BERNARD CORNWELL talks to Richard Lee about laziness and hitting barn doors. 

The first of the Sharpe books, Sharpe's Eagle, was published in 1981. Now there are seventeen, with another four planned. By any standards, they have been a huge success. There was one Number One Best-seller before the television series, starring Sean Bean, but afterwards, as Bernard puts it laconically, "the number of women readers shot up". Nowadays Bernard expects to make the list once a year with Sharpe, and once a year with one of his other books - this year it will be Stonehenge. They are all, he says, military historical novels, and though it is possible to quibble about this (especially with a book like Stonehenge), it is broadly true.

"Every man," says Samuel Johnson, quoted in the front of Sharpe's Eagle, " thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier." The old adage certainly seems to have spun pure gold for Bernard Cornwell.

When you meet Bernard Cornwell, there is something of the soldier about him. He isn't a soldier, never was a soldier, and has never tried to pretend to have been a soldier - but nevertheless. Perhaps it's the directness with which he lampoons things. "Writers block?" he explodes, "Do you hear of nurse's block? Pilot's block? Can doctors go in to work and say, 'I'm sorry, I don't feel like it today?'" A little later we are talking about contemporary literature, and Bernard shows himself very widely-read, quite one of the literati one feels, and then - "When I was researching Sharpe's Fortress I ended up in Gawilghur. Which is the backside of everywhere, and ended up in a quote hotel, unquote, where the only loo was a hole with a bucket of water beside it. And thank god I had American Psycho with me - I mean, I was able to use it usefully. I'm still astonished that people find merit in that book, because, you know, I'm not a prude, but I cannot find merit in it. But it's got a lot of very serious people praising it." Somehow there is more zest in this than in the way that, moments earlier, he had been praising Martin Amis's 'near misses'. 

Again, Bernard is a good friend of the author Sebastian Faulks (Birdsong, Charlotte Gray etc - literary stratosphere), and so, for a moment or two, I fish for a literary anecdote there. Nothing doing. Bernard tells of time when they were going to the Oxford and Cambridge rugby game and Sebastian had forgotten his ticket. "You and me, Richard," he says, "There's no way... I mean... But Sebastian. He just goes along and says how terribly sorry he is, and they let him in! That wouldn't happen for anyone except Sebastian, but he just has this very English sort of face, and you wouldn't dream of not believing him." But what about his writing, Bernard?

"Oh - we meet up every year [for the match], and the joke is, I've written two books, and Sebastian's revised a chapter. But he's doing something that is really quite difficult, and I'm doing something that is not difficult at all." 

I may have spluttered into my pint. Not difficult at all? 

"I mean, if the plot is getting dull, all I have to do is wheel on forty thousand frogs and mow them down - everyone's happy again!" 

Frogs? 

"Frogs - yes - I was once giving a talk at Waterloo, and someone in the audience objected to my calling them frogs, so I called them scum for the rest of the talk." He is warming to his theme, now. "You see, the great advantage of writing what I write, which is military historical novels, is that you have a built in time-limit, because everything builds up to the battle, then everything gets tied up in this flurry of thirty or forty thousand words. It's a great plot device - a lazy man's plot device - and you don't have to be too subtle in the way you resolve your sub-plot either. You just kill the bugger off." 

And Bernard has reserved one last grenade to lob at his books - "I'm married to this vegetarian pacifist," he says, and 'vegetarian' and 'pacifist' are given a wonderful bile, "And I heard her talking in the kitchen one day, and a friend was asking, 'Do you actually read Bernard's books?' and my wife said, 'Yes, but I skip the battles.' So I shouted out 'Bloody quick read isn't it?'"

In short, to talk to Bernard you would think that it was someone else who had written his books. Or, almost, that they wrote themselves.

We are sitting outside The Anchor, a riverside pub on the Exe estuary in Devon that is my local and, a few years back, used to be Bernard's. As we talk I become increasingly dismayed that he knows more people there than I do. "Oh, hello Bernard," they say, as if his boat were still sitting out there in the muddy harbour. Bernard, who now lives in the States (against his wishes, and for love of the afore-mentioned wife), sups his pint with real enthusiasm and tucks into a steak and kidney pie. I need hardly say that there isn't a vegetable in sight.

Talking is easy. I feel that the presence of the tape-recorder may take the edge off some of the anecdotes, but even so, talking is fun. (And tape-recorder or no tape-recorder, I've promised not to repeat any of the anecdotes about Sean Bean). We talk about the HNS (Bernard is generous, and encouraging, as ever) publishers (Bernard is extremely complimentary about his editor, Susan Watt), film companies ("a very tender nerve"), Bill Clinton (Bernard is not a fan), capital punishment (Bernard hates it), even crocodiles (the perils of research...). But what we're really here for is to talk about the books, and particularly Stonehenge, Bernard's latest book, which sounds as if it is a departure from Bernard's usual style. Hard to imagine a regular army, for example, in 2000BC. Stonehenge is less a historical novel than a pre-historical novel. There are no written records from the time; few similar sites; very little information at all, in fact, that you can rely on about the builders. We don't know for certain their race, their culture, their religion, the size of their communities; we don't even know what they ate... It all sounds a bit of a tall order for a man who, if we believe him, only sets himself the problem of 'hitting a barn door at five paces' with his writing.

