WATER LANE is available from AuthorHouse, Amazon, and Barns & Noble

Water Lane

From ancient times, the stream of clear spring water flowed by the willows in the meadow and down along Water Lane past the Maison Dieu -- the House of God -- and then across the London-Canterbury Road, nourishing watercress beds and turning waterwheels, before it entered Faversham Creek and moved on to the sea.

Water Lane is dry now, but is still called Water Lane, and the Maison Dieu is still there, on the corner of Water Lane and the London-Canterbury road, at the crossroads of the English village of Ospringe, Kent. Two thousand years ago, Roman soldiers would have brushed the sweat from their foreheads as they paused here to take a drink. Six hundred years ago, Geoffrey Chaucer would have splashed water on his face to clear the sleep out of his eyes as he emerged from the Maison Dieu -- a thriving Medieval hostel -- ready to start on the last day's journey of his Canterbury pilgrimage.

Four hundred years ago, Christopher Marlowe would have held the reins of his drinking horse, as he peered along Water Lane, looking towards his family's ancestral homestead, with a side-ways glance at the decaying and neglected Maison Dieu. Eighty years ago, my mother dropped a loaf of bread in the water of the lane, one which she had purchased at the corner store -- a converted Maison Dieu -- and a passing stranger helped her to fish it out again.

Intrigued by these connections -- of a shared ancestral village for myself and Christopher Marlowe, and of a seemingly vast difference in temperament and circumstances for the two poets, Chaucer and Marlowe, whose lives had paused at Water Lane -- I sought a form which would unite all of these associated images into a comprehensive work of art. The

desire to unite these disparate images led to the idea of telescoping the references to Marlowe and Chaucer inside my own attempt to comprehend the meaning of their lives. I decided that the attempt to understand the connections which these images evoked would begin and end with a tourist, on a visit to an ancestral village, who would imagine Christopher Marlowe in a situation that included a similar thoughtful visit to Water Lane. It was this framing idea that provided the form of the novel.

Christopher Marlowe

The Christopher Marlowe who pauses at Water Lane is at a crossroads of his inner-life. He is well aware, at the time of the visit to Ospringe, that he is in a very different situation than Chaucer would have been on a similar visit. He is under great stress. He is embarked on a dark pilgrimage, one which is taking place during what might turn out to be the last days of his life -- a reverse pilgrimage in which Marlowe is proceeding from Canterbury, his home town, towards London, where he has been summoned to answer charges of blasphemy and treason.

It is a grim pilgrimage, a pilgrimage under duress, during which he is beset by threatening forces which he cannot fathom, and yet needs to comprehend if he is to survive. Fearing that his death is imminent, he re-orders his experience, both past and present, in an attempt to achieve an understanding of his life and art.

The Christopher Marlowe who pauses at Water Lane is a man of wide interests who has outgrown the narrow world of politics which he entered as a patriot and young adventurer. He is a man who has enjoyed the liveliness of the times, and who has taken part in the philosophical debates that the new discoveries and ideas have made so exciting. His awareness that the world of Thomas a Becket and Chaucer has been overthrown has made him sceptical of the authority that dictates official beliefs and punishes treason and heresy. In May of 1593, as the political climate heats up, with threats to England from without and within making government more repressive, and with political leaders relying on accusation and hearsay to determine England's enemies, Marlowe's penchant for unorthodox thinking and outspokenness have made him a danger to his enemies and an embarrassment to his friends.

He is a man who has never lost contact with his home life in Canterbury, and who has come to value that connection more, now that he realizes that he is in danger of losing it, as the forces which threaten his destruction are closing in on him. He is a writer whose art is a synthesis of all of the aspects of his life: his boyhood in Canterbury and love for the Miracle Plays, his work in the theatre, his close-up and dangerous acquaintance with the clash of political and religious ideas and forces, and above all, his own life-long pursuit of the ideal, in every area of his life, and its contrast with the realities that he constantly encounters.

He is a man who is trying to change his life, but who is finding it difficult to leave the old ways and to start afresh. His past is catching up with him. He is ready to turn his back on politics, and to concentrate on drama and poetry, but he has been labelled as a man who needs to be dealt with, and the political crisis of 1593, with great rivalries drawing to a climax, means that Marlowe, as an outspoken representative of dangerous ideas, is under close scrutiny.

Structure

The location -- Water Lane -- and the situation -- a man caught in the overlap between the political and private worlds that he has been living in -- suggested the structure within which the story could best be told. This method of story-telling evolved during my search for a form which will allow an artistic response to the complexity of life as we experience it. The straight-line, sequential narrative of events is inadequate as a vehicle for presenting the complexity of our perceptions of our lives, and conveys an inaccurate impression of the way in which we attempt to reach an understanding of our experience. Although the events of our lives occur chronologically, our deeper minds are constantly re-arranging and inter-layering the images of these events into thematic patterns in an attempt to achieve a meaningful understanding in which the chronology of those events becomes the least relevant aspect of the experience. In this process, the chronological recollection of these events -- the easy, efficient, superficial ordering of the conscious memory -- is an inadequate substitute for the thematic understanding that the subconscious mind is constantly seeking.

In searching for the form which would reveal the meaning of experience, my study of Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust and T. S. Eliot, among others, yielded the techniques that spoke most clearly to my artistic needs. Among these techniques are: the dismantling and reordering of the past in an attempt to achieve a better understanding of the present; the use of a multi-textured surface in order to gain a greater complexity within a thematic unity; the use of discontinuous narrative as a means of creating parallel image-cycles that inter-illuminate one another; and the radical juxtaposition of image with image, with no intrusive and over-simplifying authorial or character explanation. These techniques lend themselves to the rapid-cutting that the past century has made commonplace in film, though less familiar in novels.

