The literary life of Reilly’s Tasmanian Tournament

Paula Xiberras

I was delighted to catch up with best-selling author Matthew Reilly last week, about his latest book ‘The Tournament’ and his upcoming visit to Tasmania.

I know that Matthew is a frequent visitor to Tasmania, he gets here about every 2 or 3 years promoting his books, but he’s also a fan of Barbougle Dunes golf course in Bridport on the north east coast of Tasmania and has played there 4 or 5 times with hopes to visit again. What especially appeals to him about Tasmania is it’s fresh air and the peace and solitude it affords.

Matthew admires Tasmania so much he even set one of his novels here, ‘The Hovercraft Racer’, the one that has been optioned by Walt Disney, no less. The novel employs Hobart in great detail and has a scene of a race revolving around the landmark of the Tasman Bridge.

Matthew’s latest novel ‘The Tournament” focuses on the early life of Elizabeth’s l and uses a now forgotten incident of history, a chess game in Constantinople to showcase the young princess’s prowess.

The novel follows Elizabeth’s visit there for the tournament with her teacher Roger Ascham,a figure rarely cited in historical texts apart from an infrequent footnote that Matthew embellishes with splendid brush-strokes.

In an example of Matthew’s insatiable curiosity the idea of including the character of Elizabeth’s teacher came about when Matthew was driving by a girls school in NSW called Ascham . He had always wondered about the name derivation and he decided to look it up, discovering the school was named for Elizabeth’s teacher who used ‘the art of gentle schooling’ in his teaching technique, and did so ‘extremely well’.

‘The Tournament’ is a novel of firsts in a couple or ways; it’s the first novel by Matthew to be written from the first person perspective and the first where he writes from the perspective of a young woman.

Matthew includes the shadow of the King Henry VIII in the novel, and shows how his enormous successful life shaped the life of his daughter, the future queen. Her experience of a friends dealings with men, Matthew hopes will explain why Elizabeth decided on the single life.

In the story, Matthew gives us an explanation garnered from his reading of Geraldine Brooks about the origin of burka wearing and why a Christian theologian describes girls as weeds!

There are also the delicious possibilities to consider of Michelangelo carving a chess set for use in the Constantinople tournament and Ivan the Terrible as a teenager, his proposals to Elizabeth and Elizabeth and Ascham’s delving into detective work! As always Matthew with his deft style gives us an imaginative history and fills in history’s gaps and possibly gasps wrapping them up in the entertaining vehicle of a novel.

Matthew’s next book will be set in the present day, a high tech novel set in China. In the meantime you can catch Matthew at his Tassie event presented by Dymocks and held at St Michaels Collegiate on the 18th of November at 6pm.