A few weeks ago, I was standing outside St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, gazing at the ancient Egyptian obelisk that sits in the middle of the square. (It’s also on the front cover of Omens of Death — the first book in The Basilica Diaries series.)
A fresco in the Vatican depicting preparations for the erection of the obelisk in front of St Peter’s Basilica. Photograph taken by Richard Kurti.
The guide who was showing me round said, “There’s an interesting story about this obelisk. When Moses was a young man, he was educated in Heliopolis (modern Cairo), where this obelisk originally stood. As he hurried back and forth to school, Moses would have seen this very stone every day. Even then it was a thousand years old. He would have walked past it, used it as a meeting point for friends, maybe even sat in its shade.
“Now, cut forward across time. The Romans have stolen the obelisk and brought it to Italy, where the Emperor Caligula ordered it to be set up at the Circus of Nero just outside the city walls. And that is the same place where St Peter was executed. Which means the very last thing St Peter saw before he died would have been this obelisk. And now you are gazing at the exact same stone.”
I could feel my brain jolt. Moses, Caligula, St Peter and myself, all connected across 4,500 years by a single object. These were no longer remote characters from the pages of the Bible — if I reached out my hand, I could touch them through this granite obelisk.
What the guide did was a brilliant demonstration of the power of narrative. He could have bombarded me with facts and figures about the height and weight of the obelisk, about where the stone was quarried and when it was carved, and how it was moved from the Circus of Nero to its current site and erected in a single day.
But he didn’t, because he knew that those facts would have gone in and out of my mind in seconds. Instead, he told a story that organised the truth in such a way that it connected me to the distant past.
That’s what I’ve been attempting to do on every page of The Basilica Diaries historical thrillers. I have spent countless hours researching the novels, but rather than bombard the reader with details, I have tried to organise the truth into narratives that will resonate with the modern world whilst also transporting us back across the centuries.
I hope you enjoy the latest adventure in the series, Carnival of Chaos, which will be published in April.
