:00:00. > :00:13.Now on BBC News, meet the author. Is a story about storytelling, about
:00:14. > :00:22.myth and believe, about human curiosity. Marcel Theroux's new
:00:23. > :00:30.novel is a tale of religion and politics that move from czarist
:00:31. > :00:34.Russia, India and eventually to the brink of the Second World War and
:00:35. > :00:37.the Holocaust. On every page, the same question teases and torments
:00:38. > :00:54.you: What is true and what is not? Welcome.
:00:55. > :01:00.I'm not sure if classification of novels is a good idea or not, but in
:01:01. > :01:06.the case of this very original story, I want to hear how you would
:01:07. > :01:11.describe it as a book. That is a tough one. For me, it is an
:01:12. > :01:15.adventure story, at the heart of it. I wanted to have the energy and
:01:16. > :01:19.vigour of a classic adventure story. The book itself sprang out of my
:01:20. > :01:26.obsession with another book, which I brought to show you. It's The
:01:27. > :01:34.Unknown Life Of Jesus Christ, published in 1894 in Paris by a
:01:35. > :01:38.Russian emigre. I have always been interested in this story of Jesus,
:01:39. > :01:42.and particularly the big gap in the gospel between his childhood and the
:01:43. > :01:45.beginning of his ministry in Galilee, and I always wondered what
:01:46. > :01:53.he was up to in those years. And I came across this apocryphal tale
:01:54. > :01:58.that he had been in India studying Buddhism, and it turns out it
:01:59. > :02:03.originates with this book. The writer claims to have discovered it
:02:04. > :02:07.in a Tibetan monastery. The how, why and where of that story was the
:02:08. > :02:18.seat. We live in an age of conspiracy theory sees -- conspiracy
:02:19. > :02:31.theories, and this is a great one. That period, the writer is a Russian
:02:32. > :02:35.in this part of the Empire, and he is possibly up to no good. It is
:02:36. > :02:38.fascinating that he is therein the first place. Then he comes up with
:02:39. > :02:43.this gospel that sounds like something out of Indiana showing
:02:44. > :02:47.that Jesus is a Buddhist. What a lovely idea that would be, you might
:02:48. > :02:53.think about as you say, when you look at the historical background
:02:54. > :02:57.and what was going on in the 1880s and 8090s, which is a period that
:02:58. > :03:03.weirdly resembles others, it was a busy time for fake news, for
:03:04. > :03:16.conspiracy theories. In many ways, it is a book about stories, about
:03:17. > :03:21.how important they are, and about high how this leads to religious
:03:22. > :03:25.belief. It is a story about storage telling wrapped up in a piece of
:03:26. > :03:29.storytelling. That is why I think that the novel is the right form to
:03:30. > :03:36.tell his life, because his life is about telling stories. As I was
:03:37. > :03:40.writing it, I was thinking about the fact that it seems like in the last
:03:41. > :03:43.ten years the word narrative has seized hold of people's
:03:44. > :03:49.imaginations. I don't think people talked about it in 20 -- talked
:03:50. > :03:54.about it 20 years ago. It is one of the legacies of the Blair era. It
:03:55. > :04:00.was Peter Mandelson that I remember saying the Labour Party needed to
:04:01. > :04:06.find a new narrative. You could be talking about Rasputin. How weird.
:04:07. > :04:10.People are so self conscious now about the need to construct stories,
:04:11. > :04:16.to have a back story, a charismatic central figure struggling to do
:04:17. > :04:21.something. And it seems like the techniques of novel writing have
:04:22. > :04:26.been adopted wholesale by spin doctors and political analysts and
:04:27. > :04:30.movers and shakers. When you were writing it, you must have been aware
:04:31. > :04:38.that the whole political debate about fake news, the now famous
:04:39. > :04:42.phrase, about truth, falsehood, the manipulation of truth, had really
:04:43. > :04:46.been taken and thrust into the limelight for us all in a way that
:04:47. > :04:53.wasn't the case five years ago. That was the weird thing about the book.
