Such a Strange Place: Kristen McDermott in conversation with M.T. Anderson

WRITTEN BY KRISTEN MCDERMOTT

A shy, idealistic monk, an expert relic thief, and a dog-headed man walk into a basilica. What sounds like the setup for a joke from The Canterbury Tales is actually the premise – based on a completely true story – for M.T. Anderson’s captivating first novel for adult readers. Nicked (Pantheon, 2024) relates the unbelievable but historically documented 11th-century plot to steal the bones of Saint Nicholas from a church on the Mediterranean coast of present-day Turkey and install them in a minor cathedral on the edge of the boot heel of Italy.

Anderson has been writing books for young readers for almost three decades, winning multiple awards and gracing top-ten reading lists in schools all over the world, particularly for his bestselling, prescient YA science fiction novel Feed (2002), and his National Book Award-winning YA historical duology, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing and Traitor to the Nation (2006/2008). According to the author, Nicked is just barely fictional, and wasn’t originally meant to be a novel at all. His first inspiration was to write a nonfiction book for teen readers retelling the many “weird old stories” about the early Christian bishop who became the saint associated with children and Christmas, but whose origins were (like most saints) strange, violent, and anything but cheery.

“Saint Nicholas was a bishop at the very moment the Byzantine Empire went from being ultra pagan to ultra-Christian in one astounding generation. There are stories, for instance, of Nicholas attacking shrines to Artemis,” Anderson explained in a recent interview. “Sailors were encouraged to pray to Saint Nicholas (after his death) instead of Poseidon. And I was struck as a teenager by how one story, in which Nicholas paid the dowry for a poor man’s three daughters to avoid their being sold into prostitution, got bizarrely transformed into the Christmas tradition of Nicholas bringing gifts to children.”

The more he researched the saint’s legends, however, the more he realized that Nicholas of Myra (who lived in the 4th century CE) was not just a pivotal figure of the Empire’s transition from paganism to Christianity; 700 years later, the fate of his relics became a powerful symbol of the complex reorganization of the Mediterranean by the defeat of Byzantium by the Seljuq Turkish Sultanate.

The bones of this particular story appeared to Anderson as his research took him down a “rabbit hole” of interlocking histories, legends, and personal memoirs, extending from the time of Nicholas to the well-documented voyage in 1087 by a group of Apulian sailors to steal the saint’s bones from their resting place in Myra (the southwest coast of present-day Turkey). He carefully studied the three medieval sources that describe the caper, finding them to be remarkably consistent in the events that culminated in the transfer of the bones to their current resting place, the Basilica of St. Nicholas at Bari, Italy. One of the sources, written by a monk named Nicephorus who refers to himself as his Benedictine order’s “lowliest clerk,” struck Anderson as remarkable because of its openness about the deceptions used by the sailors to seize the relics from the people of Myra.

“Are these people heroes or rogues?” Anderson recalls wondering. Noting that Nicephorus proudly recorded all the deceptions the thieves inflicted on Myra, even threats and torture, Anderson realized that the Barese authorities “had to describe the active resistance of the caretakers at Myra in order to authenticate that they had indeed stolen the real body.” The Church justified the theft as “rescuing” the relics from a site endangered by the Seljuk Turkish occupation.

The moral ambiguity of this “holy larceny,” present in the actual historical record, was a common theme in many pilgrimage narratives of the Middle Ages. And that intersection of criminality and piety gave Anderson the hook he needed for the novel. The theft of Nicholas’s bones would be revealed through the point of view of three remarkable characters: the humble (and historical) Nicephorus, the (fictional) relic thief Tyun, and the “dog-headed man” Reprobus, whose remarkable appearance lends the narrative its unique blend of realism and tall tale.

However, Anderson insists that Nicked is far from historical fantasy. In fact, he has hewed as closely as possible to the medieval record in his telling of events, only changing details to create suspense and to clarify the competition between humble Bari and the bottomless coffers of the Republic of Venice (even today, both cities claim to own the relics). Even dog-headed Reprobus is a person whose real existence would never have been questioned by any 11th-century reader, and therein lies the engine that drives Nicked. “I’m not writing fantasy, but insisting that we take medieval nonfiction at face value,” he explains, expressing a desire to convey to modern readers the rich mixture of cultures in contact with one another during a time that most Western readers believe that the European Church was the primary source of culture. It’s important to break down the idea that cultures are hermetically sealed from each other,” Anderson explains, noting that “willful inaccuracy,” as he describes it in the novel’s afterword, is actually a valuable key to understanding the medieval mind. “The world is such a strange place – we can’t close our eyes to that.”

