WARNING!! SERIOUS RANTING AHEAD, PREPARE YOURSELF FOR A DISORGANIZED INTERVIEW!!

Dear Mr. Stroud,

I don't know if this is really a smart question but here goes. Did you ever, in your story make any kind of deliberate parellelisms or metaphors to anything in your story. I know the magician political government symbolizes the leaders today. (And as a side note, I read in an interview how ironic you thought it was in making American rebels in your story considering today's events. I totally agree with you and I'm an American myself. Maybe I'm a "traitor.") But was there anything else? I have a suspicion for two things, but maybe I'm just overanalyzing. Here they are:

1: I attend a Catholic school, and I had learned about the 12 apostles. There was Bartholemew that was believed to be Nathanael. Coincidence?

2: There was a scene in Ptolemy's Gate where there was a party at the Prime Minister's mansion. Nathaniel had taken off his mask. Was that a symbol of him beggining to change, after all on that very night he had dissmissed Bartimaeus when he could have done what Farrar had said. It's kinda cool, that whole "rid of the Mandrake mask" kind of thing. You know what I mean, or am I just overanalyzing the book?

So if my theories are correct, or if there's more I didn't spot can you tell me about them, it's those side information that is so interesting to learn.

Respectfully, (a plethora amount of should I mention)
Mwamba (well, my name is Missy, but yeah.)

Hi Mwamba,

Thanks for your questions Well, I'll certainly own up to including in the books all kinds of echoes and suggestions of things which are themselves external to the book. Some of these are political, as you say, some are literary and some are historical. But I never intended any of them to be some kind of wholesale agenda; I think books that set out with hidden agendas often tend to hamstring themselves - they lose sight of the story itself and try too hard to score points of various kinds. The end result is that they quickly become dated and often simply aren't good reads. As I wrote the Bart trilogy I found that I could frequently make little jokes and references about all kinds of things, generally in Bart's footnotes. I enjoyed doing this, but it was generally improvised as I went along. Of course, the books have a lot to say about politics as part of the story, so inevitably some of those parallels and echoes are fairly well-developed. In general, I'd say that keeping your eyes peeled for references is fine, as long as it doesn't get in the way of enjoyment of the story.

As for your key questions: (1) embarrassingly here the answer is yes, it IS a coincidence! I hadn't made that connection, though it is v. interesting. There are Biblical links, though: the name Bartimaeus is borrowed from a minor character in the New Testament (I'd edited a children's Bible the year before writing Amulet), and you're probably right that the name Nathaniel was in my mind for the same reason.

(2) On one level you are totally right: Nat is uncomfortable at the party and in his role as Mandrake, so removing the mask could be construed as a gesture towards gaining freedom. And much of the book is about him rediscovering his true identity under the magician's mask. But in fact he removes the party mask in a dashing sort of way while sidling close to Jane Farrar, so his immediate impulse in doing so is contradictory and wrong-headed. He's taking it off for the wrong reasons.

Hope these thoughts are useful!

Jonathan