The Form of the Novel

Although the thoughts of the tourist begin with the connections that are evoked at Water Lane, the novel is framed by a later moment in the story. Four days after Christopher Marlowe's visit to Ospringe, the tourist imagines the poet and playwright as he lies bleeding on the floor of Eleanor Bull's house, in Deptford, reviewing his life in a series of cyclical memories. As he lies there dying, the visit to Ospringe is now the memory of a pause in his intended Canterbury-London pilgrimage, which was distorted by the arrival of three untrustworthy escorts who intercepted him at Ospringe and diverted him to Deptford. Inside the memory of this dangerous pilgrimage, the injured Marlowe reviews his last visit home to see his family in Canterbury; and inside that memory he recalls his boyhood and his love for the Miracle Plays which provoked a life-long interest in drama and ideas.

The telescopic nature of these memories suggested a structure of inter-active cycles:

- the tourist visits Ospringe, in May of 2000, exploring his connection with Christopher Marlowe and the shared ancestral image of the water in Water Lane;

- the tourist imagines Christopher Marlowe as he lies bleeding, in Eleanor Bull's house in Deptford, in May of 1593, while his murderers rehearse their story for the coroner;

- as he lies bleeding, Christopher Marlowe's preconscious mind remembers the reverse pilgrimage, from Canterbury to Deptford, under the watchful eye of the escort that began at Water Lane, in dark contrast to the pilgrimage of Chaucer;

.-inside that memory, Marlowe restructures his recent visit home, to his family in Canterbury, during which he searched for an understanding of his life and his art;

- inside the memory of the family visit, Marlowe restructures the memory of his boyhood love of the Miracle Plays, and his awakening awareness of the excitement of drama and ideas, the start of the journey which became the artistic pilgrimage of his life.

It is by remembering and reordering these aspects of his life -- the dark pilgrimage, the family visit and the boyhood love of drama -- that the bleeding Marlowe seeks to come to an evaluation of his life and his art.

The Premise of the Novel

The form of the novel also grew from a premise about the connections that can be made between any two moments in history -- in this case, between Christopher Marlowe's time and our own. I decided that as much as possible, the actual documents of the historical record of Marlowe's life experiences would be quoted verbatim in the text of the novel; and that the fictional imaginings which would connect these historical documents would affirm their factuality -- make it plausible that these are the residual fragments of a lived life -- exchanging energy with them, as it were -- while providing a minimum of interpretive speculation about them.

I wanted to keep the possibilities of the story of Christopher Marlowe as wide-open and comprehensive as I could. I wanted the meaning of the novel -- the textual combination of the fiction and the non-fiction -- to come from something other than the narrowness of a new polemical theory about the life or works of Christopher Marlowe. The fiction would suggest the complexity of a life whose known facts have launched a thousand theories. In doing so, I wanted to imagine a fictional record of the life of Christopher Marlowe that would include the possibilities of as many of the current theories about the historical-biographical and literary Christopher Marlowe as I could accommodate. I wanted neither of these possibilities -- the historical-biographical theories as to the experiences of his life, nor the suggestiveness of his works as to the thoughts that occupied him during his lifetime -- to be denied by the narrowness of my fictional text.

In the pursuit of this aim, I included excerpts from the texts of some of the poetry and drama of Christopher Marlowe, the Miracle Plays which he would have watched as a boy, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which celebrate the route which Marlowe would have taken back and forth to Cambridge and London, and the Elizabethan government reports which contain the rumours and accusations of which he would have been well aware. In turn, these historical texts contribute to the image-patterns which are the record of the fictional character's thoughts.

In negotiating the fictional web which connects the historical record, the reader is subject to a very specific point of view. The reader overhears Marlowe's preconscious mind and is therefore limited by what Marlowe knows and reveals, by what he knows and doesn't reveal, and by what he doesn't know. The reader has access, not to the actual thoughts that Christopher Marlowe is considering, but the images with which he thinks. The thoughts that connect these images, for Christopher Marlowe, are not part of the surface of the text.

The Style of the Novel

Despite the fact that this is an historical novel, the style is minimalist. Water Lane is a story of political intrigue and a lyrical evocation of the influence of childhood and family on a sensitive artist. In seeking to present this story in its essence, the novel offers only the barest of historical information and descriptive detail of time and place. In attempting to understand his situation, the preconscious mind of the main character processes only those details which offer themselves as the source of images that promise to contribute meaning to his search for understanding.

In imagining the preconscious mind of the historical-fictional Christopher Marlowe, the Ospringe tourist sees him as the quintessential 21st Century man: beset by uncertainties, overwhelmed by a barrage of disparate information, subject to forces which appear to be beyond his control, rapidly processing the images that might lead to understanding. Just as Hamlet is a Renaissance Englishman, Shakespeare's contemporary, with only a fine dusting of Medieval Danish history, so too is the Christopher Marlowe of this novel a 21st Century man, the tourist's contemporary, imagined with only a thin veneer of the Elizabethan milieu.

Water Lane is still there; the traffic whizzes by it every day. You cannot look at Water Lane and the Maison Dieu without a transport truck -- or lorry -- punctuating your view. The crossroads of Water Lane and the London-Canterbury road belongs to our time just as much as to that of the Roman soldiers, of Geoffrey Chaucer, of Christopher Marlowe and all of the generations who have paused there. To the tourist of the outer frame of the novel, what is most interesting about Christopher Marlowe is not primarily historical, but is the way in which his story, and the story of his time, can be made to illuminate our own.

WATER LANE is available from AuthorHouse, Amazon, and Barns & Noble