“Wolfe entered the visitors’ room…”

Note: This post is the thirty-second installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 31. You can read the earlier installments here.)

Given the recent lawsuit over “Stairway to Heaven” and its alleged similarities to “Taurus” by Spirit, there’s been a lot of talk online about where homage—or a common artistic language and tradition—shades into plagiarism. (For what it’s worth, I think it’s clear that Jimmy Page, for all his talents, crossed the line on more than one occasion, and that he profited handsomely by borrowing uncredited ideas from artists who died poor and neglected.) Writers frequently steal from one another, just as they cull images and stories from the world around them, and in most cases, it’s all part of the process of bricolage, the endless gleaning of material that occupies much of an author’s time. Creativity, as I’ve said frequently before, is about combinations, and artistic genius often has more to do with finding unexpected connections between existing components than inventing something new altogether, although the two often go hand in hand. Shakespeare, for one, was a master of uniting disparate stories gleaned from his wide reading into a surprising whole, and a play like The Merchant of Venice is practically a collage of appropriated material, assembled into a strange new animal by juxtaposition and the animating force of the playwright’s imagination.

We see the same principle at work today, perhaps more so than ever, given the range of potential sources that artists have at their disposal. Years ago, I read a critic—I can’t remember who—who argued that Quentin Tarantino’s truest precursor was Joseph Cornell, and while it’s hard to imagine two less similar temperaments, the comparison is a clever one. Tarantino is our most inspired collagist, and like Cornell, his combinations are an expression of a peculiar view of life. For Cornell, it was about finding beauty while excavating and combining the most unlikely of objects, and for Tarantino, it’s both a kind of cultural salvage mission and a metaphor for how he sees the world. Tarantino’s films are loaded with coincidences, cruel ironies, and tricks that the universe plays on its characters, all of which are just another word for fate. That sense of multiple protagonists jostling one another for room, and of one plot segueing abruptly into another before the previous story has had time to conclude, is inseparable from his view of filmmaking as a pileup of influences, and it’s hard to see which tendency came first. The result may seem chaotic, but it’s all of a piece, and that sense of a larger vision behind it is a big part of what separates Tarantino from his imitators.

I’ve always approached The Icon Thief and its sequels as collages, with their elements thrown together as coherently as I can manage, and sometimes the sources show. In City of Exiles, for instance, there’s a major plot thread in which a female FBI agent consults a prisoner for help in tracking down another killer, and as at least one reviewer has pointed out, this sounds a lot like The Silence of the Lambs. I was fully aware of the parallels as I was writing it, as well as of the fact that a law enforcement officer turning to an imprisoned criminal for insight has become a cliché of its own. And no surprise: it’s a nifty little device, and like many tropes that thrive over time, it’s a way of injecting a touch of suspense into scenes of exposition. (Much of the last season of Hannibal has been devoted to ringing as many variations on that theme as possible, and a lot of the fun comes from noticing how blatantly it refers to its own predecessors, including Jonathan Demme’s movie.) As with most things in fiction, familiar elements can work just fine if invigorated by context and specificity, and if I’ve done my job, the scenes between Wolfe and Ilya will work both as part of the story and as a nod to Harris. Or, as John Gardner speaks of an homage to Edgar Allan Poe in The Art of Fiction: “The reader both sees the image in his mind…and sees Poe grinning and waving from the wings.”

Still, if I was going to use this device at all, I wanted to combine it with something else, which is why Chapter 31 also includes the first major introduction of the theme of Ezekiel’s vision, a motif that will recur periodically until the end of the novel. I’m aware that some readers feel that this material seems tacked on, but in fact, it predates much of the plot: I’ve wanted to write a novel about the merkabah for years, and such elements as my interpretation of the tragedy at the Dyatlov Pass and the ultimate nature of Karvonen’s mission were designed as solutions to mysteries for which the vision would provide the clues. It also serves the immediate needs of the story by giving Wolfe a way into Ilya’s head. The one thing Wolfe and Ilya—who otherwise might be the least similar characters in the entire series—have in common is a fascination with scripture and its interpretation, even as they approach it from radically different directions, as a Mormon and a Russian Jew. As usual, when I created these characters, I had no idea that they’d end up spending so much time together, and if their backgrounds make for a nice fit, it’s because they both emerged from my own interest in how we read texts, religious and otherwise. And when all your characters are aspects of yourself, they’ll often have surprising things to tell each other…