Q&A with Simon Tolkien

 

 

 

Simon Tolkien is the author of the new novel The Room of Lost Steps. It's a sequel to his novel The Palace at the End of the Sea. He lives in Southern California. 

 

Q: The Room of Lost Steps is the second in your series featuring your character Theo--did you know that you'd be writing more than one novel about him?

 

A: No. The Palace at the End of the Sea and The Room of Lost Steps are two parts of a sequential story that I envisaged as a single novel.

 

However, the original idea for a book about the Spanish Civil War grew outwards over the years of research and writing to become a portrait of the ‘30s on both sides of the Atlantic.

 

It was no longer dramatically satisfying to me to simply write about an American boy, Theo Sterling, who volunteered to fight the Fascists. I needed to show where Theo came from and how his experiences of the Great Depression in New York and a Catholic boarding school in England molded the development of his character.

 

I also discovered that it wasn’t going to be enough for him to volunteer to fight in Spain for ideological reasons; he needed to make that fateful decision because he loved the country, and this required me to create a new section of the book in which he lives in a Spanish village before the war and experiences first-hand the inequality and injustice in rural society, and falls in love with a Spanish girl who is an anarchist.

 

These new storylines grew to the length of being half the total book, that had become nearly 300,000 words long, and my publisher explained that this was too much for a single novel. They understood that cuts would be destructive because the novel needed to retain all its constituent elements, and they suggested instead that it should be split in two.

 

This felt radical and strange at first, but I then realized with surprise that the split would not just solve the length problem, but that it also fitted with what the book had become. The Palace at the End of the Sea was about Theo’s experience of conflict in a time of peace, and The Room of Lost Steps is a war story.

 

As I worked on the editing, the books became separate entities in my mind and I forgot that they had once been an integral whole.

Q: What inspired the plot of this new novel?

 

A: I have long been fascinated by the ‘30s, an era in which young people believed that political creeds could create earthly Utopias, and the world slipped down the slope to another murderous war only 20 years after the war to end all wars had come to an end.

 

I wanted to tell the story of why and how that happened, and to explore the effect of war on an idealistic young man who has come to believe that an unjust world needs to be changed and that his actions could materially contribute towards that result.

 

Theo could have stayed in his hotel when the Spanish army tries to seize power in Barcelona, but instead he chooses to go out and help the anarchist workers on the barricades; and later he turns his back on college to volunteer to fight for the communist-organized International Brigades that are trying to hold and push back the advance of Franco’s Fascists around Madrid.

 

He risks his life for his ideals and ultimately experiences the bitterness of political and personal disillusionment. I wanted to find out what a young man who had traveled this hard road would have left at the end of such a journey, and in the process to try to understand how the inter-war world began to fall apart.

 

Q: How did you research this novel, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?

 

A: There were rich research materials for The Room of Lost Steps; far more in fact than for The Palace at the End of the Sea.

 

In the first part of the novel, Theo participates in the street battles between the anarchist workers and the army in Barcelona in July 1936. I walked the city streets and saw where the principal fighting had taken place, and determined that it would be possible for Theo to follow a geographical route that would enable him to participate in the events in the sequence in which they occurred.

 

I was thus able to marry the history to my fiction, and to dig down like an archaeologist to find a historical city hidden inside its modern skin.

 

Subsequently, Theo volunteers to fight for the Lincoln Battalion against the Spanish Fascists, and here I was able to rely on the many first-hand accounts of their experiences written by the Lincoln soldiers that survived the war. I read over 40 books and mined them for detail that made the Spanish Civil War come alive.

 

I think that the greatest surprise came with my discovery of the real room of lost steps. I was in Barcelona for a week in the summer of 2019 and my tour guide kindly introduced me to a colleague, Catherine Howley, who was an expert on the subject of the anarchists.

 

We met one afternoon near the end of my stay and I mentioned that I was planning to spend an afternoon visiting Antoni Gaudí’s architectural masterpiece, the Sagrada Famila basilica. She asked if I had yet visited Gaudí’s other creation, the Güell Palace that was halfway down the Ramblas, and told me that it had been used by the communist secret police during the Civil War.

 

I knew nothing of this but immediately changed my plans and visited the palace the next day. I left the busy street behind and climbed a staircase into another world - beautiful, ornate and muffled; I passed through lamplit hallways until I came to the magnificent room of lost steps, and I knew straightway that that was where my book would end when the two sides of Theo’s life would finally collide.

 

It was as if the palace and the room had been waiting for me, and I remember the day as being one of the most extraordinary in my life.

 

Q: What influence do you think your grandfather, J.R.R. Tolkien, had on your own writing?

 

A: I loved my grandfather, and The Lord of the Rings has been one of my favorite books ever since I first read it when I was 9. But I think that I later felt overshadowed by my grandfather’s extraordinary literary legacy, and that this contributed to my belief that I could not write fiction: a certainty that lasted right through until I was 40.

 

I clearly am a creative person and ultimately the stifled instinct broke through and I began writing. I have slowly evolved as a novelist, beginning with courtroom dramas in which the characters were vehicles for suspenseful ticking-clock plots, and then moving onto historical fiction in which the character arcs determine the course of the stories.

 

In the process, I have gained skill and confidence, and my grandfather’s legacy has gone from being a hindrance to becoming an inspiration.

 

I think that the real change came when I wrote No Man’s Land, in which I explored the experience of British soldiers like my grandfather who fought on the Western Front during the First World War, and as I said in the preface, I felt the book honored his memory.

 

I became interested in my grandfather’s theory of sub-creation, which sees the creative impulse in man as a divine spark, and I began to draw inspiration from his wonderful storytelling and complex character development.

 

An important theme of the Theo Sterling books is the evolution and manifestation of courage and its effects on a man’s life, and I thought deeply about Frodo’s story in this context.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I find plotting the greatest challenge of the novel-writing process. An idea remains embryonic even when it is developed into a synopsis. It has to remain skeletal or otherwise it can’t organically grow and put on flesh as it needs to do during the research and writing phases.

 

But will it work? Will it sustain a 150,000 word journey? These are unknowns, and so the beginning has to be an act of faith. With this in mind, I have tried not to rush the decision about what to write next, and have been mulling it over all year.

 

My current thinking is that I want to explore the phenomenons of resistance and collaboration in a wartime context, and that this places the setting somewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe.

 

Developing from the theme of courage in the Theo Sterling novels, I am interested in how characters respond to occupation and repression and how the choices they make affect their families and the communities in which they live.  

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I hope that your readers will want to read my books!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Simon Tolkien.