A CONVERSATION WITH M. T. ANDERSON

• 1. This second volume concludes Octavian’s story, which you thought of as a single narrative. Did you know everything that was going to happen before you started writing these books?

  Like many writers, I usually begin with a messy collection of images and fragments: in this case, the image of Octavian standing in brown gloom; the idea of a pox party; a picture of Octavian’s mother playing the harpsichord; the desire to examine the Loyalists during the Revolution; a question about what colonial Boston was like when it was militarized and under siege … things like that. So I started doing research and seeing which ideas stuck around and which became less interesting.

  It took me about six months before I began writing, and about eight months before I actually knew the whole story. A few months in, the discovery of Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment — an episode of the war I’d never heard about before — convinced me I needed to change my original ending. By the time I’d written about sixty or so pages of the first volume, I knew pretty much the whole plot. In fact, I ended up working on the two parts simultaneously, revising the first book while I wrote the second book.

• 2. Both books use a number of di|erent ways to tell the story, such as journal entries and letters. Why did you choose to use a variety of ways to tell Octavian’s story?

  One of the challenges of writing a historical novel is the question of perspective: People from the past were profoundly di|erent from us in so many ways. The whole way they saw the world was very alien. I find that fascinating. (Who would I have been if I didn’t believe in the circulation of the blood, or microorganisms, or outer space, or the equality of women?)

  The question is, how do you reproduce that element of di|erence? How do you make sure your book about the Middle Ages, for example, really feels medieval-ish, and not like a bunch of high-fiving Californians in really stupid hats? The Middle Ages weren’t just castles and armor. Ancient Rome wasn’t just togas. The Mongol Empire wasn’t just 90210 on horses.

  Each period, each country, each city has its own constellation of attitudes and beliefs. Some people believe humans to be essentially reasonable. Some people believe humans to be essentially wild and irrational. Some see angels in the stars. Others feel no safety on the earth. For thousands of years, people su|ered from diseases we no longer believe could exist and were cured with remedies that seem nonsensical to us. Who’s to say they were entirely wrong, or that we’re right? They were the ones who hobbled and then could walk.

  I decided that the best way to explore the texture of eighteenthcentury American thought and life was to try to enter into their language. For example, in the eighteenth century, the word man could stand in for all of humankind, male and female. Now that would sound a little weird to us — like leaving out 50 percent of the species. Think of phrases like “the rights of man” or “the rights of all men,” which were quite common back in the day. That di|erence in usage — all men versus all people — conveys subliminally an important philosophical di|erence between the eighteenth century and the twenty-first. That’s just one example of how trying to write like someone from the past forces you to try to think like someone from the past. It conceals certain things from view and reveals others.

  So that’s why I decided to write the book as a series of documents. I wanted it all to sound like it was coming unfiltered from the period. I wanted to raise the question of who is allowed to describe us and of how those descriptions linger in history and form our understanding of the past.

• 3. What was the research process like for this book?

  It took me a long time to do the research and writing — six years in all. I loved doing the research. (Mainly because it allowed me to delay writing for a while.… Writing is never easy!) I read as widely as I could in texts of the period: scientific treatises, tactical manuals, Gothic novels, joke books, diaries, ads.

  Because I was so incredibly slow, research tools actually changed as I wrote. By the end of the writing, there were these incredible online resources that hadn’t existed a few years before — all kinds of obscure books available now on Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. You can read them instantaneously, without getting out of your chair (or your tin bathtub). Now, there is something that has improved since the eighteenth century.

• 4. Did you have to adjust historical details about the Revolutionary War and Lord Dunmore’s regiment in the interest of storytelling?

  In general, I tried to be extremely scrupulous about basing everything in these books firmly on fact — no matter how strange the facts may sound. I was particularly careful about this in the section on Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment. Not many people have written about this campaign or even know it existed, so I thought it was important to try to reproduce the actual history as closely as possible. I tried to synthesize things that were known rather than making up new events. I did drop several months out of the campaign in the middle. (Pay close attention to the dates and you’ll see where this happens.) In my version, they happen, but no one talks about them.

  I took more liberties with the timeline of the siege of Boston — but still, the books adhere very closely to the truth, insofar as it can be verified. The skirmish on Hog and Noddle’s islands, for example, described in the first volume, is extrapolated from descriptions of the period, and Lieutenant-General Burgoyne’s play The Blockade of Boston, really was interrupted by an attack on Charlestown, though a few months later than I placed the event.

  There are several real documents included among the counterfeits: Dunmore’s proclamation, for example, Washington’s letter about Dunmore, and the description of the final battle on Gwynn’s Island. (A complete list can be found in the acknowledgments.)

• 5. The novel ends with Octavian’s future unknown. What were your thoughts on leaving the ending open in this way?

  I guess, at the end of this book, I launched him into the world — and I felt that’s all he needed from me. He’s on his own now! I wanted the reader to feel the ambiguity of Octavian’s future. For one thing, this is what looking at history is like: you catch glimpses of these people — sometimes very intimate and intense glimpses — and then they’re gone. The record runs out.