Interview with Michael Cooper, Author of Crossroads of Empire

 

Welcome back to YAOTL, Michael. Tell us a bit about Crossroads of Empire.

 

      The story of Evan Sinclair that began in the first book of this series, Wages of Empire, continues in Crossroads of Empire. With Evan having survived German artillery, poison gas, and friendly fire in helping to turn the tide of the war in its first months, Crossroads of Empire picks up the story with the sinking of Evan’s hospital ship in the English Chanel by a German U-boat. Evan barely survives and is left with amnesia—no longer remembering who he is.

      We are again reminded that, despite the European war, the true source of conflict is in Ottoman Palestine, since it's from Jerusalem's Temple Mount that Kaiser Wilhelm II dreams to rule as Holy Roman Emperor over Arabian oil reserves and the Suez Canal. The Middle East Front soon explodes with pitched battles at Suez and Gallipoli as Evan's story is interwoven with those of historical figures Gertrude Bell, T. E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill, Faisal bin Hussein, and Chaim Weizmann.

During his quest to recover his memory Evan will discover far more: love for his father, grief for his late mother, and hidden secrets of his bloodline—an unbroken lineage that stretches back to the Crusades and will determine his future role in the Great War.

 

When you visited YAOTl previously, you were here to discuss Wages of Empire, the prequel to Crossroads. How is this novel different than Wages? How is it the same? 

 

As noted above, Crossroads of Empire involves nearly the same cast of historical and fictional characters as we encountered in Wages of Empire, with “Crossroads” beginning exactly where “Wages” ended in mid-November of 1914. In “Crossroads,” the war spreads to the Middle East Front with pitched battles at Suez and Gallipoli. And as Evan’s father, Clive, who is now working with Lawrence at the War Office at Whitehall, desperately tries to locate Evan, Evan is desperately trying to recover his memory—a search that will lead him to Rosslyn Castle in Scotland and a surprising encounter with Zahirah, a Gypsy wise-woman of Rosslyn Glenn.

 

I find writing sequels to be so tricky–it isn’t easy to get back into the same voice and tone. What was writing the sequel like for you? 

 

In this case it was effortless…it just flowed! However, what is tricky, is the question of how far to go in reintroducing characters (both historical and fictional) in the sequel (in this case, Crossroads of Empire) who were fully fleshed out in the first book of the series (in this case, Wages of Empire). While the author (in this case, me) might hope that the books are read sequentially, and that not too much time elapses between the reading of the first and subsequent books of the series, neither can be assumed. Given this, some degree of reintroduction is mandatory, and it is always an interesting and unique challenge to accomplish this with each character—like Goldilocks in the house of the bears—not too hard, not too soft, but “just right.”

 

How did your writing change the most between the previous book and this one? 

 

I don’t believe the writing changed at all. As I noted above, it was an effortless delight— spending time with nearly the same characters was like visiting with old and dear friends (even the nasty ones).

 

Since this is a YA-specific site, tell us a bit about the character of Evan Sinclair. What inspired the character? What do you hope young readers will find to connect with in Evan? 

 

Evan starts out in Wages of Empire as a sixteen-year-old young man who has come an age while being displaced and in uniquely challenging circumstances —first from the familiar confines of England to the arid Northern Syrian desert dig site of Carchemish—from being surrounded by friends his own age in year seven at the City of Oxford High School for Boys, to living with his parents without any young people of his age, and with his father as a strict tutor. Indeed, were it not for the presence of a 23-year-old T. E. Lawrence at Carchemish, Evan would have had no friends at all. But in “Ned” Lawrence, already a brilliant scholar, Evan did have a friend as well as a surrogate older brother. Fairly close in age, Lawrence was closer still to Evan in his irreverent, boyish, and quirky immaturity, providing at once a wonderful role model for Evan as well as a much-needed respite from his isolation.

In order to explain what inspired the character of Evan, I must first refer back to one of my earlier books, Foxes in the Vineyard, published in 2011. Set in British Mandatory Palestine of 1948, the book asks the question: “What if covert elements of Nazi Germany secretly deployed to Palestine before the end of WWII, emerged in 1948, using terror to sow discord, to drive Jews and Arabs to war, to drive the British from Palestine, and to seize Jerusalem as the new capital of the Third Reich? (Parenthetically, if all this sounds fairly familiar, a revision of this book will be coming out in the next few years and will serve as the final sequel to the series). For the present, however, suffice it to say that the Hero of that book is a 50-year-old Evan Sinclair. If you do the math, that 50-year-old is the 16-year-old Evan Sinclair of 1914. As you’ll see in that book, the older version of Evan still has a close but complicated relationship with his 80-year-old father.

And that brings me to the second part of my inspiration for the creation of the adolescent Evan Sinclair. My personal experiences played a pivotal role in creating Evan Sinclair; drawing on a host of my own experiences during those years of my life—playing baseball in a ramshackle ball field in the summer heat, crossing the Atlantic on a steamer, resisting temptation in France, being in hospital, falling in love, and volunteering (with a good deal of ambivalence) to serve in a time of war. In creating Evan I drew from my own experiences at that age and other ages, with my own penchant for risk-taking, my relationship with friends, and my own close but complicated relationship with my father.

