It was the author’s last name that got me, of course. A book by the grandson of the man who gave us THE LORD OF THE RINGS? Let me at it. Maybe some of the magic rubbed off, generationally.

According to the publisher’s description, Simon Tolkien intended NO MAN’S LAND, a coming-of-age/historical novel culminating in World War I, as a tribute to J.R.R. Tolkien, who fought in the Battle of the Somme (1916). And indeed (more of this later), one can easily imagine that certain aspects of the clash between good and evil depicted in the trilogy --- particularly when Frodo and Sam pass through the ghastly deathscape of Mordor --- were inspired by the elder Tolkien’s tormented memories of the trenches.

We first encounter the hero of NO MAN’S LAND, Adam Raine, in 1900, years before the Great War, as a child in a London slum. When his mother dies, his father moves them north to a mining town, Scarsdale. There, Adam must struggle for acceptance (his father insists he remain in school while other boys his age labor underground). The cruel, murky depths of the mine --- evoking the underground kingdom of the dwarves in THE LORD OF THE RINGS --- frighten him, as if in mystical anticipation of the trenches. Yet there is also a fellowship among the miners similar to the bonding of soldiers at the front, and Adam does at last form several life-long friendships.

Scarsdale itself is reminiscent of Middle-earth. There are the glories of nature and the Scarsdale family’s splendid Hall, on the one hand (think the Hobbits’ Shire and elvish Rivendell), and the industrial squalor of the mine and the miners’ houses, on the other (the blighted lands of Mordor). When a posse of mine workers, angered by dangerous working conditions, set fire to the Hall, Adam’s father dies in an attempt to rescue Sir John Scarsdale’s aged mother. This is the turning point for Adam, for in recompense, Sir John promises to house him and pay for his education (he ultimately goes to Oxford, where J.R.R. Tolkien was a professor).

"[F]or devotees of Middle-earth, there is much to savor. Although J.R.R. Tolkien himself denied that his trilogy was an allegory for World War I...NO MAN’S LAND suggests otherwise."

Once perceived as an interloper by the miners, Adam is now doubly an outcast in these aristocratic surroundings. Although befriended by Sir John’s eldest son, Seaton, a soldier, and besotted with Miriam, the parson’s daughter, Adam finds a powerful enemy in Brice, the younger Scarsdale son, and his haughty mother. “It seems to me sometimes,” he says to Seaton, “that all my life I have been an outsider looking in on other people’s lives, as if I was marooned in some kind of no man’s land all my own.” Clearly, the book’s title refers as much to Adam’s sense of being a stranger, with no real home, as it does to the grim strip of territory between British and German lines in World War I.

Soon, war overtakes England, and Adam, along with his miner friends, joins up. He and Miriam become privately engaged, but before long his brothers-in-arms and the grim geography of battle become his only community, his only reality. On leave after being wounded, he finds it impossible to tell Miriam --- or anyone else --- what the front is really like; in a way, he cannot wait to get back “home” to his battalion. This is a poignant forerunner of today’s veterans, signing up for tour after tour, too often vulnerable to post-traumatic stress and suicide.

Simon Tolkien, author of five previous novels (courtroom dramas and wartime thrillers), obviously worked hard on this book and researched it thoroughly (at times --- as in the details of life in the London district where Adam grows up or the technical specifics of coal mining --- the fruits of that research are too obviously on display). Some scenes, especially the mining disaster that cements Adam’s most enduring friendship and the chapters set in war-torn France, are powerful and deeply felt, evoking the profound yet unsentimental comradeship among the miners and soldiers.

But while J.R.R. Tolkien had the gift of creating marvelously real, complex characters and gripping plots while simultaneously building an erudite and fabulously detailed alternate world, Simon Tolkien lacks that genius. He is well intentioned, diligent and heartfelt, but he is not an original thinker. NO MAN’S LAND often reminded me of classic books on the same subjects: HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY (mining) or the Regeneration trilogy and ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (World War I). It is all a bit too predictable, like a Masterpiece miniseries: “Poldark” meets “Downton Abbey.”

However, for devotees of Middle-earth, there is much to savor. Although J.R.R. Tolkien himself denied that his trilogy was an allegory for World War I (cf. an article in National Geographic from 2006), NO MAN’S LAND suggests otherwise. “This was Golgotha, the hill of the skull, the field of bones at the end of the world,” Adam thinks as he carries the wounded Seaton across the field of battle. THE LORD OF THE RINGS is a war between good and evil, both internal and external. As bearer of the ring, Frodo struggles against his own lust for power as well as against Sauron. He, like Adam, is stranded in no man’s land, and at journey’s end he is too scarred and exhausted to return to the Shire.

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that by 1918, “all but one of my close friends were dead.” Adam survives the war and, toward the end of the book, like the elder Tolkien, begins to write about his experiences. A publisher is interested. Intimations of a sequel? I wonder if, in a future novel, Adam Raine will invent one of the most celebrated fantasies of all time.