The Room of Lost Steps (Theo Sterling)
In July 1936 in Barcelona, Theo remembers Easter Sunday a few months before: the blood on Primitivo’s hands as he holds his horse’s reins and the girl on the horse’s back—Maria, the love of Theo’s life.
The Room of Lost Steps is the second in Simon (grandson of J.R.R.) Tolkien’s duology about a young American man coming of age at the end of the Great Depression and start of the Spanish Civil War. It begins where the first book in the series, The Palace at the End of the Sea, ends but with no real reentry. Readers unfamiliar with the earlier work can be disoriented as they encounter Theo and the people in his life without context. Most questions do resolve quickly, but it can take a while for a reader to figure out who and, importantly, how old Theo is so they can assess how mature his observations and actions are.
The book recalls the tumultuous early days of the Civil War and the warring factions—anarchists and communists fighting the fascists. Theo is thrust into a battle between the military and anarchists in Barcelona’s Plaça d’Espanya before being branded as a fascist son of a wealthy man and fleeing. Then, from his home in Oxford, he joins the International Brigade, returns to Spain, and fights for the Spanish Republic in the bloody 1937 Battle of Jarama.
Despite placing Theo in the midst of fighting with untrained, inexperienced volunteers and their misguided leaders or relating the abuses perpetrated by those fighting against fascism, the narrative is dispassionate, almost matter-of-fact. The reader walks with Theo as he moves from one situation to the next but does not deeply feel or understand.
