Lord of Light: A Novel of Historical Adventure

I do love to write fiction.

When I was little, I always wanted to be an historian. That was after I had wanted to be an archaeologist, of course. But history had always been my greatest interest even when I was a kid. Whether I was reading books about the Ancient World or about British History, I was always reading something. When I was a teenager I remember reading Elizabeth Longford’s biography of the Duke of Wellington and various histories of the Royal Navy and Lord Horatio Nelson. As the years went by, and I took a variety of degrees in history, I have, of course, read thousands of history books.

And as I was reading history, I was also devouring historical fiction. Between the ages of about ten and thirteen, I read and re-read C. S. Forrester’s Hornblower novels about a captain in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. I subsequently read Alexander Kent’s Bolitho novels and Dudley Pope’s Ramage novels. I was naively astonished to learn that C. Northcote Parkinson’s The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower (1970) was actually a novel! In the decades that followed I devoured Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin novels, the fantastic rascality of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels (although I only like the ones set in India), and the various pleasures of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Iain Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost, Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles, Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, The Three Musketeers books by Alexandre Dumas, and many others.

In a way, The Lord of the Rings novels and the Game of Thrones novels are like historical fiction. Just imagined as an alternative history!

And this is to say nothing of my adolescent love of Robert Ludlum and subsequent fascination for the spy novels of John le Carre (especially his trilogy Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honorable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People) and Eric Ambler, the latter of whose Mask of Demetrios , Background to Danger, and Journey Into Fear are classic stories of a European in Istanbul in the 1930s (not irrelevant to Lord of Light!) .

I realize now, at any rate, all these decades later, that history is just storytelling, so that my two obsessions were hardly separate. History is rigorous and careful storytelling in which one is careful to document why one tells the story one does—but it’s still storytelling.

Wallis Budge: Magic and Mummies in London and Cairo (Dost Publishing, Rev. Ed., 2021) is a sort of rags-to-riches story. It’s an underdog story about a poor boy struggling to make his way in a world full of class prejudice and privilege. It’s a story about ghosts and seances. It’s an adventure story about Budge’s travels and escapades in the Middle East. It’s a story about imperialism and Egyptology, and how Egyptology continues to try to hide from this relationship. It’s a story about how Budge’s reputation was ruined by his enemies, and how his enemies have controlled his memory.

Budge’s story was told with documentation and rigorous demonstration, not as fiction. But if Wallis Budge, as a reviewer said, reads like a Victorian novel, that is because writing history and writing novels are related skills. A storyteller is behind both good history and a good novel.

Anyone who has had the pleasure of reading Peter Hopkirk’s fabulous book, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (1992), knows that scholarship and storytelling can coexist quite comfortably in such a book. Hopkirk’s book is both a thrilling story of espionage and high adventure and a well-documented history of the relationship of British India to Central Asia in the 1830s and 40s. The characters are weird and wonderful; the drama is exciting; the air of tragedy and hubris is stunning. Treason in the Blood: H. St. John Philby, Kim Philby, and the Spy Case of the Century, by Anthony Cave Brown (1994) is another fantastic feat of historical storytelling that sits comfortably next to the novels of John le Carre.

All of this is just to say: When I sat down to write Lord of Light after finishing Wallis Budge in about 2010, I felt well prepared to tell a story about a rascally adventurer dashing from London and Paris to Cairo and Istanbul because, not only had I lived in Cairo for six years and made a couple of visits to Istanbul, but I had written about the activities of museum and antiquities people in both places for Wallis Budge and had read about such fictional rascals as Harry Flashman or (in another genre) Sam Spade and Travis McGee. I was inspired by what I’d already read!

I hope you enjoy Lord of Light. It’s basically an old-fashioned adventure story set between WWI and WWII with a bit of romance also in the mix. I felt as if I were honoring my forebears in writing it. It was a blast!