Two books by Geoffrey Trease

Geoffrey Trease was one of the authors I read most as a child: he was astonishingly prolific, and I worked my way along the library's shelf of his books - and then checked back on every visit, to see whether anything new had turned up. He wrote historical fiction (not exclusively, but these were both the majority and my favourites), a genre that I loved (for the same reason as I loved SF, I think, for the chance to visit a strange and unfamiliar world). There was more to his appeal than pure genre, though: I liked his voice, and when I had worked my way along that shelf to the point where Trease gave way to Treece (Henry) I stopped. I wasn't particularly aware of his left-wing politics, though perhaps this helped: I was accustomed, even as a child, to the idea that not everyone thought as my family did, and that I would find assumptions in books which I would need to discount if I was ever to read fiction without mentally debating with the author. John Brunner is the first person I remember reading with a sense of relaxation, that I could lower that guard - but perhaps I unconsciously found the same quality in Geoffrey Trease.

So I've been following treaseproject with great interest, and took a Newcastle lecture on the subject as an excuse to re-read a couple of Trease's books. I might, I suppose, have chosen Bows Against the Barons, the story of Robin Hood told as a tale of class warfare, and one of the few books that durham_rambler and I had both read when we first met. But what came to hand were a couple of my favourites, The Hills of Varna and Crown of Violet.

The Hills of Varna was written first, in 1948. In the early 1500s, two young people travel to a remote monastery to find the only manuscript of a classical Greek comedy, the lost Gadfly of Alexis, and bring it back to Venice so it can be published by Aldus Manutius. The Crown of Violet, which followed in 1952, tells how Alexis wrote his play in defense of Socrates.

This, at least, is what I remembered of the plots of the books, and it's accurate as far as it goes: but I had managed to forget a large amount of incident, of the sort which is presumably intended to make a book more attractive to the young reader, but which seems to have struck me then as it does now as a distraction from the essential. So what I remember loving in The Hills of Varna was the excitement of rediscovering lost learning, the journey to somewhere on the fringes of the 'domesticated' world, and (I'll come back to this) the neat sidestepping of any romance between Alan and Angela, the central characters. These things are still present on re-reading, but rather masked by the abundance of adventure: there is an unscrupulous Duke who wants the manuscript for his own private library, there are pirates, there are sword-fights. I won't go as far as to say that I found this breathless string of incidents tedious, but I did greet each exciting new reverse with "Oh no, not again!" Perhaps this is why on this reading I found myself preferring The Crown of Violet, in which the only distraction from the writing and production of the play is the need to foil an aristocratic coup.

Both books are remarkable for the treatment of the women characters: Trease writes young women who play an active part in the adventure of the book, but without making them feisty, spirited or any of the other adjectives which are usually a warning that there are anachronisms ahead, that the characters of this historical novel are modern young people in fancy dress. Angela is strong in will and in physique, athletic enough to participate in the hardships of the journey and sufficiently in love with learning to want to. But when Alan tries to argue with her (for he comes from England, a rather backward country, and some of his ideas are old-fashioned) she quotes precedents from among her contemporaries. She is sufficiently a young woman of her time, too, to accept that her best route to independence is to marry the right man, and she has already decided who that will be - so there is no prospect of romance, either overt or unstated, between the Alan and Angela, which I continue to find a refreshing change.

The Crown of Violet has another strong female character in Corinna (and more than a suggestion this time of romance with Alexis), but again her freedom is explained in terms of her social position: she is not an Athenian, her mother is a tavern cook, and she is therefore not subject to the restrictions of respectability which bind Alexis' mother and sister. This outsider status also allows her to counter the love song to Athens and its somewhat limited concept of democracy (and sets up one last melodramatic twist at the end of the story).

Both books glow with the excitement of ideas. At the centre of each is a young man ready to change the world, the particular world of the place and time in which he lives. Alexis adores Athens, from the Acropolis which crowns her with violet down to the sea green hem of her robe (the language is surpringly lush, and I enjoyed it immensely). Socrates embodies the virtues of Athens (and Milon, the teacher of rhetoric, the corrupt modern ways of the spin doctor - I can't resist qoting: "'Oratory,' he told the class, 'is the art of per­suasion. People are most ready to believe what they want to believe. Therefore, in planning any speech, you will first consider the audience, ask yourself what kind of things these particular men wish to believe, and pick out arguments of that sort. Then arrange them so that whatever you are trying to put over to them will seem the logical result.'") and Alexis leaps to his defense. Alan risks everything to add one lost manuscript to the sum of human knowledge, but then returns to England, to help bring light to an England "about to burst into the green glory of her Tudor spring."

Heady stuff.