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cover of episode 'The Pretender' centers on a real peasant who learns he is heir to England's throne

'The Pretender' centers on a real peasant who learns he is heir to England's throne

2025/6/26
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Scott Simon: 我介绍了《The Pretender》的故事背景和主角。故事发生在1483年,讲述了约翰·科林从一个普通农民到被告知自己是Clarence公爵的儿子,并可能成为国王的命运转变。这个故事充满了阴谋和危险,因为当时的英国王位争夺非常激烈。 Jo Harkin: 这个故事基于真实的历史事件,但历史记录非常有限,特别是关于农民的生活。因此,我在写作时,遵循了Hilary Mantel的原则,即在已知的历史事实基础上,用虚构来填补空白。我试图通过这个故事,探讨身份、命运和个人选择等主题,并赋予历史人物更丰富的人性。

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Ten-year-old John Collan, a peasant boy, discovers he's not who he thinks he is. Two nobles reveal his true identity as Edward, Earl of Warwick, the rightful heir to the throne of England, setting off a chain of events with deadly consequences.
  • John Collan's true identity as Edward, Earl of Warwick
  • The political climate of 1483 England
  • The dangers faced by royal heirs

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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Jo Harkin is on the podcast today. She's the author of The Pretender. It's an historical fiction novel taking place in England in the 1400s, and it's about a peasant boy who becomes king. And in this interview with NPR's Scott Simon, Harkin talks about how she comes from the school of Hilary Mantel, right? How it was important to write truthfully about the true things that did happen and then use the tool of fiction to fill in the gaps. And she talks about how she's a

The issue with writing about peasants, though, is that their history was rarely recorded. After the break, Harkin talks about how this book was an opportunity to give this real peasant child's life a second act. That's coming up.

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or faked. It's 1483, and John Collin is ten years old. His object in life is to rid his village of a demon goat that knocks him about, until a stranger well-dressed arrives and informs John that, in fact, he is not the son of a farmer. He is the son of the late George, Duke of Clarence. John's real name is Edward, Earl of Warwick, and he is to be king.

The Pretender is a new novel from Joe Harkin, and it is drawn from history. Joe Harkin joins us from Berkshire in the UK. Thanks so much for being with us. Thank you so much for having me. Tell us about the people who show up one day. What do they say to him?

Yes, so these two nobles arrive and he thinks he's going to be sent off to have a tutor in Oxford, which is the nearest town to his little village. And he is shocked to learn that apparently he was swapped at birth by his father, the paranoid Duke of Clarence, who is the brother of King Edward IV and the brother of King Richard III. And Richard III is the one on the throne at the time that the novel starts.

So these nobles say, you are the last York Hope, you're a lost heir. We've come to get you and now it's time to go and reclaim your glorious destiny as the King of England. We just have to basically get Henry Tudor out of the way first. He's pretty terrified, but he goes off and, yeah, to learn to be a king. Yeah.

A dangerous job for a 10-year-old because a lot of kings and would-be kings and heirs were being slain in England at this point, weren't they?

Exactly. This is in the aftermath of the princes who were killed in the tower. So England is still kind of rocked by these two deaths. And so for John Corland to, for the story to be, oh, this is the real Earl of Warwick, this child was kind of an ongoing threat. How did they settle on this child? What made him so propitious for what they plotted?

Well, this is the interesting thing. It's based on a true story, which I sort of discovered by chance when I was reading a history book. The real child, Lambert Simnel, got barely more than a footnote. So when I first started with the novel, I just actually thought that this kid was a straight fake, that they had just found someone with a passing resemblance to the Yorks or maybe a bastard, and they decided to just sort of groom him, basically, to impersonate this kid.

And then when I was looking into the research, it turns out that his father, the Duke of Clarence, actually did try to swap him as a baby because at this point he was basically scheming against his brother, the king, Edward IV.

He knew his life was in danger, and it was. He was later executed. And somewhere along the line, he made an attempt to swap his infant son out for a peasant child just to keep him safe. The story is that he didn't succeed. His two sort of retainers who confessed to being part of this scheme said that they hadn't actually managed to do it. But then I kind of thought, well, they would say that.

So I actually had to retool the novel to kind of make way for this ambiguity. Like there was a possibility that his father succeeded and this kid was the real deal. When you're writing a novel, when do you have to leap from the research into your imagination? So this one actually quite early on. I always follow Hilary Mantel, who was just such a huge inspiration. I obviously loved the Wolf Hall trilogy.

And her basic approach was that if something was historical fact and it was on the record, then she would treat that as solid. And then it was where there was a gap that she would fill in with her own invention. And I thought that was a really great way to do it. I'm not really interested in writing alternate history. But then the problem with the time that I'm writing about, the late 1400s, records are really patchy. And what you had at the time were the official chronicles.

And those were basically the propaganda of whatever monarch was in power in whichever country they were from. So some of it was just hearsay and rumour. Ultimately, yeah, I found that there was a lot to fill in. And Simnel himself, he's barely a mention in these histories. The consensus is that he was a peasant, but no one knows who his family were. And peasants' lives were generally unrecorded anyway.

The people who take him from the farm feel that he needs to be educated as a, you know, if he's going to be a proper sovereign. What do they feel is important for him to know? So as a young king and grooming sort of king to be at the time, you would be required to hunt with birds and with dogs. So you'd obviously need to be good on the horse. You might need to be good at jousting, archery.

archery, sword fighting, as well as they were required to be well-read. That was the expectation. So he suddenly has to catch up on all this education in quite a hurry. And this is kind of something I wanted to really show in the book, how he's not just shaped by his society and the environment around him, but how his culture has kind of gone into forming him as a person. It was obviously a challenge to sort of show that with a light touch rather than going into extensive tropes

tracts of medieval poetry, but I had to restrain myself with some of that. Well, I want you to read something because he turns out to be, I think it's safe to say, gifted.

at language and writing. And why don't we read something that he writes? Sure. Yeah, so he has aspirations of becoming a writer himself and becomes a little bit disillusioned with this as the novel goes on. But in his early years, this is one of his compositions. And it's basically him trying to make sense of his life. And little John played at a yeoman, a boy raised on the farm. He went by the name of John Collan, so to come him to no harm.

There's something very sad about that, isn't there?

Yeah, he's trying to fictionalize his life. And this is at the moment where he's riding away from the farm to begin this bright future that also kind of horrifies him. So he's framing it as this fairy tale, and it does fall into that kind of trope. But the reality is very different. And yeah, he has mixed emotions, to say the least. Of course, it's irresistible to do a little research ourselves,

to look up what happened to John Lambert Simnel. Not an unhappy life. Did he receive a certain kind of mercy? This is the thing. The real child, he's pardoned by King Henry after his attempt to take the throne fails. He gets set to work in the kitchens. Some accounts have it that he became a ladle washer, others that he was turning a spit.

And he might have been relieved that he didn't die on the battlefield, which is obviously the risk that's uppermost in my character's mind throughout a lot of it. And that's the end of him. We don't hear anything more about him. Yeah, that left me with just this huge space to kind of create a second act for him. And I think that's sort of what interested me about his story almost as much as the known facts, which are pretty crazy. But the idea that he could then go on to have this second existence where possibly he has a little more agency than the first time around.

Jo Harkin's new novel, The Pretender. Thank you so much for being with us. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure.

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