Simon Tolkien is the author of the new novel The Palace at the End of the Sea. His other books include the novel No Man's Land. He has worked as a barrister in London, and he lives in Southern California.
Q: What inspired you to write The Palace at the End of the Sea, and how did you create your character Theo?
A: A long time ago, I came across an article about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade - American workers and students who volunteered in the 1930s to fight for the democratically elected Spanish Republic, which was under attack from the Spanish army supported by Hitler and Mussolini.
Thousands of them crossed the ocean without any previous experience of soldiering and risked their lives to fight for their ideals; many never came back. I was impressed by their courage and thought that their story would make a wonderful subject for a novel, particularly as no one seemed to have ever written one before.
Years went by, and after finishing my novel No Man’s Land in 2016, I began casting around for the subject for my next book. I remembered the Lincolns and decided to write a novel about one of these volunteers.
I soon decided, however that I wanted the book to be about more than the Spanish Civil War. I wanted to find out why my hero volunteered, and this required that he should have a life in New York that he left behind and that he should also go to Spain before the War and fall in love with the country, so that he would be fighting for the people instead of just an ideology.
From this preliminary structure the book grew and grew to become a portrait of the 1930s as a whole, not just in America and Spain but in England too, tracing a young man’s search for meaning and identity in a fragmented world where hope of a just future would so often prove to be illusory.
Q: How did you research your novel, and did you learn anything that especially intrigued you?
A: I read the standard histories, obviously, but also as many contemporary accounts as I could get my hands on, mining them for vivid passages that would enable me to picture the vanished worlds I was trying to recreate.
With Spain, I found out how the villagers of that time lived and dressed and ate, and I tried to understand the centuries-old customs and beliefs that governed their lives; street by street, square by square, I built an Andalusian village and called it Los Olivos, and in the end, I could see it and hear it and smell it, just like my hero, and experience the terrible injustice that lay beneath its beautiful surface, destroying it like a cancer from within.
I was often intrigued by what I found out through my research, and offer one small example: Hollywood in the 1930s shot the same movies twice over, once in English and once in Spanish for export to the Latin American market, so that when my hero, Theo, arrives in Los Olivos, he is taken to see Dracula in the main square, projected onto a sheet hung up between two plane trees. For the villagers, the transformation of Andalusia into Transylvania was a miracle like something out of the Bible!
Q: The writer Mark Sullivan said of the book, “In epic fashion worthy of his namesake [grandfather J.R.R. Tolkien], Tolkien crafts a remarkable novel of an American boy swept up by love and circumstance and cast into the crucible of the Spanish Civil War. Intense, vivid, and moving.” What do you think of that description?
A: I am so grateful to Mark for his endorsement of my book. I am a great admirer of Beneath a Scarlet Sky with its extraordinary descriptions of how the hero, Pino Lella, helped Jews escape Italy over the Alps, and its compelling story of his subsequent morally ambiguous and dangerous double life in Milan as driver for a German general and spy for the Allies.
Mark’s book and mine are both coming-of-age stories about young men who learn to know themselves, but at a bitter cost of loss and disillusion. I think Mark is right that I have tried to tell an epic story of an era and I feel his phrase “swept up” is an exact fit for what happens to my hero, Theo, whose unwavering belief that he can change the world leads him to take up dangerous challenges that a more thoughtful but less courageous person might have backed away from.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: The Palace at the End of the Sea and its sequel, The Room of Lost Steps, took seven years to write, but I followed the same preparation process as with my previous books, moving through four phases - plotting, research, writing, and editing. I think my 20 years’ experience as a lawyer helped with the complex organizational work involved.
Research and writing took by far the longest time, but plotting was as before the hardest and most scary part of the journey, because I worried about whether the storylines I came up with would work.
I tried to make the synopsis document I had developed by the end of phase one like a sculptor’s armature; a skeleton on which the flesh could be added with the writing. More than that, and I knew there would be a danger that an over-elaborate story structure might inhibit invention.
The plot lines inevitably changed in several ways when my research opened up new fictional possibilities, leading to alterations in the synopsis, but in broad terms, I knew where Theo would go and with whom before I started writing, and where he would end up, although reaching that conclusion was still years away.
What I didn’t know was that the book would become a duology. That structure was made necessary by the overall length of the manuscript, and I was fortunate that the pre-planned division of the overall story into six distinct parts, each with its own climactic conclusion, meant that the split into two books could be achieved in a seamless and effective way with a minimum amount of rewriting.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Publicity! I am lucky that my excellent publicist, Rachel Gul, has found me a number of interesting writing assignments to do, focusing on different aspects of my novel and its historical settings.
Once both books are published, however, I intend to start plotting a new book about resistance in an occupied country in World War II. I am interested in what induces a defeated population to resist or collaborate, and how the resisters relate to outside agents who may have less to lose than they do, with the repercussions of sabotage affecting the resisters' families and other members of the local community.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’d like to express my appreciation for the work of the editing team at my publishers, Lake Union. All the central characters in my previous books have been British, and I was determined this time round to make my hero, Theo, an American.
I throughly researched 1930s New York, but I didn’t understand that this wouldn’t be enough, because there are so many minute differences between British and American English of which I am blissfully unaware, even though I have lived in California for the last 17 years.
Over and over again, the copy editors showed me instances where Theo was using British phrases which an American reader would immediately pick up on, but that I hadn't. Adopting their suggestions gave Theo the true American identity that I intended for him, but had not been able to properly provide, and both Theo and I are hugely grateful for their help.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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