In Depth
Robyn Young: War, peace and warrior monks
25.05.07 Benedicte Page
It takes a certain courage—or recklessness—to begin your writing career with an epic trilogy spanning east and west, a huge cast of characters, and more than 50 years of complex medieval history. Robyn Young, author of the Crusader novel Brethren, and the forthcoming follow-up Crusade (Hodder, August), says that it's just as well she was thoroughly "naïve" when she set out on the project—several years ago, in her mid-20s. "If I'd known how much work this would be, I just wouldn't have done it. I'd studied GSCE history, that was it—and I didn't get a very good grade!"
It was a moment of real, passionate, writerly inspiration that led her to her theme. She was taking courses in creative writing at Sussex University, having abandoned attempts to force herself into a "sensible" career in finance because she was desperate to write. Coming upon the Templars by chance (long before the success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, let alone rumours of his Templar-themed new novel), Young was intrigued by the concept of the warrior monks and sat down to read The Trial of the Templars by historian Malcolm Barber.
"It details the fall of the order at the hands of the French king Philip IV and the Pope, and by the end of it I was just in floods of tears." she says. "The Templars had been going for 200 years, and this incredibly ruthless, ambitious king who needed money targeted them for their wealth. He masterminded this trial, with propaganda that accused them of charges like heresy and sodomy.
The trial was outrageous—men who were devout Christians, who'd served in the Holy Land for years doing what they thought was good for Christendom, were being refused the last rites on their deathbeds after being tortured. I had a real, 'I need to tell this story and right this wrong' sort of feeling."
Brethren surged onto the bestseller charts last year and was the biggest selling hardcover fiction début of 2006. Crusade returns to the story of Templar knight Will Campbell in 1274, with a conflict brewing in Acre, the last major stronghold of the Crusaders in Palestine.
In Young's story, Will is part of a secret inner circle of the Templars devoted to bringing about peace, rather than conflict, between Christians and Muslims. "I thought, 'I want some good guys.' How can you have someone going off to the Crusades saying: 'Killing the Saracens is fantastic' and have modern readers go, 'Yes, that's fine'? I thought, 'I really need to connect with the readers, and I need some heroes who are trying to work for peace.' And the more I read, the more I discovered that actually there were a lot of alliances between east and west. It wasn't a continuous war—there were periods of peace when people traded with each other and just had to get on because they were living alongside each other."
Young was writing Brethren well before the current crisis in Iraq. "On 9/11 itself I was writing a speech where my main character in the east, Baybars, proclaims a jihad on the west. My partner came home very shocked and said, 'Have you seen the news?' 'No, I've been writing.' And there it was—both worlds collided. We had members of parliament calling for a 'crusade' on terror at the time. I was so shocked. I wrote to Tony Blair and said, 'Do you know what that word means? If you really want to aggravate the situation, that's how to do it.'"
Young writes in the attic of her Brighton home, with a beautiful view across the South Downs. It sounds an unlikely location in which to re-create the very bloody power struggles of the medieval world, where death is ever-present, often in brutal and barbaric forms. "I worry about myself sometimes," she says, with what can only be described as a giggle. "My agent [Rupert Heath] and my editor [Nick Sayers] are always the first people to read the book. 'Spectacularly gory,' they say, and they love it."
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