As with consulting a guidebook before travel, some access before beginning a critical review of a long novel may provide useful in the reading.

The bedrock of the story I will tell you is the 6,000 years of human history piled up in myth and fact on the Greek island of Crete. Since this is not common active knowledge, you may better appreciate my story and the actors onstage if you know the fundamentals of this history. Though I have sought clarity amidst complexity, previous readers tell me that having a few tools close by has been rewarding: an atlas, a dictionary, an encyclopedia, and even a short compendium of Greek myth and drama, for example.

There is a book within the novel: The Chronicles of Max-Pol Millay - a journal written for Alice-of-Many-Names to reveal the history and on-going affairs of Alexandros Evangelous Xenopouloudakis - (a.k.a. Alex Evans.) This reflects real life experience - much of what we know about another comes mostly from what others tell us - and in the telling they both reveal and mask much about themselves.

The Crete and Oxford portions of the novel are illustrated, but not in the most direct sense - but by way of a sketchbook containing drawings, paintings, maps, and notes by a member of the cast - Louka Mahdis - expressing her own experiences as a gift to Max-Pol.

There is music in the novel - both written and recorded. Since this feature is somewhat unique, many early readers of the manuscript have not given the music much attention, alas, if any. But the music is very important. Every human being contains music in their mental jukebox. This music reveals primary history, fundamental character, and states of being. We choose it - sometimes it chooses us. Music commissioned for the novel is meant to express what words cannot. Please listen.

My category for myself is not writer or novelist but storyteller. /Third Wish/ is a long story containing many short stories about those who enter the labyrinth of imagination and return. All of the main characters are themselves story-tellers - and they will tell you tales to answer questions you have not asked but only considered as you have experienced the unfolding of the play. However, in the end, it is the story told by the reader that matters most of all.

Four seminal notions define /Third Wish/: Slowly. Surprise. Witness. Passion.

Finally, when all is said and done, /Third Wish/ is a wide-ranging love story of a specific kind: It's about loving life and tying it up with a scarlet ribbon of memory as a keepsake. One of the characters says:

“Love is not a noun, after all.

Love is an active verb.

Love is a chance we have taken -

No wins, no losses - lots of ties.”

The nature of those ties binds the actors, the novel, the writer and, if all goes well, the reader together.

Why the title? In fairy tales, the third wish is the last one left when the first wish was foolish, the second wish was used to undo the first wish. Now the remaining wish must be used wisely and well - with the help of co-conspirators. Their names are Alice, Max-Pol, Alex, Wonko, Zenkichi, Polydora, Alice-Alice, and Dog.

They are waiting for you.

Please join them.

Robert Fulghum

Kolymbari, Crete, Greece