NONE OF WHAT YOU'RE ABOUT TO READ MAY BE TRUE

            This doesn’t mean that what you’re reading is a lie. It may simply be fiction. Fiction, after all, is what I do these days. Fiction is what has made me the obscure novelist that I am widely known as. Frustratingly, I’m widely known not because of my books but because I am quoted all over the internet for having many years ago in a moment of pique declared in an interview:

“First you're an unknown, then you write one book and you move up to obscurity.”  – Martin Myers

            The quote, attribution and all, has become famous. It may be better known than my books. An internet poster hawker – no connection of mine – actually sells posters with the quote attributed to me in a selection of a dozen or so dazzling designs. I get no royalties.

            This ramble is a preamble to my sharing with you the news that I’ve written and am about to publish a sequel to my last novel, THE SECRET VIKING which I published in 2012 as a Kindle Book on Amazon. The sequel is titled THE RETURN OF THE SECRET VIKING and if you haven’t already read its predecessor you don’t need to do so now because I am about to share with you a quick catch-up on the history and mystery of THE SECRET VIKING.

            And let me say upfront, I don’t expect you to believe what I’m about to tell you. No one believes me.  No one believes that while doing research for a literary biography of a deceased Canadian writer, I stumbled upon the fact that her husband, purportedly a Polish novelist who had abandoned her several years prior to her death, was actually a covert 1300-year-old Viking and the most prolific writer of all time. I know... I know... I didn’t believe it either… at first. 

             It took years but I tracked the guy down. He was living over a  convenience store in a strip mall in Newark and writing screenplays for Netflicks and he was a real Viking and paranoid about his secret getting out. Only by promising to protect his present disguised identity, was I able to interview him at length. And then, I spent the next five years making his story into a literary biography, called THE SECRET VIKING. 

             But when I tried to sell THE SECRET VIKING, once again, no one would believe me. Agents, editors, publishers all said, ”This is bullshit. None of this is true. What are you trying to pull?” 

             Even my dean, a close friend, at the university where I professed for a couple of years, was aghast. “Look,” he warned me. “Don’t do this. You’ll never get away with it. The media will carve you up. There’ll be a scandal. And you’ll get yourself severed for cause.” 

             Talk about a bind. In 2005, I had turned out a well-received humorous memoir and before that I had written three critically acclaimed novels that had been published by major publishers in the US, Canada and the UK and taught on Canadian Literature courses. One critic praised my work “…for its Barth-like interplay of traditional narrative and unsettling authorial intervention, its Joycean play with form, its catalogue reminiscent of Barththelme’s experiments, its Nabokovian word play and its Borgesian awareness that reality is a construct.” I was in demand for speech-making left and right.           

             Get the picture? One day, I was everybody’s literary darling. The next, I was a liar, a fraud, a con artist. What was I to do? The first thing to do, I decided, was not to give up. 

             Using a pen name, I rewrote my experience with the Viking as a novel and changed the title to ABOUT 200 SHORT NOVELS. And get this. After the rewrite, I was told it didn’t sound like fiction; it sounded real. In frustration I reworked the book again and changed the title back to THE SECRET VIKING.

             THE SECRET VIKING is a novel that may or may not have been authored by the protagonist who is a 1300-year-old Viking and the world’s most prolific writer. What’s more, the book may or may not be fiction.     

             The Viking’s secret existence first came to light when literary scholar, August Dallou was researching the papers of deceased Canadian novelist Helga Rittersporn. In her notes for a tell-all memoir, Dallou discovered that the Polish novelist husband, who had abandoned her a few years earlier, was actually a 1300-year-old Viking warrior-poet, Thorsten the Rood. After a blow to his head at the age of 44,Thorsten had miraculously stopped aging and secretly lived on and on.                                

             Non-aging but mortal, fearful and paranoid, Thorsten has avoided scrutiny and danger century after century, by hiding behind a series of cover-up identities, mostly literary, frequently famous, all the while, writing, writing, writing. For 1256 years, the life extended Viking had been running scared and writing.   

             Recognizing Thorsten as a treasure trove of literary and historical information, Dallou is eager to find the elusive warrior poet and wrest from him thirteen centuries of knowledge. But Thorsten is determined not to be found and Dallou’s attempts to track him down became a literary detective story, a comic literary detective story, with pomo trappings.              

             As Dallou chases after Thorsten through diverse recent identities, the secret Viking’s tale spins out in a series of glimpses of his past lives between episodes of the ongoing chase. Snippets of Thorsten’s writings, past and present, fragments of his work as poet, scribe, author, playwright, screen writer, trip into view, tiptoeing among the novel’s many threads and revealing how Thorsten keeps his secret and survives in what, in his fearful view, is a life-threatening world.      

             Now, here’s the thing. Though Thorsten appears to be writing this book, at the same time, another author usurping Thorsten’s name and tale is trying to get what sounds like the very same book published. There are, it seems, two versions of the novel. One is this novel. The other is the novel in this novel. Both novels have the same name and appear identical. And both may or may not be fiction.    

             When the persistent Dallou and the determined Thorsten finally meet face to face, Dallou persuades Thorsten to stop running and tell all. In the comically ironic mode that pervades this book with its profusion of plots and authors, Thorsten’s revelations examine the relationship of author to literature, of literature to life, of author to god, of character to his own story.         

             One fragment offers a fiery condemnation of the postmodern novel – a novel very like the one the reader is reading. Clearly, authorship today is a risky business. Tell me about it.            

             If this is a novel, it’s a novel with two endings. The first is a red herring. The second is a great white whale in which Viking author and learned scholar crash headlong into each other in a surprising collision. It’s on page 335.  

             It comes down to this. Under various names and guises, Thorsten is the author of hundreds of novels. I myself am the author of merely four novels and a memoir. With THE RETURN OF THE SECRET VIKING, I’m doing my damnedest to make that five novels and a memoir. I will probably need help. I’ll let you know.