By William Ried.
Ansel Tone has been named “The Golden Boy of Popular History.” He teaches propaganda at Columbia University and writes Redux Revisionist History best-sellers. His looks and family wealth help him to hawk his books on late night talk shows. He speaks to packed auditoriums. Undergraduates are said to swoon over his lectures. The public sees a professor who drives fast cars and runs with glamorous women, but his personal life is poised between an overbearing father and a son he hardly knows. Ansel spent his junior year at Trinity College in Dublin, on a campus cloaked in four centuries of student pranks and mayhem.
Twelve years later a classmate comes to New York and organizes a reunion. Ansel attends mostly to see how time has treated the beautiful Tess, his girlfriend that year who married their classmate, Charlie. Charlie and Tess live in “Mountain House” in the Hudson Valley. She’s a big-firm lawyer. He’s trying to replicate the success of his first novel and overcome the train-wreck of his second.
At the reunion Charlie announces he will fictionalise the story of how he won Tess away from Ansel. He’ll change the facts to improve the story, but he first wants help remembering what really happened. Ansel panics. Digging into the past could reveal secrets that could overturn his life, and so he sets out to manipulate the story.
Complications ripple from Charlie digging into his college days, Ansel struggling to rewrite his own past and Tess wondering if she wound up with the right guy, while their classmates come to terms with themselves and each other and share the repercussions of rewriting history.
In one instant the quintessence of automobile design exploded into a burning mass, and it all came back to that night, when an ancient campus was washed by spring breezes.
In what felt like the shortest of years they had soaked up the spirit of Trinity College, the tranquility and mystery of the old buildings within high stone walls, the manicured lawns and rebel statues. Half a millennium of tradition and rebellion laid like a cloak over bustling youth.
In a week the American exchange students would go their separate ways home for summers, and senior years and the rest of their lives. But that was in the future. For one night more Dublin was theirs, the world stood still and wide open and history remained to be written. They had one more chance to clasp arms and bellow drinking songs.
Bud organized the party, as usual. He scored access to a snooker room in the Graduates Memorial Building and arranged for a keg. He assigned tasks to the other “McYanks,” the six American students who lived on the same hallway in Botany Bay, attended the same Irish history seminar and often traveled in a pack. Tess and Molly nicked food from the dining hall. Ansel and Charlie got the word out and collected beer money. Dutch helped Bud move furniture and the keg.
They had barely cleared a dance floor when music started shaking centuries of dust from the ornate molding. This brought a trickle and then a wave of people into the snooker room. The beer flowed. A few bottles of whiskey appeared and quickly went to ground. The party soon overflowed into the surrounding hallways.
Dutch saw nearly everyone he had met at Trinity, from the crazy German pre-med student who always had weed to the annoyingly unsullied redhead saving herself for a boyfriend back in Galway. He was no hoofer. A gimpy leg from a baseball injury and his broad shoulders made him a menace on the dance floor. But it was a night for release, so he whisked Molly and then Tess and then whomever else he could grab onto the floor and tried not to bump into anyone too hard.
He met two American tourists invited by one of the Irish students. “Never seen a shag rug on a phone before,” he shouted over the music to the taller one, pointing at the fuzzy pink phone case slipping from her pocket.
“Oh, thanks!” she shouted back. “I’ve lost it twice already.” She had short auburn hair and a welcoming smile. Her friend went off to dance, and Dutch guided the tall girl to the keg, then they moved out of the party room to where they could hear each other.
“Nothing like this at Santa Barbara,” she said, gazing at the intricate staircase and running her hand over a carved wooden bench.
“UC Santa Barbara?”
“Yeah. The coast in gorgeous, but the buildings are nothing like this.”
“Small world!” he exclaimed. She looked up.
“I went to baseball camp there one summer.”
“That’s amazing!” she laughed. “Yeah, I study there, and my folks run a diner right by campus, the Cosmo.”
“I ate there! Best French toast in California…or so they said.”
“That was probably my mother,” she laughed.
“And hey, if you find this staircase impressive, you must see the Debating Chamber.”
She looked at him appraisingly.
“Oh, it’s safe; I promise. It’s just down these stairs.”
She gave him another close look and smiled. They descended half-way to the first floor, passing students on their way up. He led her onto the balcony overlooking a big hall with deep red walls and large windows.
“Wow!” she said, gazing at pilasters rising to the ceiling two stories up.
“Shaw,” Dutch said nonchalantly, nodding toward a bronze relief on the wall as if pointing out a classmate across the yard.
“George Bernard?” she asked.
“Well, no. Actually, it’s a guy name George Ferdinand Shaw. I think he edited The Irish Times.”
She smiled. He tried to think of another scholarly comment. Maybe it was time to suggest a tour of the statuary around New Square. But their cups were empty, and she was eager to check on her friend.
