Bioy and Borges also liked to create connections between their narratives – literary in-jokes, references to obscure or non-existent authors and books, and so on. On a trip to London Bioy once tried to get hold of a title Borges wrote about in ‘The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim’, unaware that the book had been invented by his friend.

‘The Bottle Imp’, one of Stevenson’s most beloved stories, was partly inspired by a Richard John Smith melodrama first staged in London in 1828, and which in turn had been based on a German folk-tale. Stevenson considered it ‘in its ingenuity and imaginative qualities singularly like the Hawaiian tales’. When it was translated into Samoan in 1891 (the same year it appeared in English), Stevenson was disconcerted to note that Samoan visitors to his house would ask him earnestly, ‘Where is the bottle?’ The trope of the coin is also to be found in Borges’s fantastic story ‘The Zahir’, where it initially implies free-will, but soon becomes a conduit to a disturbing meditation on dream and reality.

Borges suggests that writers rewrite previous writers without truly realising it. In his narrative ‘The Circular Ruins’, a man dreams about a son until the son becomes real; the man then discovers he, too, is someone’s dream. This story is essentially a fable on creativity; we come to understand that we owe a debt of influence to those who went before us and that we are not in control of things in the ways we might think or wish. Borges, who was very familiar with Stevenson’s essay ‘A Chapter on Dreams’, said this story came to him as a dream, and that furthermore he considered reading to be a form of dreaming in that it is a private, internal experience only somewhat tied to the external world. The relationship between dream and reality, between creativity and actuality, is key. Discussing ‘The Circular Ruins’, Borges said, ‘The whole story is about a dream, and, while writing it down, my everyday affairs – my job at the municipal library, going to the movies, dining with friends – were like a dream. For the space of that week, the one thing real to me was the story.’

Furthermore, referencing Schopenhauer, Borges highlights the idea that life and dreams are pages of the same book: reading them consecutively is living, flicking through them is dreaming. Fiction can seem to have a life of its own, and both Stevenson and Borges are intrigued by the ways in which life and literature interrelate. Stevenson seems to prefigure Pablo Picasso’s dictum that ‘Art is a lie that makes us realise truth’ (which seems nowhere more true than in fiction, for the best and most lasting of fictions surely reveal bigger truths). These truths can seem unpredictable or unsettling in Stevenson’s fables and Borges’s stories alike. This is partly because both authors allow room for the reader to engage with the mysterious, with contingencies that seem acausal or impossible in life – coincidences, contradictions and the otherworldly. Borges often takes existential arguments to dizzying conclusions. Stevenson and Borges, in Balderston’s words, ‘find the highest achievements of the art of fiction to be those in which a story is suggested by a text but left to be completed by the imaginative reader’. This approach allows a reader to feel involved in the story in an insightful and pleasurable manner; we feel absorbed by and into the text, actively subsumed by the narrative process.

The art of reading allows us to cast off our selves and assume a different persona – perhaps even to become the author. In some ways, when we read Stevenson we become Stevenson. Alastair Reid, the Scottish poet and essayist who was a friend to and translator of Borges, paraphrased Borges’s thoughts:

We are physical beings, rooted in the physical cycle of life-and-death. Yet we are also users of language, fiction-makers, and language and fictions are not, like us, subject to natural laws. Through them, we are able to cross over into a timeless dimension, to bring into being alternate worlds, to enjoy the full freedom of the imaginable.

Good readers, Borges believed, are rarer than good writers. Borges and Stevenson allow the reader’s imagination to participate in the creation of the narrative. As Reid put it:

We are all ficcioneros – inveterate fiction-makers – it is through our fictions, private and public, that we make sense of our world, and find some equilibrium in it, it is through our fictions that we create ourselves.

Borges, like Stevenson, was a reader of Carlyle, who posited the notion that history was a story we read and write and which writes us. To Borges, we are in fact the authors, readers and protagonists of an infinite narrative – trying to negotiate our own meanings and those of others, while underneath all our superficial differences we are one person: nobody. This kind of radical thinking – seeded in Stevenson and others and brought to fruition in Borges – is lively, creative and provocative.

Stevenson and Borges were both enamoured with succinctness. ‘There is but one art – to omit’, wrote Stevenson. Borges famously didn’t write novels because, in a sense, he had too much to say; it was more productive to write brief, dense stories and short, fertile essays. Borges condensed novels into ideas contained within a sentence, often contemplating instead the non-existent book. ‘Why,’ he reasoned, ‘take five hundred pages to develop an idea whose oral demonstration fits into a few minutes?’ Some have ascribed Borges’s lack of superfluous detail to his myopia, but I think it is also attributable to stylistic choice, by way of Stevenson’s essays and artistic practices.

Another thing they have in common is that the quantity of material they wrote is much greater than is generally supposed. Stevenson scholar Roger G.