Generic Difficulties

These two quite different historical novels, both by first-time novelists, reveal once again the many difficulties of that genre, no matter how much information the author has gathered. The publisher of Temple of the Grail has provided ample publicity material. Along with the usual media release, there is a two-page puff piece couched in the first person about how Adriana Koulias came to write and publish the book. Koulias is Brazilian by birth, from a Catholic family that moved to Australia when she was nine: ‘By the time I was eighteen I had come into contact with a cornucopia of religion and philosophy.’ Much of this lore has been fed into Temple of the Grail, which sets out, she says, ‘to show how religious zeal, carried to extremes, eventually leads to error’. In addition to this promotional material, the book itself contains a foreword by David Wansbrough praising the book to the skies:

None of this book has the waffly lofty twaddle of ‘channelled’ information. The content has been produced because the author has worked hard to clarify her thoughts, to absorb historical references, to totally live for a time within the activity of the experience – and then has let it go. The pictures that arose later have a truth about them.

What is the point of including a foreword such as this? If one is reading it, the book has probably already been bought. If what Wansbrough says is true, it will become apparent to the reader. If not, it makes the failure all the more glaring.