And as to the question of what young readers might find to connect with in Evan, I would hope that they—both young men and women—would see in Evan something of themselves, and would be able to easily relate to his actions and reactions, his deeds and misdeeds, his challenges and his triumphs. 

 

This time around, Evan has amnesia. What brought you to this idea? What role does amnesia play in the larger themes of the novel?

 

From the standpoint of craft, I found that the dramatic plot twist of having a central character (indeed, the Hero) having lost his memory to be very compelling, creating manifold levels of mystery and drama. Additionally, Evan’s amnesia prolongs Clive’s search for him with added degrees of poignancy and pain. And, above all, Evan’s amnesia creates a unique additional arc; the hero not only confronts and searches for meaning in a world at war, but is also faced with an added journey to find out who he is.

On another level, the over-arching notion of amnesia dovetails with the apparent amnesia of so many people at that time and in our own time: doing exactly what George Santayana warned of in 1905—the cardinal sin of not remembering history and having to repeat it. As one looks over the current conflicts in our world today, whether in Europe or the Middle East, there seems to be a sort of amnesia – of having to repeat some of history’s worse excesses because history is either forgotten or ignored, perhaps willfully.

 

How did you approach writing about real historical figures like T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell?

 

I try to learn all I can about these and the other central historical characters of my books. This requires learning about them through the windows of primary source accounts such as contemporary biographies, autobiographies, and collected letters. In this way, we can get a sense of how they spoke, what they thought, what they wore, and what they looked like. In regards to these particular historical figures—Lawrence and Bell—there is a wealth of primary source material related to the richness of their interests, activities, and character. It certainly behooves the writer to “get things right,” and that, in turn requires a massive amount of research, but in the end, this information must be distilled and woven into the story in a way that is so subtle as to be invisible. Indeed, nothing wakes the reader more rudely from the dream of a good story than a ham-handed display of detailed research. Or, to put it simply, the writer must be able to “show” without “showing off.”   

In referring to requisite research as “massive,” I realize that the word choice makes the task appear daunting and thoroughly unpleasant. Clearly, if one only follows the adage of “write what you know,” only minimal research may be required. However, if we are drawn to write outside of ourselves, outside of the confines of our known world, we have no choice but to do so with a prodigious amount of research. And the secret of doing this, and actually enjoying it, can be encapsulated in an alternate adage: “Write what you love,” and the research becomes a joy.

 

What was your process for integrating historical documents and letters into the narrative?

 

When I come across a particularly significant portion of a letter or document related to the story, I strive to make certain that the material can be introduced in such as a way as to create added value rather than a ham-fisted distraction. In that context, I make certain that the chapter is written so that the materiel is seamlessly brought into the fabric of the story with minimal visibility, and for maximal impact and for the reader’s enjoyment.   

 

Your novel weaves together personal family history with monumental historical events. Evan's search for his identity parallels larger questions about national and cultural identities during WWI. It was such an interesting interplay–we all shape history and are shaped by it. How do you see this dynamic playing out in our understanding of history today? 

 

In answering this question, I would harken back to the famous aphorism expressed by the philosopher, George Santayana in his book, The Life of Reason, in 1905: “Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it.”

The responsibility of remembering history falls to writers of history as well as to writers of historical fiction. Delving into a variety of historical periods, we share a common goal: to create a compelling and accurate narrative of real people in the grip of a defined historical moment. For the writer of historical fiction, there is the added challenge to animate the lives of the historical and fictional characters within that moment so that the reader will care about the characters in the midst of their fraught present and in their anxiety in the face of an uncertain future. It is our goal to seek out that tension between our knowing how things turn out and their unknowing—that we might fully communicate their anxiety, their ignorance at the uncertainty of outcome. And here, as we hold up a mirror to the past, we see our own reflection in the glass; with the current conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, and at that moment we may realize that we ourselves now face a future that is equally unknowable, and in that moment, we may also realize that if we ignore the past, we do so at our peril.

I believe that those of us who read and write historical fiction would tend to agree with Santayana, forming a united front committed to remembering history—to save history from oblivion. All this is self-evident—if the past is unremembered, ignored, or misrepresented, history’s worst horrors will tend to reanimate again and again.

 

What’s next? 

 

In continuing this series, I am bringing out a prequel to Wages of Empire and Crossroads of Empire, which is set in the Holy Land in 1290, the end of the Crusades. This book, The Rabbi’s Knight, will connect with my other books in detailing the origin story of the connection of the Sinclair blood line to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

 

Where can we find you?

 

On my website - https://michaeljcooper.net/

And I’m always happy to receive emails from readers!

I live in northern California in the USA and look forward to doing book events across the country and internationally.

And as I mentioned, a new and revised version of The Rabbi’s Knight will be coming out in August of 2025. Details will be on my website.