:04:54. > :04:59.I finished it last spring. Fake news wasn't a word when I handed the book
:05:00. > :05:05.my publisher, and I had weird to the tingling in my spine when people
:05:06. > :05:15.started arguing about the truth and falsehood, and alternative facts,
:05:16. > :05:21.and I thought, this is so bizarre. -- I had a weird tingling in my
:05:22. > :05:27.spine. This book deals with anti-Semitism, and that is the
:05:28. > :05:31.oldest hatred of all. It seems evergreen and like it will never
:05:32. > :05:37.disappear. Of course, it is a perennial subject for novelists, and
:05:38. > :05:44.yet, there is nothing familiar about that theme in this book - oh, here
:05:45. > :05:50.we go again - because it is wrapped up in this enigmatic figure who
:05:51. > :05:56.clearly fascinates you, almost obsesses you. I found him so
:05:57. > :06:01.strange. Here is this guy, in British India, what is he doing? He
:06:02. > :06:06.finds this book and says that Jesus was studying Buddhism. He then turns
:06:07. > :06:11.up in a lot of other people's box. In real life, he actually does. But
:06:12. > :06:16.you only see flashes of him. There is no biography. We don't know when
:06:17. > :06:21.he died, we're not 100% sure when he was born, but he flashes up a lot of
:06:22. > :06:24.times in declassified documents from British India. I have to say that
:06:25. > :06:28.what I have read about him, he doesn't seem like the nicest person
:06:29. > :06:34.in the world. He seems to have inspired this trust above all. The
:06:35. > :06:40.fact that he was there doing this thing, and that he disappeared from
:06:41. > :06:45.history, I find extraordinary. In a way, the post-Cold War world, with
:06:46. > :06:49.all those horrible certainties removed, has produced, as everybody
:06:50. > :06:56.knows, a version of political chaos that we are living through, and it
:06:57. > :07:00.seems to me that what you are trying to catch there is something that
:07:01. > :07:06.flavour, almost exactly a century before. What is weird is that that
:07:07. > :07:10.period, it seems that so many other stories that are covered are
:07:11. > :07:14.re-emerging, stories about communism, liberalism, what rights
:07:15. > :07:21.we are fighting for, and a lot of very noble ideals lead to rights and
:07:22. > :07:26.extending the franchise to women, all these things. This is a cocktail
:07:27. > :07:30.of very modern ideas, and even the technology is modern. They get the
:07:31. > :07:35.first long-distance telephone lines. OK, you can only call as far as
:07:36. > :07:39.Belgium from Paris, but still. We think of our period as unique and
:07:40. > :07:44.special in terms of the speed with which news travels, the wave fake
:07:45. > :07:50.news can be disseminated around the world. It really wasn't that
:07:51. > :07:54.different in Paris in the 1880s. It is also ultimately I think our hymn
:07:55. > :08:03.of praise to the art of storytelling, which can be
:08:04. > :08:06.manipulated and can be damaging, but it is part of the building of a
:08:07. > :08:10.nation, and you feel that with every bone in your body. I do, and I love
:08:11. > :08:19.stories and long to be seduced by them. My wife came home from a book
:08:20. > :08:24.festival with a bag that said, stories are bridges to other worlds.
:08:25. > :08:30.I thought, that's true, but stories are also other things, propaganda,
:08:31. > :08:35.poison, lies. And I wanted both for the reader to feel like this story
:08:36. > :08:39.involves them, but also for them to emerge with their eyes open to the
:08:40. > :08:45.manipulations of story, and to see how ubiquitous these forms of
:08:46. > :08:46.storytelling are. Marcel Theroux, author of The Secret Books, thank
:08:47. > :08:58.you very much. Good evening. The final day of
:08:59. > :08:59.meteorological summer has seen a mix of sunshine and heavy