Manda Scott | 'I have always been obsessed with the concept of women who fight and why'

Some authors have played at aping their characters. Hemingway tried to embody the tough-guy attributes of the men in his books during his gun-toting “Papa” phase. Ian Fleming clearly wanted to be Bond, at least by the amount of gin he guzzled.

It would be difficult for Manda Scott to pull this off, as a good chunk of her career has been spent writing on the spy game in Imperial Rome and the Iceni leader Boudica. If she wanted to play the part, she would probably have to arrive at our meeting place—the caf é in Waterstones Piccadilly—tattooed, sheathed in a breastplate and riding a war chariot.

Alas, this is not the case. She does have tattoos—a line of crows fly up her arm into the sleeve of her rolled-up jumper—but she is casually dressed, and has journeyed from Shropshire on a Virgin Express train to Euston. Yet as she talks, in a softly spoken cadence still retaining hints of her native Glasgow, you get the sense of her steely intelligence—peppered with a wry sense of humour—not unlike the Boudica of her novels.

In Scott’s newest, Into the Fire (Bantam), she takes on another legendary historical woman: saint, scourge of the English and symbol for France, Joan of Arc. Scott says: “I have never been obsessed about particular historical eras. I wrote about Boudica and Rome because I got interested in the stories and that was the time they were set in. But I guess I have always been obsessed with the concept of women who fight—and why.”

Scott herself may have a fight on her hands when the book is published in France. Into the Fire is a dual narrative—one arc takes place in the 1400s during the “Maid of Orl éans” campaigns, the other in modern-day Orl éans amid a series of deadly terror attacks and a mayoral election—yet a central theme is that Joan of Arc was not the touched-by-God, virginal peasant girl of legend.

“Joan of Arc has always been an interest, because I’ve always thought it was staringly obvious she couldn’t have been who they said she was,” says Scott. Aside from the obviously false miracles, Scott’s arguments include the fact that an untrained peasant could not have suddenly learned the intricate ways of fighting as a knight. Scott’s imagination was further fired when she stumbled on an article by Ukrainian anthropologist Serguei Gorbenko, who has posited a reasonable alternative to the Joan myth (to reveal it would give away spoilers concerning the novel).

Scott says: “As I looked into [Joan] further, it was like having a jigsaw and turning it the right way up and all the parts fit together. It made so much sense—why has no one else said this throughout the centuries?”

Partially, Scott discovered, because the myth of Joan is very much adhered to, in both the politics of modern-day France—the far-right Front National has co-opted her as a symbol—and its academics. Scott says: “When you write about Rome or Boudica you go to the experts and say, ‘Download your brains into mine’, and they will talk for hours. But with [Joan of Arc] scholars, when I tried to talk about the ‘real’ Joan they would clam up. It was like I was inviting them to commit heresy, like they were committed to keeping a sort of Loch Ness Monster version of history.”

The next level

It may seem strange to say of someone who has been Orange Prize-shortlisted—for her d ébut, the 1997-published crime novel Hen’s Teeth—and written 14 novels which have earned £2.5m through BookScan, but Scott probably has not yet achieved the huge audience her writing deserves.

Into the Fire could change that. It is more pared-down than some of her other books, yet is riveting for both the pulse-pounding action and the moral and character complexity. The contemporary story features Orl éans police captain In és investigating a series of arson attacks by Islamic fundamentalists, while also reluctantly being coerced into backing her estranged husband¬≠—a Nicolas Sarkozy-esque figure backed by a powerful family—and his mayoral bid. And in 1429, English soldier/spy Tomas infiltrates the French forces to get close to Joan of Arc, aiming not just to kill her, but to destroy her growing legend too.

What separates Into the Fire from many a time-slip novel is that neither narrative seems shoehorned in; In és and Tomas’ fascinating journeys complement rather than compete. This may not have been the case had Scott not made a dramatic switch: “I initially wrote the historical part from Joan’s point of view. But I realised it just didn’t work; that part of the book had to be a quest. So I ripped it all up and started again. That was 80,000 words gone.”

It is not the first time Scott has ripped it all up. Before she began writing, she trained and worked in veterinary medicine for 15 years, including stints at Cambridge University and University College Dublin. Why she became an animal surgeon “would probably take a lot of time with a therapist, but I was a very solitary child, I related to animals, and my mother ran a sanctuary for wildlife”. Yet in the 1990s she decided she did not want to “spend the rest of my life working 14-hour days”, and threw herself into writing.

She received particular encouragement from Fay Weldon and Terry Pratchett while on Arvon writing courses: “Both were genuine and gave of themselves. They altered my vision of what writing was at a point when a lot of people around me thought it was a hobby—like collecting stamps.”

After Hen’s Teeth, there were two more crime novels. Scott’s former publisher Headline was slowly building her into a crime brand, yet she was dissatisfied. She had begun shamanic dreaming—a spiritual discipline she now runs courses on seven or eight times a year—and completed a vision quest, in which she meditated on what to do next. The answer was the Boudica cycle.

This was news to Headline. She says: “I was at Crime Scene 2000 [festival] and someone asked what I was doing next, and I said ‘Boudica’. Problem was, I already had the advance — I already had spent it — for the next crime novel.” But former Transworld publisher Selina Walker was in the audience and signed her up for the Boudica books, and she has been with Transworld ever since.

Scott learned a lesson from that period, though: “Ultimately, you have to write what you are inspired to write. If I’m going to give two years of my life writing this, will I enjoy it? Will it make me want to get up in the morning? But importantly, you have to think about the reader: Can I inspire them? Can I enthrall them? And what can I say that is different?”

Metadata:

Imprint Bantam
Publication 18.06.15
Formats HB/TPB/EB
ISBN 9780593072479/ 72486/9781448169580
Editor Bill Scott-Kerr
Agent Mark Lucas, LAW