Marcel Theroux Meet the Author

Now on BBC News, meet the author. Is a story about storytelling, about

myth and believe, about human curiosity. Marcel Theroux's new

novel is a tale of religion and politics that move from czarist

Russia, India and eventually to the brink of the Second World War and

the Holocaust. On every page, the same question teases and torments

you: What is true and what is not? Welcome.

I'm not sure if classification of novels is a good idea or not, but in

the case of this very original story, I want to hear how you would

describe it as a book. That is a tough one. For me, it is an

adventure story, at the heart of it. I wanted to have the energy and

vigour of a classic adventure story. The book itself sprang out of my

obsession with another book, which I brought to show you. It's The

Unknown Life Of Jesus Christ, published in 1894 in Paris by a

Russian emigre. I have always been interested in this story of Jesus,

and particularly the big gap in the gospel between his childhood and the

beginning of his ministry in Galilee, and I always wondered what

he was up to in those years. And I came across this apocryphal tale

that he had been in India studying Buddhism, and it turns out it

originates with this book. The writer claims to have discovered it

in a Tibetan monastery. The how, why and where of that story was the

seat. We live in an age of conspiracy theory sees -- conspiracy

theories, and this is a great one. That period, the writer is a Russian

in this part of the Empire, and he is possibly up to no good. It is

fascinating that he is therein the first place. Then he comes up with

this gospel that sounds like something out of Indiana showing

that Jesus is a Buddhist. What a lovely idea that would be, you might

think about as you say, when you look at the historical background

and what was going on in the 1880s and 8090s, which is a period that

weirdly resembles others, it was a busy time for fake news, for

conspiracy theories. In many ways, it is a book about stories, about

how important they are, and about high how this leads to religious

belief. It is a story about storage telling wrapped up in a piece of

storytelling. That is why I think that the novel is the right form to

tell his life, because his life is about telling stories. As I was

writing it, I was thinking about the fact that it seems like in the last

ten years the word narrative has seized hold of people's

imaginations. I don't think people talked about it in 20 -- talked

about it 20 years ago. It is one of the legacies of the Blair era. It

was Peter Mandelson that I remember saying the Labour Party needed to

find a new narrative. You could be talking about Rasputin. How weird.

People are so self conscious now about the need to construct stories,

to have a back story, a charismatic central figure struggling to do

something. And it seems like the techniques of novel writing have

been adopted wholesale by spin doctors and political analysts and

movers and shakers. When you were writing it, you must have been aware

that the whole political debate about fake news, the now famous

phrase, about truth, falsehood, the manipulation of truth, had really

been taken and thrust into the limelight for us all in a way that

wasn't the case five years ago. That was the weird thing about the book.

I finished it last spring. Fake news wasn't a word when I handed the book

my publisher, and I had weird to the tingling in my spine when people

started arguing about the truth and falsehood, and alternative facts,

and I thought, this is so bizarre. -- I had a weird tingling in my

spine. This book deals with anti-Semitism, and that is the

oldest hatred of all. It seems evergreen and like it will never

disappear. Of course, it is a perennial subject for novelists, and

yet, there is nothing familiar about that theme in this book - oh, here

we go again - because it is wrapped up in this enigmatic figure who

clearly fascinates you, almost obsesses you. I found him so

strange. Here is this guy, in British India, what is he doing? He

finds this book and says that Jesus was studying Buddhism. He then turns

up in a lot of other people's box. In real life, he actually does. But

you only see flashes of him. There is no biography. We don't know when

he died, we're not 100% sure when he was born, but he flashes up a lot of

times in declassified documents from British India. I have to say that

what I have read about him, he doesn't seem like the nicest person

in the world. He seems to have inspired this trust above all. The

fact that he was there doing this thing, and that he disappeared from

history, I find extraordinary. In a way, the post-Cold War world, with

all those horrible certainties removed, has produced, as everybody

knows, a version of political chaos that we are living through, and it

seems to me that what you are trying to catch there is something that

flavour, almost exactly a century before. What is weird is that that

period, it seems that so many other stories that are covered are

re-emerging, stories about communism, liberalism, what rights

we are fighting for, and a lot of very noble ideals lead to rights and

extending the franchise to women, all these things. This is a cocktail

of very modern ideas, and even the technology is modern. They get the

first long-distance telephone lines. OK, you can only call as far as

Belgium from Paris, but still. We think of our period as unique and

special in terms of the speed with which news travels, the wave fake

news can be disseminated around the world. It really wasn't that

different in Paris in the 1880s. It is also ultimately I think our hymn

of praise to the art of storytelling, which can be

manipulated and can be damaging, but it is part of the building of a

nation, and you feel that with every bone in your body. I do, and I love

stories and long to be seduced by them. My wife came home from a book

festival with a bag that said, stories are bridges to other worlds.

I thought, that's true, but stories are also other things, propaganda,

poison, lies. And I wanted both for the reader to feel like this story

involves them, but also for them to emerge with their eyes open to the

manipulations of story, and to see how ubiquitous these forms of

storytelling are. Marcel Theroux, author of The Secret Books, thank

you very much. Good evening. The final day of

meteorological summer has seen a mix of sunshine and heavy