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Council of Genres hadn’t taken the news of my resignation very well. In fact, they’d refused to accept it at all and given me instead unlimited leave, in the somewhat deluded hope that I might return if actualizing my husband “didn’t work out.” They also suggested I might like to deal with escaped fictionaut Yorrick Kaine, someone with whom I had crossed swords twice in the past.
    Hamlet had been a late addition to my plans. Increasingly concerned over reports that he was being misrepresented as something of a “ditherer” in the Outland, he had requested leave to see for himself. This was unusual in that fictional characters are rarely troubled by public perception, but Hamlet would worry about having nothing to worry about if he had nothing to worry about, and since he was the indisputable star of the Shakespeare canon and had lost the Most Troubled Romantic Lead to Heathcliff once again at this year’s BookWorld awards, the Council of Genres thought they should do something to appease him. Besides, Jurisfiction had been trying to persuade him to police Elizabethan drama since Sir John Falstaff had retired on grounds of “good health,” and a trip to the Outland, it was thought, might persuade him.
    “ ’Tis very strange!” he murmured, staring at the sun, trees, houses and traffic in turn. “It would take a rhapsody of wild and whirling words to do justice of all that I witness!”
    “You’re going to have to speak English out here.”
    “All this,” explained Hamlet, waving his hands at the fairly innocuous Swindon street, “would take millions of words to describe correctly!”
    “You’re right. It would. That’s the magic of the book imagino-transference technology,” I told him. “A few dozen words conjure up an entire picture. But in all honesty the reader does most of the work.”
    “The reader? What’s it got to do with him?”
    “Well, each interpretation of an event, setting or character is unique to each of those who read it because they clothe the author’s description with the memory of their own experiences. Every character they read is actually a complex amalgam of people that they’ve met, read or seen before—far more real than it can ever be just from the text on the page. Because every reader’s experiences are different, each book is unique for each reader.”
    “So,” replied the Dane, thinking hard, “what you’re saying is that the more complex and apparently contradictory the character, the greater the possible interpretations?”
    “Yes. In fact, I’d argue that every time a book is read by the same person it is different again—because the reader’s experiences have changed, or he is in a different frame of mind.”
    “Well, that explains why no one can figure me out. After four hundred years nobody’s quite decided what, exactly, my inner motivations are.” He paused for a moment and sighed mournfully. “Including me. You’d have thought I was religious, wouldn’t you, with all that not wanting to kill Uncle Claudius when at prayer and suchlike?”
    “Of course.”
    “I thought so, too. So why do I use the atheistic line: there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so? What’s that all about?”
    “You mean you don’t know?”
    “Listen, I’m as confused as anyone.”
    I stared at Hamlet and he shrugged. I had been hoping to get some answers out of him regarding the inconsistencies within his play, but now I wasn’t so sure.
    “Perhaps,” I said thoughtfully, “that’s why we like it. To each our own Hamlet.”
    “Well,” snorted the Dane unhappily, “it’s a mystery to me. Do you think therapy would help?”
    “I’m not sure. Listen, we’re almost home. Remember: to anyone but family you’re—who are you?”
    “Cousin Eddie.”
    “Good. Come on.”

    Mum’s house was a detached property of good proportions in the south of the town, but of no great charm other than that which my long association had bred upon