Cassie McCullagh

a sort of junior scholar's work on the Oxyrhynchus papyrus, which is this extraordinary collection that because it was in the sands in Egypt.

It's dry.

So these fragments of all sorts of different texts have survived and it is lifetimes and lifetimes worth of work.

To make sense of them.

Piecing it all together again, yes.

And finding out what's in there.

So this then becomes, you know, it's that mode that we've all read so many times before, which is a supposed found manuscript story.

This character says...

to his wife, well, look, I've got this scholarship in Oxford.

Of course I have to go.

And she says, well, I can't give up my career here.

He says, well, I'm just going to go and I'm going to go and study for a year.

And at the airport, she whispers in his ear, don't come back.

Their marriage is already rather fraught, but he absolutely adores his daughter.

And a lot of this is supposedly addressed to her.

So he goes and he meets a classical scholar overseeing this project, who's like a tweety older man from Central Casting.

Hang on, getting Dan Brown vibes now.

Well, this is something that I think Jan Martell has to be very, very careful of, that it doesn't become a Da Vinci Code story because there are elements of fantasy in it in that anybody who's done any sorts of classical research knows the amount of work you could get done in a year is not very much.

Yes, it is.

Because what he comes across at first are just a few lines that have been repeated in these bits of papyrus.