Welcome to PLW’s Words with a Wordsmith Friday!

Today we interview Simon Tolkien, author of the historical novels The Room of Lost Steps and The Palace at the End of the Sea.

Now, let’s meet Simon!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What was the inspiration for your most recent book?

A long time ago, I read an article about young Americans who crossed the ocean in the mid-1930s to join the Lincoln Battalion and fight for the democratically elected Spanish republic which was under attack from Franco’s Fascists, supported by Hitler and Mussolini. It was a sad story – the Lincolns were defeated and many of them died in Spain – but I also found it inspiring. I was moved by their willingness to make such an extraordinary sacrifice for the cause they believed in, and after the publication of No Man’s Land in 2016, I decided to make the volunteers the subject of my next novel.

I was inspired too to make this decision because I had emigrated to America from England in 2008 and I wanted to try and write for the first time from the perspective of an American hero. Many of the volunteers came from New York, radicalized by their participation in the labor struggles there during the Great Depression, and I decided to set the first part of the book in the city, partly because I needed to show my readers why Americans volunteered to fight in Spain, but also because I have always loved New York and I relished the opportunity to try to bring it to life at that flexion point in its history when the skyscrapers were reaching ever upwards while many of the inhabitants were practically starving down below.

I also decided that it would not be enough to simply follow the Lincolns to Spain but that I needed to have my hero experience life there before the Civil War, so that his decision to fight would be made not just for ideological reasons but also for love of the country and a Spanish girl. So, the novel organically expanded from its limited beginnings to become a portrait of the Thirties on both sides of the Atlantic, an era of intense political hope and disillusionment, and ultimately ended up as a duology, The Palace at the End of the Sea and The Room of Lost Steps. It took me seven years to complete but I never lost sight of my original inspiration: the young American men who lived and died a hundred years ago, convinced that they could change the world and make it just, and that it was worth sacrificing their lives to achieve their goal.

image via zinnedproject.org

 

Favorite non-reading activity?

Golf. Not a very literary pursuit I know, but I’ve played the game for nearly forty years and my enthusiasm remains undimmed, notwithstanding an infinity of bad shots. Ignominy awaits around every corner, particularly when there’s an audience. I remember a course in London that I played on for years where the last hole was over a long lake with the green located beneath a stone terrace on which the members would congregate with their beer, laughing contemptuously at shots that landed in the water. But on the walls of the bar behind were engraved the names of club championship winners going back to before the First World War and I have always loved the tradition associated with the game: that sense that ghosts are in the trees lining the twilit fairways. I also enjoy the settings of the courses where I’ve played both in the UK and America. My home course, Sandpiper in Santa Barbara, stretches out along the cliffs above the Pacific, while the mountains rise up behind. Playing there during the pandemic kept me sane, the panoramic views the best possible antidote to the shrinking claustrophobia of the lockdown. Another course that I play is a virtual deer park and you have to shoo the beautiful creatures away before hitting shots. Herons and egret fish in the lakes.

I think that I would like the game less if I found it less challenging. I didn’t play when I was a kid and the game has never come naturally to me. Occasionally, I master the rhythm and the ball arrows majestically towards the distant flag, but most of the time I am struggling with errant shots and a tightening grip on my clubs, and I always count scoring under a hundred as a victory. But I take lessons and keep trying to get better, going back each week for more punishment or glory! And for wonderful days out with my friends. I love the camaraderie of golf. For over four hours each week, we try as hard as we can to win, concentrating on every shot, but remain united throughout in our attempts to tame the hardest courses which always bite us back, just as we think we’ve got them under control.

 

Do you have another artistic outlet in addition to your writing? Do you sew? Paint? Draw? Knit? Dance? Garden?

I can’t sew, knit, paint or draw, and my wife says I’m a terrible dancer, but I do garden. In fact, it’s my pride and joy. For most of my life, I had to hold my enthusiasm in check because I lived in London where a twelve by twenty feet back yard was counted as the lap of luxury, but coming to Santa Barbara changed everything.

