Tom Holland: evaluation

Transcript context

…In what way is your interpretive Christianity still influenced by Lord Byron, a writer you started your career working on? That’s a very, very good question because I’ve never thought of the conjunction, although now you mention it. I was raised by my mother as in the Church of England. She is a regular churchgoer, so I went to church with her. That was very much part of my upbringing. But at the same time, my mother’s elder brother, my Uncle David — he was an extraordinary man who had, during the Second World War, been posted, as a very young man, out to India. He’d fallen in love with India. Throughout the ’50s, he worked as a publisher in Pakistan. Then, while he was out there, he decided that, actually, he wanted to be an actor. He came back to England. He got roles. He got a role in Doctor Who as a homicidal Tibetan monk. He was not a churchgoer, it would be fair to say. He took me to Newstead Abbey as a very impressionable boy. Newstead Abbey is the home of Lord Byron, and it was an abbey that had been closed down in the Reformation, bought by the Byrons. The Byrons had fought on the side of the king in the civil war, had been admirals and ne’er-do-wells, and Byron inherited this title. I went to this abbey and was told stories about how Byron and his friends would dress up as monks. Byron had a drinking cup made out of a skull. He and all the lads would do very ungodly things. This seemed to me the height of glamour and sophistication. To my innocent churchgoing self, Byron became a kind of model of swagger and glamour, as he was for people throughout the 19th century, and for many people still is. I became fascinated by Byron. I initially wanted to do a doctorate on him, but then I gave that up because I decided that he was just too fascinating, too charismatic, and basically too hostile to the academic, I think. He didn’t deserve an academic treatment. Instead, I wrote a novel in which he was a vampire. That set me on the course of writing. I wrote three novels in various periods of history in which famous people from history were vampires. I began to realize I wasn’t really interested in writing novels. I wasn’t ultimately interested in writing vampire stories. I wanted to write about history. But the link, I think, with Christianity is what interested me in writing about the vampire novels — and what has interested me in writing all the various volumes of history in various periods of time that I’ve done since. It’s a fascination with how people in different ages understood things that, to us today, might seem far-fetched, implausible, impossible. So, essentially, how they relate to the dimension of the supernatural. It’s a real problem for anyone in the 21st century trying to understand the past, is that perhaps too academic approach to the study of what, say, people in Rome or early medieval Europe or whatever thought about the divine. It’s a bit like studying a butterfly by sticking a pin through it. Too objective, too academic, too rationalist in approach can risk alienating you from perspective, the very perspectives that you’re trying to understand. ing a butterfly by sticking a pin through it. Too objective, too academic, too rationalist in approach can risk alienating you from perspective, the very perspectives that you’re trying to understand. I think that that was something I realize now, from the distance of time, from when I was writing the vampire books. That’s what I was exploring in those books and have continued to explore, I think.…

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