Author interview: A Man of Our Kind

Author Scott Telek discusses the newly-rewritten first book of the series, formerly Our Man on Earth, now titled A Man of Our Kind. Here he discusses why he rewrote the book, what to expect, and whether people who have already read it should go back again.

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You recently rewrote this entire book. If I have read the previous version, do I need to read this one?

No. I took special pains to ensure that people who have already read this book and the others I am revising, Books 2 and 3, do not need to go back and re-read them. If you are reading the series as it is released, which is Book 5 as of now, nothing that is being changed will affect the story going forward. And I’m very grateful to those readers who decided to go forward with the series after that version. Just know, should she be mentioned again, that Merlin’s mother is now Adhan, not Meylinde.

However, if you do decide to go back and read it, you’ll get a 75% new book focused on Vortigern that features a lot of murder and treachery, and the story of Merlin’s mother is entirely rewritten, so we get to know her family better and hopefully the whole thing is a lot more vivid.

A wholesale rewrite is a big step. Why did you feel you needed to go that far?

Well to be honest, I’ve never been entirely happy with the first book. I had actually revised it three times without letting anyone know. I was still finding my way in writing fiction, which I hadn’t done for a while, and discovering how to approach this material. Like how much should I stick precisely to the story and how much should I try to mimic they way they speak and the voice of the Old English vernacular. So by Book 4, I felt that I had arrived at a style which works for the series, but now the first three books were out of step.

The other thing that happened is that my partner, completely out of the blue, bought me the Wace and Layamon tellings of the story for my birthday—good partner, right?—and they contained the story of Vortigern from the beginning of his reign all the way up to his death. And I realized that this is the true beginning of the story… we see him invite the Saxons into Britain, we see Pendragon and Uther go into hiding, we meet Hengist and Rowena… all of these things that continue on after that book and provide a much smoother transition into the saga to come.

Briefly, what’s different about this version?

The biggest change is the addition of the Vortigern story. In the old version, we had a brief summary of his life beforehand at the beginning of Book 2, which is how it is in the Vulgate Cycle telling of the legend. This book now has him fleshed out and we get into his story, which is quite funny but also tragic. I mean, he is an awful tyrant who does horrific things, but he’s so blithe and evil I find him funny. It also allows the entire book to alternate between the suffering of Adhan’s story and the dark humor of Vortigern’s, which definitely makes the entire thing a more engaging read and transitions much more smoothly into Book 2.

As for Adhan, she used to be named Meylinde, but I found out that this character is named in an obscure Arthurian source, so by my own rules I need to adhere to that name. I felt her story was always a bit weak, especially her relationship with her family. So now we get to know her family a bit more before they’re gone, which helps us understand what she lost and what it all means to her. She also has a few more moments of annoyance and times when she just loses it, so that helps make her more human and relatable.

I’m proud of the novel for the first time, which is saying something, because I was always a bit apologetic about it before, and was hesitant to recommend it to people. Now I feel good about it as the opening of this series and am confident many more people will enjoy it and want to continue in the series. As the first book in a series, a lot is riding on it, and I think there’s a high standard to achieve to entice people to keep reading. 

You play up Vortigern’s relationship with his son, which is not detailed at all in the original sources.

One of the challenges in my project is I need to look at these sources and see what’s there, and find a way to make it dramatic and relatable so that reading it is involving, and also to enhance it in a way that illustrates the themes of the overall saga. In this one, all we know about Vortimer, Vortigern’s son, is that he ends up as a knight who rebels against his father, and how he turns out. He doesn’t even appear until he’s an adult, and then he vanishes. He’s really barely in it at all.

So one way to humanize Vortigern, and to show a vulnerable side to him, is to have him relate to his son. That way you also get the son’s perspective on him, which is helpful. Meanwhile, in the other half of the novel you have this very good mother also dealing with a difficult son, so it becomes a contrast of a very good parent and a very bad parent and an examination of the different ways parents relate to their children.

How does the novel differ from the original legend?

The writing of the Middle Ages is very sparse on emotion or what we would call psychology, so everything about psychology and character development is added by me. All of the elaboration on the death of Adhan’s family is added. The characters of Rossa and Farah are created by me—they don’t even get names in the original legend. The judge, Norris, is also not named and everything about his character, including his emotional scene at the end, is created by me. And everything about the development of Merlin’s mind and his moral development was created by me. 

As for Vortigern, everything about his relationships with his son, the king Constant, Saxon leader Hengist and his wife Rowena is invented by me. We just hear about events, we don’t actually see them in the source legend, so it’s up to me to turn them into dramatic scenes that unfold, instead of just hearing what happens.

The development of Merlin’s mind is one of the most striking sections of the novel. 

Thank you, I’m very glad to hear that. I knew from the start that I wanted to explore the formation of Merlin’s mind, and the novel offered a wonderful chance to look at that, since we have him starting as an infant. And since we are told that he is born with all knowledge pre-installed, it seemed that the experience aspect of life would be lacking, and that he would not be able to make sense of any of this knowledge without experience. 

One of the things that I kind of ran with going forward is this gap between Merlin’s pre-installed knowledge and the complications and maturity that comes with life experience, and how he can be emotionally insensitive because he’s too young to see people as anything other than pawns on a chessboard. This is particularly called out in Book 3, when Merlin does some very questionable things in order to get Arthur born, then he develops from there. 

You also show the development of Merlin’s sense of right and wrong, and how his mother influenced that.

In the legend, Merlin is essentially born perfect and is always right, which is uninteresting as a character, so this was a way for him to have flaws and also for his mother to influence his development. I didn’t intend this to be a big thread of the series, but now, having just published Book 3, this has become a very large theme, and in retrospect it worked out perfectly, because it gives Merlin an arc and a place to develop to, and brings some suspense to the Arthurian story as a whole, because we’re no longer sure Merlin didn’t make a mistake of youth in creating Arthur, and this will go on to be a very rich question haunting the entire series. 

The source legend tries to have it a bit both ways; we see Merlin manipulate everything to create Arthur, but it never explicitly says that he is responsible. In my version I make it clear that Merlin created this other human being as a sort of massive social engineering experiment, mostly because I find that a fascinating sort of sci-fi idea, but also because it surfaces the themes of destiny and existential questions about how much control any of us have over our lives that are already present in the legend. 

A Man of Our Kind is available in ebook from Amazon.