"He'd been traveling all of his life. Clay thought of friends and loved ones - the ones still alive, and the ones he'd lost - and he imagined telling them the story of this journey. Would they believe it? Who knows? Everyone carries their own baggage into a story."
Michael Bunker, WICK Book 1 - Chapter 9
When I read that passage I felt it echoed the whole book's meaning. From the opening line, Michael Bunker grabs the reader by their shoulders and takes them along his main character's journey. Will we believe it? In other words, will we see through it and manage to get a glimpse of the author's "baggage"?
It probably doesn't really matter anyway, since, as Bunker writes one paragraph later, "Journeys, in the end, are individual things no matter how many people come along on them." Such sentences have multiple meanings.
First you have Clay Richter's journey: he is the main character, moving and coping alone indeed, but meeting many people, some friendly, some not, along his journey. A journey which, like Odysseus's or Ulysses's, is supposed to bring him back home (to Ithaca, by the way, just like Homer's legendary Greek hero). It is a fact that WICK is a tale of epic proportions, placing its hero between Scylla and Charybdis. However, here the Trojan War takes place after he endeavours to come back home, thus allowing the reader to have an exciting thriller on top of a mythological parallel.
This reversal with the original myth is important. That and the death of the hero's wife and kids (no spoiler here, it's something you learn right away) are clear signs that the author is not writing a mythological story so much as a tragedy. In the pure tradition of tragedy, the reader should know how it will end from the start...
Next, the quote mentioned above can be read as a comment from the author about himself and his work: writing a book is a journey, something that's done in complete solitude, yet meant to be shared, otherwise it is meaningless. It is also a long, painful process that can only mean anything after years of maturing, experiencing, discovering Life - that is to say, after years of a spiritual and philosophical journey.
This is what you feel when you read WICK. Like someone real, honest, experienced, learned, is TALKING to you. Teaching somehow, yet not in an overbearing kind of way. Yes, the narrative is thrilling and you want to know what's going to happen. But, as in Homer's Odysseus, it is completely secondary. Page after page, Bunker delivers many inspiring messages, and that's the objective of the book: to get you in, to invite you to travel along, like Veronica or Clive do in the narrative, for a few miles or all the way if you feel like it.
WICK is supposed to be universal, to appeal to any man. Hence the choice of name for the main character, maybe. We are all supposed, originally, to be made of "Clay", after all.
As for the last name, Richter... Wikipedia says that "the Richter magnitude scale was developed to assign a single number to quantify the energy released during an earthquake." You can't argue with the fact that Clay goes through quite a lot here...
Well, Amazon's own scale won't let me give WICK more than a 5, but if I could I would give much more, because Wick sure feels like an earthquake: it has rocked my world and shaken everything inside me.
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