Simon Tolkien

Simon Tolkien is the grandson of JRR Tolkien and a director of the Tolkien Estate. He is also series consultant for the Amazon series, The Rings of Power. He studied Modern History at Trinity College, Oxford and went on to become a London barrister specializing in criminal defense. He left the law to become a writer in 2001 and has published five novels which mine the history of the first half of the last century to explore dark subjects – capital punishment, the Holocaust, the London Blitz and the Battle of the Somme. The epic coming-of-age story of Theo Sterling, set in 1930s New York, England and Spain, is being published in two volumes, The Palace at the End of the Sea in June, and The Room of Lost Steps in September.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I had no title for my book all the time I was writing it, and last year I started to get worried that I would have to make do with something generic that didn’t do justice to the story. I wanted a title that would be lyrical and mysterious, but would also make sense when the reader sees it appear as a phrase in the text. A tall order! And then, just when I’d started to despair, I found 'the palace at the end of the sea’ buried on page 164! It’s an image for how Michael, the father of Theo, the hero of the story, saw Ellis Island at the end of his family's long hard voyage across the Atlantic from Poland at the end of the 19th century. The huge redbrick and limestone hall glittering in the sunshine is the gateway to a new life in America, a world where the Manhattan skyscrapers hold the promise that anything is possible. But Michael’s dreams disintegrate in the Great Depression, and Theo realizes the hollow irony of his father’s vision when he too passes Ellis Island on a boat leaving New York at the end of Part One. The title thus encapsulates the themes of hope and loss, illusion and disillusion, that are at the heart of the novel.

What's in a name?

A great deal! My hero, Theo’s name points in two directions. His fervently Catholic Mexican mother, Elena. speaks to him in Spanish and pronounces his name Tay-oh, but for his fiercely patriotic American father, Michael, it is Thee-oh. She has given him the name in honor of Saint Theodore of Amasea martyred in the fourth century, but for Michael the connection is to Theodore Roosevelt, the famous president whose unbridled energy embodies the American dream in which he so fervently believes.

And Theo’s last name, Sterling, is Michael's invention - 'a solid name that people can rely on in business'. But Michael is the son of Jewish immigrants who cut him out of their lives when he married the gentile, Elena, and in the first chapter, Theo’s grandfather tells Theo that his true name is Stern, meaning star in Yiddish - ‘for the star that guides us.’

Theo’s names and his lost name symbolize different identities and callings that exert competing gravitational pulls on his developing personality as he grows from boy to man.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

I think ‘astonished’ would be an understatement. I was a very confused and under-confident teenager and fifty years on, I find it hard to connect with who I was then. There is nothing autobiographical about this novel but I do think that Theo’s coming-of-age story is in part an attempt to build a bridge across time to my other troubled lost self.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Beginnings! In the new era of e-book sampling, it is vital to draw the reader into the story from the first sentence of the first page. So, Kidnap, the first chapter of my book begins: “He was eleven when he was taken,” and soon the hero, Theo, is being pulled along through the busy New York streets by a grandfather whom he has never met, on his way to an encounter with a Jewish heritage that he never knew he had. I want the reader to be absorbed and to care from the outset, and that can be hard to achieve, requiring careful construction of action and character development. But the endings of my novels almost write themselves. I know what is going to happen, and I write the last pages in a creative burst, so as try and achieve the climactic feeling that the reader is expecting and is entitled to.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I have been writing novels for twenty-five years and I think that the creative area where I have made most progress is in character development. The men and women that populate The Palace at the End of the Sea and its sequel, The Room of Lost Steps, are as real and multi-dimensional to me as people I have known in my own life. The essence of their independent existence, their realness is paradoxically that they are entirely fictional, but as I think of them now, I do see that some of them have characteristics that I recognize in myself or that I aspire to. And I think that the strongest link I have to my hero, Theo, is a refusal to give in and an almost irrational belief that a full life depends on taking up challenges instead of evading them - and damn the consequences!

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Songs: a half century ago, my father played me a song called "Brother Can you Spare a Dime." It tells the story of a man who worked hard to build a dream, only to see it turn to dust in the Great Depression. The song made a great impression on me, just as it does on my hero, Theo, who feels when he hears it that it is telling the sad story of his own father, whose business was like a tower built "up to the sun, brick and rivet and lime,” that now is “done”.

Movies: The 1984 movie, Another Country, was a major inspiration for the English boarding school in Part Two of my novel. The film vividly conveys the oppressive isolation of a traditional world in which bullying is enshrined in the rules, and the vivid visceral scenes helped me to picture Theo’s school experience in which he must decide whether or not to conform. Colin Firth’s portrayal of the communist boy, Judd, in the movie was also useful to me in developing the character of Esmond, the charismatic Marxist schoolfriend of Theo, who has a profound effect on Theo's life both at the school and afterward.

Visit Simon Tolkien's website.

--Marshal Zeringue