"The Room of Lost Steps"

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 and The Room of Lost Steps.

Tolkien applied the Page 69 Test to The Room of Lost Steps and shared the following:

From page 69:

Theo ate hunks of bread with olive oil and pieces of uncooked ham, washed down with water in a goatskin bag. Even before he’d finished, he felt his strength returning, and the men clapped him on the back. Friends now, when they would have shot him in cold blood at a nod from their leader five minutes before. They called the short man Ascaso, and Theo sensed that they would lay down their lives without hesitation if he gave them the word.

In a pew at the back, the wounded man had stopped crying out, and Theo wondered whether he was dead.

Ascaso was over by the main door of the church, which he had half opened to look out. He was smoking a cigarette, and the golden sunlight wreathed with the blue smoke to illuminate his diminutive figure as if he were an actor on a stage. The gunfire, muffled before, was now louder than ever.

Suddenly he shouted twice, calling out a name that sounded like Oliver, and ran out.

“Who’s that?” Theo asked.

“Juan García Oliver. He leads the other group,” said one of the men. “They crossed Chinatown farther up, so perhaps they didn’t lose so many when they came out. If we join together, then maybe it will be enough.” But he looked like he had no faith in what he was saying. A hundred men would be no match for machine guns protected by the walls of the barricade.

A couple of minutes later, Ascaso came back into the church. “Time to go,” he said. “We have a plan.”

He walked to the end of the church and leaned down over the man in the back pew, verifying that he’d died. He closed the man’s eyes and took his pistol and handed it to Theo with an ammunition clip. “Let’s hope you can shoot as well as you can run,” he said.

On the way out of the church, he flicked his burning cigarette into the font and laughed when he saw Theo flinch.

“This church is beautiful, isn’t it?” he said.

Theo nodded, uncertain of the right response.

“It’s the oldest in Barcelona. A thirteenth-century Romanesque jewel, but tomorrow it will burn. All of them will. You’ll see.”

Page 69 of The Room of Lost Steps, reproduced above, conveys the tension of a short still interval between two episodes of street fighting on the first day of the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona. The arresting image of the anarchist leader, Francisco Ascaso, standing in the doorway of the Sant Pau del Camp Church, wreathed in smoke and illuminated by sunlight, conveys the appeal that anarchism held for the hero of the novel, Theo Sterling, but Ascaso’s casual disrespect for the font and promise that the church will burn reveal his ruthlessness, intensified in Theo’s mind by the fact that Ascaso understands that it is unique and beautiful, “a thirteenth-century Romanesque jewel.”

Attraction and repulsion: the contradictory effect that anarchism has on Theo is a central theme of the novel. He admires the anarchists’ courageous resistance to fascism, but he distrusts the violent destruction that they espouse, and this ambivalence leads to an inability to believe and commit that undermines his relationship with the anarchist girl he loves, Maria Alvarez.

The Room of Lost Steps completes Theo’s coming-of-age journey that began in The Palace at the End of the Sea. His participation in the fighting in Barcelona cements his hatred of fascism, and convinces him that he can help to change the world. He volunteers to fight with the International Brigades and so completes the journey from illusion to disillusion that is the overarching thematic arc of the two novels. Page 69 describes an episode that is an essential step along that road and so passes Marshall McLuhan’s test with flying colors.

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--Marshal Zeringue