Joe Harkin: “The Middle Ages were full of adventurous and outrageous voices”

I read a lot of excellent modern historians, like Thomas Paine, but also used as many primary sources as I could: histories written by historians of the era, letters from kings and ambassadors, records of parliament, church, and law courts. However, these were highly irregular and incredibly biased. It was actually the account of the royal household that unexpectedly gave me the strongest sense of the real people behind the history. (For more on this I would recommend Tracy Borman.)

As a first-time historical novelist, I underestimated the research I would have to do. I realized that it wasn’t enough to know what the houses looked like, what my characters were eating or what was going on politically at that exact moment. I needed to know the history of the story – the context that these characters would naturally need. I also needed to explore the cultural context: to show how what they read and saw affected their personality, similar to the way television, media, and the Internet shape us. As you can imagine, the research took much longer than I imagined: about four years.

Read your book and learned about other pretenders in historian Nathan Amin’s Henry VII and the Tudor Pretenders: Simnel, Warbeck and WarwickI’m curious what made you center on Lambert Simnel’s story and not the others?

Warbeck is the most famous of the claimants to Henry VII’s throne: others ranged from the weak Rouff Wilford (charmingly described by Amin) to exiled Yorkists with genuine claims, such as Richard de la Pole. All of his stories are interesting, but Lambert caught my attention partly because there’s something missing. We know nothing of Henry’s origins other than contradictory accounts from historians and the confessions written for him. And we don’t know what happened to him in adulthood. After Henry’s invasion failed, he was sent to work in Henry’s kitchen, and then he disappeared from the pages of history. This was a real gift for me as a writer. The idea that as he becomes an adult, he is now free from his early puppet masters, and finally has some degree of agency. In theory he can do what he wants – but as of now, what does he want?

In several chapters, groups of townspeople take the mic. Perhaps they never had an opportunity to share their beliefs, gossip and humor. Is that why it was important for you to improve the novel posthumously?

The common people of that era are an extremely important part of the novel: Lambert himself is a commoner and grows up on a farm, then moves to the city of Oxford. The ‘low people’ – as they were called – that he surrounded himself with in his early years are characters who stay with him emotionally, if not physically.

In the historical record, we actually often get a lived sense of the people of this milieu: not only through records of local court proceedings, but also in official histories. By this time, serfdom had ended and the public had the freedom to spread rumors, rebel, and even riot. In some cases, their voices survive verbatim. For example, the unnamed Londoner who, when Edward IV was crowned, was heard calling him ‘Twat and turd for him’.

What inspired you to make Joan the skilled political strategist of whom her father, Kildare, had lamented: ‘Sadly you are not a man’. History has marginalized women and they appear in footnotes as someone’s wife or girlfriend. Was highlighting this character your way of taking a stand against patriarchy?

At this point in history, I was surprised to see more women in positions of power than I expected, from the ruthless Queen Isabella of Spain to the strategic Margaret of York, who ruled the Burgundian Netherlands in the absence of men. Ordinary women also had more autonomy than I expected: they could run businesses, choose a husband—and leave a husband.

Joan FitzGerald was a real person, but we don’t know much about her – however, it seems that the daughters of the Earl of Kildare were generally as formidable as their father: her sisters were highly respected and played a role in Irish politics.

In ImposterHowever, Joan takes Will-Force to a dark place. It was important to me to show female strength without being a modern type of feminist, and Mary Joan is an expression of that. He is as dishonest, conspiratorial and anti-social as men. He also enjoyed writing exceptionally.

Before he became Lambert Simnel, he was John Colon. Then, he was the Earl of Warwick. All the changes show that education and grooming make each of us a “pretender”; We mold ourselves to maintain appearances. Were you interested in invoking this performative aspect of life?

It’s an interesting question: Are we the same as our projected identities? Is there such a thing as pure authentic self-existence apart from our various performances and personalities? Or is the self something more multiple, changing and ambiguous? Is there such a thing as the self? Its undeniable nature is such that we are all forced to make our own abodes. (of Hari Kunzru) impressionist This is a great exploration.)

People living in democratic and socially dynamic societies today are certainly more capable than Simnel of debating this concept. He was far away from Sartre and harmony. In medieval England, your place in the world – king, cleric, peasant – was chosen for you by God, and it corresponded to your true self. Violating one’s rank was a serious matter, and not knowing one’s rank – which is Simnel’s predicament – ​​would have been not only extremely upsetting, but also personally dangerous.

Imposter Heavy investment has also been made in literature. Did you discover in any archives that John was interested in literature, or was it a partly imaginary area?

All we know about the real Lambert Simnel is that he was confirmed as York’s heir, which means he would have been given a general classical education with a normal reading list. His other reading interests are imaginary, but I based them on best sellers of the time, such as Racey Le Morte d’Arthur, which he is obsessed with, and cheap canterbury tales.

I also invented his desire to write ‘something true’, partly as a way of understanding himself as this unknown person of ambiguous parentage. By the end of the book he has become more disillusioned about access to writing and the privilege that decides who gets to tell the story.

From homosexuality to same-sex relationships between characters, how important was it to label these as “deviant” at the time in this narrative?

I wanted the social landscape of Imposter To be as realistic as possible. Simnel meets a large number of people, and statistically some of them may have been gay. Obviously, these people would not be living a free and open life. At this point, the ‘closeted spouse’ has become a theme in historical fiction, but it would have been the reality for gay people in the medieval era, so it was impossible to avoid. However, I could avoid the cliché of killing off my gay characters or making them go through trauma to further my main plot. I hope I’ve given them as much agency as they realistically can.

From the book: “Epic, ode, fable, ode, romance, fable: The shapes were wrong.” What other shapes did your telling of John’s story take, and, if there were more than one, what caused you to reject the others and continue with this story?

Initially, I had planned to experiment more with the forms of the day – using ballads and popular poems as a medium to tell Simnel’s story. At one point I even went so far as to consider writing in Middle English! The problem is that these forms, long out of use, may have alienated the modern reader from the characters. And I wanted the reading experience to feel immersive and alive. So, I decided to revive some obsolete but brilliant Middle English words, like ‘wonderly’, ‘hudder-muder’ and ‘cupshotton’, and keep the prose modern.

How did Ovid or Chaucer inform you in presenting this story?

Ovid may have been as important a part of Simnel’s education as Edward, but Chaucer was a more immediate and relevant influence, for Simnel and – more importantly – for me. I’d read a little Chaucer at school but had forgotten how rude it was. When I first thought about the novel, I knew I wanted to explore tragedy and violence as well as some humor and absurdity. In fact, I felt appreciated for the originality of my bold and irreverent voice. But I was quickly humbled because the Middle Ages were full of adventurous and outrageous voices: Chaucer was foremost among them, a master at mixing the bleak and tragic with satire and farce. The best I could do was follow his lead, and hope I did it justice.

Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. She can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.