Back in the snooker room, Dutch was telling the California girl a story when he sensed she was looking past him. Following her gaze, he was not surprised to see she was watching Ansel and Tess. They were always the center of attention. But instead of their usual snogging as if no one was watching, they stood in the middle of the dancers arguing. Suddenly, Tess stomped from the room. Ansel shrugged in several directions as if he were on stage and then looked over at Dutch.
“Trouble in paradise?” Dutch said sympathetically, although it was hard to feel too sorry for the king of the prom.
“Ah, women,” Ansel said. “You can’t live with ’em and you can’t, you know…” He turned to Dutch’s companion. “And this is?” he asked, mimicking her eager expression.
Dutch realized he had not asked her name.
“Reilly,” she said, extending her hand to shake and nodding at Dutch in belated introduction.
“Yeah,” Dutch said, recovering. “Reilly’s from California, traveling around Ireland.”
Neither of them heard what he said. They soon disappeared onto the dance floor, so he took his beer to where friends were singing along with the music. His father always said, “if you can’t sing well, sing loud,” and so he joined in emphatically and largely out of tune.
Later, Tess returned and stood back by a wall, looking like she might take a shillelagh to someone’s head. He made his way over. “You okay?”
“What,” she said, as if pulled from a trance. “Yeah, I’m fine. Come on, Dutch, let’s dance.”
She yanked him after her. As they swayed and spun, she tried not to be obvious but clearly she was watching Ansel and Reilly, who held each other close. When Ansel kissed her, Dutch could feel Tess’s shoulders tense.
At a break in the music, Tess charged across the floor. Face-to-face with Ansel she shouted, “You shit!”
Reilly looked startled. The crowd pushed back but everyone heard Tess growl, “Are you trying to humiliate me, you bastard?”
“Slow down,” he replied, holding up his hands as if fending off an attack. “No need for drama. It’s the end of the year!”
She took a wide swing at his head but he ducked. She stormed to the other end of the room.
Ansel could be arrogant but he and Tess seemed perfect together. He was darkly handsome, with the entitled air of someone whose family had a lot of money. She was a consensus beauty, thin and delicate. They were together from early in the year until that night.
Ansel left with Reilly, but not before elaborate goodbyes all around. Dutch was relieved to see Charlie and Molly had taken Tess in hand.
As the crowd dwindled, Dutch helped Bud clean up and then they went outside into the cool night air. The campus was peaceful. They sat on the base of the Provost Salmon statue to polish off a bottle of whiskey.
“Well that was quite a show,” Bud said, handing over the bottle.
“An inauspicious end for the McYanks,” Dutch replied.
“It all seemed good until that thing with Ansel and Tess. Who was that girl?”
“She’s just passing through. I talked with her some, but all I got was she goes to school in California.”
“Ansel can be a turd. How could he treat Tess like that?”
“I’ll drink to that,” Dutch said. He held up the bottle to see if there was any left and then drained it.
Dutch woke next morning to find Bud crashed on Charlie’s bed. He wondered at this, but then remembered Ansel had kicked Bud out of their room so he could be with that girl. And Charlie? Last he remembered his roommate and Molly were comforting Tess. He rose gingerly and opened the shade to muted sunshine. There were police officers in the square.
“Holy shit,” he said to himself and then turned to his friend. “Hey Bud, the campus is swarming with Gardaí. This can’t be about the party?”
He went outside to see what was happening. When he returned, Bud was peering out the window. “So what’s up?” Bud said in a low rasp.
“It’s not about the party,” Dutch said somberly. “Last night Digory fell from the Arts Block. They say he’s dead!”
Praise for Backstory
Backstory won the 2021 New York City Big Book Award for Mysteries, was named a semi-finalist in the 2021 Kindle Book Awards for Literary Fiction, and is a finalist for the 2021 Wishing Shelf Award for Adult Fiction. Editorial reviews include the following:
- Backstory is an “exciting thriller…that compares rewriting the past to bolster one’s own narrative to the concept of fake news,” as a series of “betrayals, alliances, lies, and secrets show how the past is never truly past.” – BookLife Reviews
- “An original and deftly crafted novel that is an inherently riveting read from cover to cover, Backstory showcases author William Michael Ried’s genuine flair for the kind of narrative storytelling style that brings his characters to life and holds the reader’s rapt attention from first page to last.” –Midwest Book Review
- “Backstory is a smart, fast-paced, edgy whodunnit/ whodiditagain that keeps the reader guessing until the very end.” – BookLife Prize Critic’s Report
- “A deftly written and fully engaging novel that showcases the author’s genuine flair for originality, Backstory by William Michael Ried is unreservedly recommended.” – Small Press Bookwatch Review
- Backstory displays “exemplary writing style and near-perfect pacing. While the story is unique in topic and theme, it will still have strong appeal for most readers of mysteries.”– Judge, 29th Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards
The cover of Backstory, designed by Mihail Starikov d/b/a michaelstar*, of Moscow, Russia, was also named a semi-finalist in the 2021 Kindle Book Awards.
To view the author’s website go here.
An extract from Ried’s previous book Five Ferries published in A Sense of Place Magazine can be found here.