For this reason, the growing friendship between Nicephorus and Tyun symbolizes for Anderson not only the blend of cultures attending the “conversation with Islam that was going on in the Mediterranean region,” but also to embody the challenges that the world of commerce and deception poses to religious faith. Anderson conceived the relic-thief as “someone approaching this adventure from a different faith system,” and imagined Tyun as a citizen of the Great Xia Empire, captured and taken into the Middle East. His liminal status – a pagan Eurasian in the Mediterranean, a man whose country and culture no longer exist – make Tyun an ideal trickster figure, to highlight the central question about whether the theft was God’s work, a clever scam, or some mixture of both.

That uncertainty at the heart of the narrative, depicted in frequent clashes between the idealistic Nicephorus and the canny, cynical Tyun, creates what Anderson calls a “noir-ish” relationship between the two. An element of suspicion-fueled erotic attraction weaves through their double- and triple-crosses, as Tyun and Nicephorus struggle to trust one another. Nicked therefore adds to the heist caper and the travelog the elements of a queer rom-com, all of which transform a complex historical event into an entertaining romp.

Anderson, when he’s not writing, is a dedicated globe-trotter who combines his world travels with meticulous research for his historical fiction. He visited the two main settings – Bari and Myra – as part of a tour with his friend Dr. Erin Thompson, who works with international organizations dedicated to restoring stolen cultural artifacts to their original regions. As he explored the area that was fought over by the Byzantine and Seljuk empires a thousand years ago, he observed tour buses of Russians and Ukrainians (this was in the first year of the present war), united in their reverence for St. Nicholas, describing it as “a deeply moving scene — the arching between the contemporary and the medieval.”

Anderson takes seriously the historical novelist’s obligation to represent other cultures fairly and accurately. “It’s vital to be aware at all times of how little you know. I really tried to understand the full complexity of the interplay between these different cultures, but in the end, this is a task too vast for a novel. It’s head-spinning.” His annotated bibliography for the book has reached nearly 2000 pages (“When I die, my bibliographies will be my castle made of pop bottles,” he jokes). The task of the historical novelist, he notes, is “to see if through the excellence of our research we can find a new way to pry apart what we think we know, to defamiliarize it so that we can see it again in its fullness.”

The author himself is present in the novel to help us toward this goal. Anderson uses a tolerant, charming voice for the gently intrusive narrator, imitating the narrative style of medieval travel and saints’ narratives. “I think it was instinctive, but I was picking up on medieval formats,” Anderson explains, noting that the chronicler Nicephorus introduces himself at the beginning of his narrative. For modern readers, this lends the novel a metafictional playfulness associated with masters of the genre like A.S. Byatt and John Barth (“a shadow that falls over me,” Anderson says).

Ultimately, Nicked is an affectionate, inspiring narrative about the power of human communities to create opportunities for wonder. “Post-pandemic,” Anderson claims, “I think our culture has moved from bitter stories about what’s wrong with people to a desire for stories of communities where people love and support each other.” He notes that, compared to the dystopian tone of his earlier novels for teens, “this is a more joyous book,” and that the novel’s supportive band of thieves and sailors reflects our current interest in creating “found families.” “I’m involved in public life in my small town and have been moved to witness people who seem at first glance to be cranky and divided, all getting to know each other and understand each other.”

Anderson has only begun to tell the story of Nicholas; his next project will be a nonfiction book for teen readers that treats the saint as a nexus of information about the cultural landscape of the medieval world, and the discipline of textual treasure-hunting. The tumultuous clash between the medieval Christian and Islamic worlds is “a story that deserves to be told: what does it mean to interface (as modern people) with a sense of faith that is so powerful and transformative?” For young readers and adults alike, the afterlife of the saint that most modern readers associate only with the Victorian figure of Santa Claus is an ideal vector for that history.

About the contributor: Kristen McDermott is a Professor of English at Central Michigan University and a reviewer for HNR. Her in-progress novel, Stratford’s Will, was awarded Honorable Mention in the YA and Children’s Fiction category of the 2024 Historical Novel Society First Chapters Competition.

Published in Historical Novels Review | Issue 109 (August 2024)