Historical hues

Award-winning author Marié Heese on research and retrospection

It’s a talented author that can write about the past with such ease and accessibility  that it seems as though the plot is taking place in the present.  In her latest historical fiction novel The Colour Of Power, South African author Marié Heese whisks her readers through the incredible rise to power of Empress Theodora, one of the Byzantine Empire’s most powerful women figures.

Her lengthy academic career – including an MA (English) (cum laude) and D Litt et Phil – explains her love of the research element required to write a book of this magnitude, but there’s another reason behind Heese’s choice of the historical fiction genre.

“I like to write about another period that enables one to say things, somewhat obliquely, that are relevant to the present,” she explains.

Some of Heese’s strongest themes are those related to the women’s issues of the time and how her strong female protagonists navigate the constrained and discriminatory societies in which they find themselves in. Whether it’s through the brave female pharaoh Hatshepsut in The Double Crown who ruled over Egypt for two decades, or the determined Empress Theodora in The Colour Of Power who climbed the ranks and went from public entertainer and high-class prostitute to empress, Heese expertly presents the past for its resonance with the present  and  provokes her readers into thought.

Colour and detail make for effortless reading about  eras long gone, although Heese is quick to point out that the seduction of details presents its own challenges.

 “I like to give a visually and sensually rich description of what’s going on, but it’s always driven by the story,” she confirms. “If a character is in a marketplace,  I need to know what would have been in the marketplace, what she would have been wearing, what she might have been eating and so it goes on.

“It’s tricky, because one can very easily get bogged down in it. There is such a thing as telling the reader too much, and it’s a great temptation when one has done a lot of research,” Heese says. “There are all of these lovely things you know and want to include, but it can cause the novel to sag, so it’s a fine line to tread.”

Heese is of the opinion that topics choose writers, not the other way around. While she has always been interested in Egypt (hence the decision to write about Hatshepsut), stumbling upon Theodora’s story was quite accidental. She happened to be sifting through various copies of old National Geographics at her local library when a beautiful Byzantine mother and child icon on one of the 1983 covers caught her eye.

“It’s a fascinating period that people don’t know a lot about it. Byzantium was the Eastern Roman Empire, and it went on for 1 000 years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the barbarians,”  Heese says. “Eventually it fell to the Ottoman Turks, but Byzantium is a bridge between the classical civilisation and more modern civilisation.”

Becoming an award-winning novelist might not be quite Heese’s youthful dream of making a career for herself as an actress, but  taking as long as five years to write both The Double Crown and The Colour Of Power (which, incidentally, comes with a sequel due to be published next year) cannot be anything else but a passion.

“It’s great fun,” Heese admits with a shy smile.  “Of course you do get tired, and it’s hard work, especially when you get stuck, but I love doing it and there’s more than enough scope in the facts that one doesn’t know for sure to allow one’s imagination to go wild.”

This article first appeared in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Thursday 14 July 2011.

The Colour Of Power (ISBN: 9780798152808) is on shelves now. Heese won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book in the Africa region in 2010 for The Double Crown.