SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Imagine "Ocean's Eleven" of the 11th century. Let's ask M.T. Anderson to read from his new novel about how a heist to swipe the remains of St. Nicholas began.
M T ANDERSON: (Reading) In an age of sickness, in a time of rage, in an epoch when tyrants take their seats beneath the white domes of capitals, I call upon St. Nicholas, gift giver, light bringer, wonder worker, who saved the living from drowning and pasted together the dead from their pickling jars, who even after death gave of himself in medicinal ooze. I ask St. Nicholas to tell us a tale to pass a winter night so that when we rise in the morning, we may feel resolute in the new dawn. I will tell the story of the heist of St. Nicholas' body from its tomb. I will tell it as it was told to me by musicians and drunkards and guidebooks and lovers. Though I am an unbeliever, I pray for faith.
SIMON: "Nicked" is the title of M.T. Anderson's new novel, and M.T. Anderson has written stories for adults, children and teens. His book "Elf Dog And Owl Head" just won a Newbery Award, and he's won the National Book Award. Joins us now from Cambridge, Mass. Thanks so much for being with us.
ANDERSON: I'm delighted to be here.
SIMON: I guess this is your first novel for adults, right?
ANDERSON: This is the first novel purely for adults. Yeah. Many of the others are things that I feel like could be read by people, say, from 15 upwards. But this is the first time that I was like, I want to write something that really does not need to be of any interest to teens at all, but it will speak to people with mortgages.
SIMON: (Laughter) A novel, but based on what I'll call events.
ANDERSON: Yeah. No, real events. Believe it or not, the body of St. Nicholas, Santa Claus, was indeed stolen by a bunch of Italian pirates and taken back to Italy.
SIMON: And your story begins with dreams in the mind of a pure and honest soul, Brother Nicephorus. What does he begin to discern in those dreams?
ANDERSON: Yeah. So he starts to dream that the saint is calling him to travel across the Mediterranean and to seize upon his corpse and bring it back to Italy. And the reason, in the novel, as well as in reality, is that - this is strange but true - people believed that the corpse actually wept a kind of a fluid, an oil, a liquor, that when you drank it or rubbed it on yourself, it would cure anything. And in fact, I mean, the body, which is now in Southern Italy - people still visit the tomb and purchase that sacred liquor for their own ales.
SIMON: What do the monk and the abbot - and can I refer to them as pirates? - what do they feel is to be gained by transporting the corpse of a beloved saint back to Bari?
ANDERSON: Well, I mean, you know, it was a huge deal for a medieval city to have a powerful and highly visible saint. It meant that you were going to have a huge amount of pilgrim traffic. And in particular, St. Nicholas was the patron saint of sailors. And what we forget, with our modern version with him in a sleigh and all that kind of thing, is that, in fact, he was a saint of the Mediterranean and was known for calming storms and, like, pulling people out of the water by their hair and flying them over to safety. The idea is you're a port city, you get this saint, St. Nicholas, the navigator, and suddenly, all these sailors are going to want to set out for their voyages across the sea from your city because it means that they can actually get his blessings before they travel. So that's sort of, like, the gain for them. For the relic hunters, the relic hunters are just looking for a fee. They're basically just looking for a huge amount of money to steal this thing.
SIMON: The head relic hunter is a man, an engaging man, known as Tyun. He's no monk, is he?
ANDERSON: No, no, no. So the idea is he's someone who probably is not even originally Christian. He's a kind of a conman who's selling himself as a relic hunter. And so these monks have to hire him because they know that he's the best, but at the same time, they know that he's probably going to try to betray them in some way and try to, for example, sell them just a random pile of bones. So there's this sort of built-in antagonism, even though they've hired him. That's why this monk, Nicephorus, at once is sort of suspicious of him and yet also sort of oddly attracted to him, this figure who's traveled the world and who is so good at lying.
SIMON: Brother Nicephorus is there to oversee that it's an honest theft, if I might put it that way.
ANDERSON: Right, which, of course, you know, that's a really complicated idea, isn't it?
SIMON: It's very nice. Along the way to the heist, we hear stories of what people of faith regard as miracles.
ANDERSON: Absolutely. Right. And, of course, the thing is that there's always the question. Is any given miracle a miracle, or is it a put-on job by some kind of con or whatever else? And I think that even people in the Middle Ages in reality had that question a lot of the time. Someone, for example, was trying to sell the skull of Christ as a child - clearly a problem.
SIMON: (Laughter).
ANDERSON: So I really wanted to kind of play off that idea that at once you have people who are believing in these impossibilities, and there's a kind of a weird joy to the fact that they want to believe something that seems so unreasonable, and yet at the same time, they are trying to protect themselves from lies and deceit, which is tough when you're talking about impossibilities.
SIMON: You alluded to this. Brother Nicephorus finds himself contending with what I'll refer to as a damned attraction, doesn't he?
ANDERSON: Brother Nicephorus is clearly attracted to the relic hunter. And, you know, it might be the other way around, too, but it's a little hard to tell because they're also, like in many other noir novels - think of this as sort of a medieval noir novel - you have the detective and then the person who hires them, and they might actually be betraying each other. But weirdly enough, that betrayal seems kind of hot.
SIMON: (Laughter) Well, it draws them together in a circle, I guess.
ANDERSON: Sure. Yeah. They end up sort of stranded in all kinds of sort of ridiculous, dangerous circumstances in the course of the book, as they go, like, fleeing across the countryside of sort of occupied Byzantium, that kind of thing, hiding in cow sheds and confronting mad Venetians.
SIMON: Mr. Anderson, I've read you live in a haunted house.
ANDERSON: I do. I mean, I don't believe in ghosts. To some extent, it's exactly like this novel in that - you know, where your life is controlled by a miracle you don't believe in. So, yeah, I mean, I don't believe in ghosts, but I have to listen to them howling all the time. It's a real pain in the butt.
SIMON: I'm sorry, you hear them howling at night?
ANDERSON: Well, I mean, you know, occasionally. It's not, like, a constant thing. I was told before I bought the place that it - you know, it's a child that wails outside the bedroom window. And my feeling is if it's outside the bedroom window, then it's not the homeowner's problem.
SIMON: (Laughter) Oh, you are a hard man (laughter).
ANDERSON: Yeah. Well...
SIMON: Could we talk to the ghost sometime?
ANDERSON: Actually, I found when the house was being renovated - it hadn't been lived in for a few years when I moved in - and they found letters under the floorboards that the kids who lived in the house had slipped between the floorboards for the ghost, one of which said, dear ghost, I love you. I think you are cute. I hope your mom buys you a corgi so you can ride on it. Do you like ice skating?
SIMON: Oh, my God. That's adorable.
ANDERSON: It is adorable. So, you know, you can't really be frightened of the ghost after you learn that it rides a corgi.
SIMON: M. T. Anderson's new novel "Nicked." Thanks so much for being with us.
ANDERSON: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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