"Stonehenge is by far the most difficult book I've ever written," Bernard admits, "My God, I've never researched anything like that. I mean, even to the point of building a 3 to 1 scale model to test North's theory [this is John North, who is 'terrific', apparently]. But in the end you chuck it all out. You don't use it. It's only the story that counts. But the 95% you chuck out underpins the story with verisimilitude."

Stonehenge is the story - of course - of the building of Stonehenge. I suppose, in scope, it is similar to Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, which was about the building of a cathedral. As with Follett's opus, you pick up the book thinking about the end-product - the stones, the architecture. But the books are about people, not structures. They are tapestries of the life of those times, interestingly similar to the world we know in their motivations of love, greed, ambition, hatred and fear; interestingly dissimilar in their religious, artistic and cultural preoccupations.

Bernard Cornwell begins his story by using two of the archaeological finds of Stonehenge. "There was an archer, with a stone bracer to protect his wrist from the lash of his bow, buried beside Stonehenge's north-eastern entrance, and he had been killed, evidently at close quarters, by three arrows." Also found in one of the burial mounds closest to the monument - amongst other things - were three gold lozenges. In Bernard's story the gold belongs, at first, to the man who dies. The gold signals a change to the tribesmen, or rather, it provides a focus for those within the tribe who want change. There is a war party, a peace party, and a religious party - the latter offering its support to peace or war depending on circumstances. In the novel, each of these parties is headed by a brother, and so the rivalries are personal. The three powerful women in the story are all priestesses who help, manipulate, or seek to crush the brothers. And between them all the stones are brought, the slaves who will work them are taken, and the proper ceremonial and religious conception behind the temple is decided upon, changed, and remade. 

The book, for me, was a remarkable feat of sustained imagination. It is so easy, as past novelists have shown, to flip off into fantasy on such a subject - anything from magic to flying saucers. Bernard resisted the temptation. "Where I found in my Arthur trilogy that I could dabble in the magic, I felt I couldn't with Stonehenge. I couldn't have wizards. I went slightly over the top with Arthur because it was a romantic, magical background. And there is one episode of Stonehenge which you could put down to magic - but I figured one in 185000 words, I could probably get away with it. The essence is much more a reconstruction of what kind of impetus would make a society do this kind of thing."

What results, therefore, is what you might call an archaeological novel, and what characterises it is its sparseness. "It's not a society that is that complicated. The landscape is very beautiful, but there are no castles, towns, you know what I mean." The overwhelming images for me from the book are wide skies, animal skins and bones, human squalor, and temples - not Stonehenge, that doesn't arrive till the end of the book, and even then it is not as we see it - but sordid, animal-smelling, superstitious, fear-inspiring temples. It is a very striking impression. The only pre-historical fiction I've read before is Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear, which is fun, but not overly convincing, and Mary Renault's Theseus books. But Renault makes her prehistoric world somehow Attic and Mediterranean, and its barbarism has the rationale of Fraser's Golden Bough in its conception. There is no such prop to Bernard Cornwell's pre-history which, by comparison, has a system-less and entirely convincing brutality to it.

Does such an ambitious project as Stonehenge, I wonder, mean a change of direction for Bernard? Are we to have more of this epic type of fiction?

We talk for a while about future projects, and Bernard, it is clear, has no shortage of these. 
The next Sharpe is Sharpe's Trafalgar, due in the spring of 2000. Susan Watt, Bernard's editor, was particularly enthusiastic about the 50,000 words of it that she has seen so far. There is an element of mischief about the book, because it is Bernard's chance to write a sea story in the mode of Forester or O'Brian - a kick up the aubreys, as it were. And one may reasonably suspect that the role of the Riflemen - and one in particular - may be found to have had more than a little to do with the outcome of that glorious battle. "After all, those dozy buggers couldn't have won it on their own, could they?" After Trafalgar comes Sharpe's Copenhagen (which apparently has a working sub-title of Sharpe's Blonde.) Wellesley was actually at Copenhagen with the Rifles. After that, there are two gaps at least in the Peninsula War to fill. But apparently there is nothing more for Sharpe to do after he's settled down with his French girl, at the end of Sharpe's Devil. "No, " says Bernard, "Leave him in peace. If I did those four, that'd be 21 books, I think. That's enough isn't it?"

