novels?

Answer: None are real. They are all imaginary or interpreted.

James: Pick an excerpt from one of your books you would like to share with readers.

Brian: From Immortal Water: Juan Ponce de Leon, a veteran soldier and hardened killer reflects on something of his past… you recall we spoke of writing private and secret lives.

It was during the wars in Spain that I married. My mother had died while I was away and so I was unable to bid her goodbye. It created a kind of emptiness in me. I began to feel a need for permanence, for a woman to somehow fill that chasm for which I have so little understanding. Children were a part of it. Each man wishes his name carried on. But it was more than that. It was time, for some reason, to marry. There was no rationality to it; only a strange new mood.

I left it to my father to arrange it, knowing he would choose wisely and well. It would be a union of houses, the business of marriage. My reputation, solid by then, and my maturity made the matchmaking easier. I was past marital age. Not old, but certainly no young man either. And by this time I considered myself more adept socially. I had made the acquaintance of ladies at court as well as that of the camp prostitutes. In my arrogance, I thought I knew women.

Leonor was of noble birth, of course; her family of like circumstance to mine. Her father was an honourable man. He provided a dowry of twenty five hundred escudos. Not a great sum, but reasonable. She was sixteen when I first met her. I had no idea what to expect as I presented myself to the family. I remember it was early evening, the sun cool and low in the sky.

Her father was just a little older than me: a plain man, rather bookish and dour, and I think slightly in awe of this rough captain who had entered his house to claim his daughter. We took wine together. He asked about the war. There was no talk of the daughter until his wife appeared to take me to meet her. His wife was a plain woman, very shy. I began to despair of my father’s choice. In his dreams each man wishes a beautiful wife, one of whom he can be proud, one who pleases his senses as well as his house. I prepared myself for the worst.

She was in the garden. She sat on a bench in a bower of orange trees, their blossoms pungent; their webbed branches holding the twilight magically. I felt in that instant like a boy, giddy with anticipation, an odd mixture of fear and hope mingling and making the heart beat just a little faster, making my senses alert and crisp, so that when she stepped out of that dappled grove in a glance I was able to see everything and remember it perfectly, to this day.

She took my breath away.

This all happened in seconds, yet I recall it seeming to last much longer. When she stepped into view she had covered her face with a fan and so, quickly, I studied the rest of her. Her gown was of green moiré silk. It rustled like restless leaves. The fastenings down the front were embroidered in silver which sparkled like early stars in the twilight. They raised to a low cut bodice and beneath the dress a lace chemise. The fan itself was organza inset with pearls. It concealed all of her face but her eyes.

Her eyes were green. They were cool. Lagoons of sea green, touched with sparkle, just like the sea if the sea were perfect. Her hair was shot through with auburn, her flesh pale and almost porcelain. I have seen its like only in those delicate figures which arrive sometimes from Cathay. She seemed so fragile, so feminine, I feared one touch would shatter her. And then she lowered the fan.

She smiled.

This will stay in my memory forever. It was not just her mouth that smiled, her lips full and curved like scallops of sand on a shore, but the coolness of her eyes changed to that emerald flash one glimpses, if he is watchful, as the sun sets upon the New World’s sea. Her flesh dimpled a little at the corners of her mouth, and within her smile there seemed a quick flame that glowed and reached out to touch me so I was infected and smiled as well, just to keep the warmth, hold the rose in her cheeks. She smiled as if she smiled only for me.

She was beautiful.

I thought then that beauty meant something. I thought it meant sensitivity, a softness of soul not to be found in harsh features like my own. It was hard to think otherwise in the face of such symmetry, such radiance as lived in the smile of Leonor. The sea has great beauty, yet it is capable of other things: of storms, of rip tides, of hidden shoals. The sky is vast, and yet one lives beneath but a small part of it. How was I to know then that Leonor was merely beautiful flesh, that within lay a soul like bitter herbs and a mind obsessed with smallness. I did not realise she could call up that smile when it suited her, only when it suited her. She used her cool eyes to hide her feelings just as the sea conceals its dangers beneath placid waves.

In time we married. In bed that first night there was nothing. She lay still and silent while I raged on top of her trying to make it love. I thought it was merely the loss of virginity. But it kept on. She would submit but it was only that: submission, duty, disdain. It was not long before I went back to the war.

War loves me.

While I was gone my son was born. I did not see him until he was three. She named him Luis. He had eyes like hers. The first time I saw him he shook my hand. I have never kissed my son.

With time her obsessions grew. She had married a man from whom she’d expected great things. She wanted the best of Venetian glass, silver from Milan, plate from Cathay, Antwerp tapestries and Rhenish chalices. She wanted each thing about her to be as beautiful as she. I was a soldier. A very good soldier. I had my share of booty. It was never enough. And when she discovered my ineptitude at court her disappointment in me was complete. The business of her marriage was bankrupt.

She told me that, many times.

When I lost my position as governor, she left for home. I lost it through intrigue at court, through Diego Colon, the son of Columbus my friend, through snivelling men a thousand leagues distant who plotted without my knowing. Yet Leonor blamed me. She had raised my son and my daughters to loathe me. She had taught them gentility and intrigue, the things at which she was so adept. Oh, it was my fault as well. I was absent too often. I never knew them. I was too busy fighting my wars. My children grew distant.

I have never been one to express emotion. I thought, when we married, Leonor would change that: make me more human, give me the softness I have always felt but not shown. How was I to know, on that quiet evening in a twilit garden, there are those in this world who do not even feel?

And yet each time I break open an orange to drink of its juices and eat its sweet meat, its pungency reminds me of her; of that first evening before I knew her when, for a moment, I was in love.