I live in a hilly area, so I am lucky that I can access all of my yard. Most of the land was dirt when we bought the house, but I could see the potential because of the plethora of oak trees – some of them a hundred years old or more with wonderful leafy canopies. Over time, I have added to the trees, and discovered mostly through trial and error what plants will thrive in sandy soil where they must rely on drip irrigation for two thirds of the year. Some have turned into hedgerows where rabbits and quail live in apparent harmony, sheltered from hawks. I love watching the quail parents shepherding their babies as they forage.

I have connected the different areas of the garden with decomposed granite paths, and in the morning and evening, my pug, Sadie and I walk slowly round, passing from sun into shade and back again, and stopping on benches to admire views of the mountains and the sea. Humming birds drink at the Buddha fountain and frogs spawn beneath the water hyacinths in the pond. Through my garden, I feel a sense of connection to nature as it changes and renews through the seasons, and this grounds me and helps me do better in other areas of my life, especially my writing.

 

What brings you great joy as a writer?

I began by writing courtroom dramas and crime genre novels because that was a world I knew about from my days working as a criminal law barrister in London. But over time I grew more skilled and confident as a writer and turned to history, which was my great love as a boy when I devoured 19th century novels and felt the draw of the past that was forever there but just out of reach. Writing historical novels has enabled me to make it come alive and this gives me immense pleasure, although pain too because the first half of the twentieth century in which I place my fiction was a period scarred by terrible trauma in which I feel I’ve shared.

Over time, my novels have become more ambitious and the stories are now driven by the three-dimensional development of the characters instead of the requirements of a suspense plot. As I write, I experience their dreams and their suffering, and they have become real to me like old friends. Tapping into this creativity inside myself that I did not know for the longest time that I possessed, has provided me with a sense of fulfilment that I would never have anticipated when I started out as a writer.

How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have?

One. I had never written a word of fiction until I started work on my first novel at the age of forty, making a super-charged New Year’s resolution to change my life. The book was a comedy about an unsuccessful lawyer called Harry with an appalling boss and a terrible wife with tendencies toward religious mania, who insisted on sending their son to an unpleasant Catholic boarding school run by monks in a remote part of rural England. Harry finds solace in a new relationship, turns the tables on his employer, and rescues his son from the school to give the book a happy ending.

I wrote in the evenings after long days in court where I worked as a criminal law barrister, and a year later I was convinced that I’d written perhaps not a masterpiece but certainly a novel worthy of publication. I made a list of literary agents and sent them a well-constructed query letter asking if they would like to read my work, and got quite a few positive responses back, doubtless because they were interested in the fact that I was the grandson of J.R.R. Tolkien. But the agents’ enthusiasm evaporated when they read what I had written, and the growing pile of rejection letters forced me to re-evaluate my book’s merits.

One agent in particular helped me. She told me that I should treat my book as a learning experience, and that I needed to start over and write about what I knew. I was angry when she told me this, but afterward I realized that she’d given me good advice and that I had the choice between giving up or starting over. It was very hard to begin again but I pushed forward, constructing a courtroom drama around a boy who accuses his stepmother of conspiring to kill his mother, and two years later I sold it to Random House where it became my first published novel, Final Witness.

The first book I wrote remains in a drawer, doomed never to see the light of day because it doesn’t deserve to, but once in a blue moon I take out the manuscript and leaf through the pages, smiling at some of the scenes, and remembering with affection the naïve hope and excitement I felt in that first heady year of my writing career when I was just starting out and had no idea about the trials and tribulations that lay ahead!

 

 

Simon Tolkien is the author of The Room of Lost Steps, The Palace At The End Of The Sea, No Man’s Land, Orders from Berlin, The King of Diamonds, The Inheritance, and Final Witness. He studied modern history at Trinity College, Oxford, and went on to become a London barrister specializing in criminal defense.

Simon is the grandson of J.R.R. Tolkien and is a director of the Tolkien Estate. In 2022 he was named as series consultant to the Amazon TV series The Rings of Power.

He lives with his wife, vintage fashion author Tracy Tolkien, and their two children, Nicholas and Anna, in Southern California. For more information, visit www.simontolkien.com and meet up with Simon on Instagram.