There are two other books that Bernard is contracted to do, but he's a little cagey about these. He says that they are medieval, and that they are not war stories as such, but 'pure story'. He also says that they may end up as a trilogy, like the Arthur books. Beyond that he won't go. "I'm not going to tell you the subject of the medieval series because then it will get into your magazine and someone else will write it. They are researched - very early researched. What I liked about the Arthur series was the background - that mingles religion, magic, superstition, politics, romance - and the medieval period gives me that but even richer. Again I can't say too much, but the basic idea is so simple - I don't know why no-one's ever done it."

So that's seven books he is committed to write. Enough? Of course not. "There are a whole number of one-off books I want to do," he says, one of which, it turns out, is the 'Agincourt book' that his fans have been hoping for for some time. There is also a whole new series in prospect, a set of post-Napoleonic mysteries which Bernard sketches out to me, and which again seem viable.

And, of course, there are the Starbuck books, about the American Civil War. Bernard's Most Asked Question, apparently, is 'When is the next Starbuck?' The answer is always the same.

"I keep saying I don't know. I mean, they were fun to do. And the next one's all researched, it's a great story - terrific piece of research, very complicated, interesting story - about Mary Lincoln's addiction to spiritualism, and the fact that her sister was married to a confederate general, who was a widow, and who was brought up to the White House - it's lovely stuff - and I'd have kept it going, only what happened was that the Sharpe films came out, so I got side-tracked with Sharpe again, and at the same time I started the Arthur trilogy..."

The real answer, I think, is that Bernard only wants to commit himself to writing one soldier book a year. He started the Starbuck because he genuinely thought he had finished with Sharpe. But the fans wanted more Sharpe. And they still do. So as long as there are more Sharpes, I suspect Starbuck will be left in limbo. Unless, of course, Bernard carries out his frequently repeated threat, and kills Starbuck off in one last book.
Talking to Bernard, you realise that the fans mean a lot to him. He's generous with them, and refreshingly grateful. He also listens to what they say. The Sharpe's Blonde joke, I understand, comes about because one of his fans complained that Sharpe always seems to pick dark-haired girls. One feels, somehow, that some of the ideas for the 'gaps' in Sharpe's history may have been suggested by fans. It is also clear that if - when - the Starbuck books do start up again they will feature far more prominently the character of Lassan, who, we find out, is Sharpe's son. Cornwell fans, it seems, want more of the American Civil War, but they also seem to want to choose who the hero of it will be.

The fans, though - by which I mean the vocal fans - are wrong. In terms of sales, the Arthur books have been Bernard's most successful. They outsold the Sharpe books in the UK, and they sold much better worldwide. They were bestsellers in Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan and the USA. People loved Bernard's very 6th Century Arthur, the gritty realism of the soldiering, his remarkable and extreme Merlin. Despite what Bernard says about the magic, people responded to these books because they were a true and moving version of a story that has been too overlaid with fantasy. In effect, he made a familiar story into a new one. And it is this same realism and re-discovery that will make Stonehenge a similar success.

Apparently, there were problems when the publishers were thinking about marketing Stonehenge. Bernard is shyly proud about the result "There were long long discussions about the cover, because they were getting more and more elaborate, and more and more like a science fiction cover, and I played about on the computer at home, and came out with a very simple cover which said STONEHENGE, 2000 BC, a novel by Bernard Cornwell. And when it came back it was BERNARD CORNWELL - huge at the top - and Stonehenge, small, at the bottom. I'm not going to bitch about that..."

Because this is what has happened. In publishing-speak, Bernard Cornwell is the brand, now. Sharpe is all very well, but Bernard has gone beyond being a one series author, and over the next few years we will see - to use more publishing-speak - whether he can punch his weight in the Big League. 

Personally, I'm looking forward to it. As I write I am surrounded by my Sharpe collection, and the earliest of them, that copy of Sharpe's Eagle, has a wonderfully dated-looking cover; it sold new at £1.35. Don't get me wrong, I love the Richard Sharpe books, before and after Sean Bean. But eighteen years is a long time and a lot of battles. For me - though I confess my appetite is thoroughly whetted now for the Trafalgar book - I also have to admit that I will be more excited by the non-Sharpe books that Bernard writes over the next few years.

When you speak to Bernard Cornwell, or watch one of the excellent talks that he gives, it's easy to fall under his spell. He tells jokes. He laughs at himself. He often implies that he doesn't do much research, or that the research he does doesn't really matter when compared to the story. And all these things are true, up to a point. But what you also get is a wealth of pithy and well-selected anecdotes, a gentle irony at the research of the self-professed Researchers, and the kind of balanced overview of historical events and historical processes that betrays true knowledge.

Is there life after Sharpe?

Most definitely.

If you are lover of all things Sharpe, then you could do worse than to join the Sharpe Appreciation Society: details from Christine Clarke, PO Box 14, Lowdham, Nottingham, NG14 7HU. England. Sharpe Query Line:Tel: 0(044) 115 966 5405. www.southessex.co.uk email- sharpe@southessex.co.uk

(c) Richard Lee, 1999


First published in Solander: The Magazine of the Historical Novel Society, Issue 6, Autumn 1999.