Stranger than Fiction
Warning - Spoilers
If you've not read Living With the Truth then you won't want to read
this. If you have then you're probably wondering how there could be a
sequel to the first book. It would be like looking for a sequel to
Of Mice and Men.
I had a few ideas. I thought about going back in time but I didn't like the
idea of working with a younger Jonathan. I thought of taking Jonathan through
the events of the first book again as an observer who gets to step in at the
end and change the ending.
None of them worked. Finally I decided to resurrect him. But when?
The answer was obvious: outside time, at the end of everything. And why?
Because the Dunameon had made a muck up of their last attempt at putting the
universe through its paces. And not for the first time. So, each and every
individual that had ever existed was being brought back to life and interviewed
before they began the whole thing again. And it's just Truth's luck he ends up
with Jonathan.
The whole book takes place in a landscape generated by Jonathan's memories
of his past life. Everyone and everything is as he remembers it, not necessarily
the way it was. In this pseudo-reality he has to face his mother and father, his
past (presented as a film) and a conference made up of various Jonathans from
alternative realities. Oh, and he gets to visit Truth home plain, where he gets
to meet some of the other Powers who have had a hand in messing up life as he
knew it.
The book ends with a final confrontation with Jan where he learns that you don't
always need to get answers.
A bit about the writing of Stranger than Fiction
People talk about the "difficult" second novel. It really wasn't. Even though
the first book is complete — in fact, final — there was still a lot about the
protagonists that had hardly been touched. The question was whether I should
go there. There are plenty of books where we'd like to know more but do we need
to? If you think about all the awful sequels to perfectly good movies then the
question pretty much answers itself.
That said, a writer — at least this writer — often has little control about where
his writing will take him and I clearly hadn't finished with these two characters.
In this book I realised I wanted to know a bit more about Truth and so I brought
him to the fore a bit more. The result was a more fantasy-focused book; in fact
none of the book takes place in the real world but to say more would spoil things.
But, if by "fantasy" you're expecting dragons and trolls you would be mistaken. Yes,
it is "disengaged from reality" but, at the same time, most of the book takes place
in realistic settings. Ah ... just read the ruddy book.
Living With the Truth
Stranger than Fiction
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