Today we have with us a good friend of mine, Rachel McMillan. In addition to being the author of multiple novels, novellas, and nonfiction works, Rachel is a self-described “book gusher,” a literary agent, and a fervent encourager of other writers.
Rachel’s new novel, The Mozart Code, defies genre as a historical spy romance, set in post-World War II Vienna. The love story of Simon Barrington, alias Simon Barre, and Lady Sophia “Sophie” Huntington-Villiers is filled with great music, mysterious artifacts, secret codes, family skeletons, and all sorts of other enticing things! This lushly atmospheric novel is a “companion book” to Rachel’s previous novel, The London Restoration, but the books don’t have to be read in order—the story is easy to pick up.
Q: You’ve given most of your main characters a great passion for something—for chess, or Mozart, or church architecture. How does that aid you in characterization and in plotting?
A: I think it is mostly a way for me to exercise my enjoyment of things and give my books a sense of lasting permanence. For me, these details really allow the reader to travel and hopefully learn something, the way I continue to learn when I research and write. So my personal passion is ignited here and I love it.
With Simon and Sophie’s relationship, their great passions had a lot to do with the arc of their stories and are central to their relationship but also how they see the world. I wanted them to intersect in viewpoint much as Mozart and chess intersect in Nannerl, Mozart’s sister, and the legend of the Mozart family in Salzburg. So from the very first chapter, you see me setting up Simon’s mental chess board, and every player in the story is either in the sequence, mentioned, or thought of in Simon’s internal voice. Of course this becomes manifest when he receives an enigmatic play from Das Flüstern and an actual chess play is in motion.
For Sophie, she sees and experiences the world through music, so in her point of view the descriptives are more attuned to musical symbols and themes. Of course, just as Sophie and Simon’s relationship intersects, so do their viewpoints, to where there is a crucial moment where they both hear Beethoven’s Pathetique together in the Sacher Hotel on a pivotal night in their relationship and then the worlds have melded. It was really fun to play with that.
Q: Setting always plays a major role in your novels. You’ve set them in some of your favorite cities: Toronto, Boston, and now Vienna. What was it about Vienna in this particular period that drew you?
A: I love Vienna so much, and I love it because even though it is still Baroque and beautiful—a city of too much whipped cream, really—if you look closely enough you see the cracks: You see the very visible interfaces and facades of glorious buildings patched up after the war. In The London Restoration, my motive was to show a heroine who saw the world through the possibility of what it would be after reconstruction. Diana, my architectural historian, sees the possibility in Blitzed buildings.
In The Mozart Code, Sophia is responsible for the restitution of art and artifacts scattered after the war, and Vienna was this absolute treasure mine of things just popping up for years after, including Mozart’s death mask (historians are divided on the authenticity, but it made for a fun plot point). I also really enjoy that for all its musical beauty, Vienna to this day still has an undercurrent of the macabre. It very much still is renowned as the “City of Spies.” When you take that beauty, the devastation of the bombing (just before the war’s end, ironically, for some of its more magnificent structures), and the way its canvas loans itself to the essence of the Schwartzmarkt and a noir feel (think The Third Man), then it is an atmospheric writer’s dream. I also truly wanted to use Mozart and what better city to do so—especially as a companion to another city with great claim on him: Prague.
In contrast, we have Prague. Hitler forbade his Luftwaffe from bombing Prague and subsequently its exterior is very much one of the few grand European cities unblemished by the bombs of war. But, of course, Prague fell behind the Iron Curtain shortly after the events of The Mozart Code and Vienna did not.
Q: What are some other cities you hope to use in your work in the future, and what do you love about them?
A: BRUSSELS!! I have been playing with a novel set around the time Charlotte Brontë was a teacher there, for years. I LOVE BRUSSELS! I think it is one of the most underrated cities. It is gorgeous.
I am currently writing a book set in Paris and Rouen (more on that a little down this Q and A), and Rouen was one of the first ever places I visited in France, and I loved that it shared the Seine with Paris: this ribbon of communication. I am a huge fan of churches and cathedrals, and there is a reason Monet painted the same cathedral there 50,000 times (slight hyperbole) from 50,000 angles. I also love that Joan of Arc’s influence still flits over the city. Finally, Rouen is a city that was liberated by Canadian soldiers, and I don’t often get to write my country as much as I would wish in my historical fiction, and so any way I can nod to it, I do.
For Paris, I love the churches! And the Palais Garnier!
Q: The stakes are very high for the characters in The Mozart Code. Without giving away too much, some things have to be sacrificed that might never be regained. What made you decide to cross that line instead of engineering some sort of last-minute reprieve? How hard was it to go there?
A: I knew starting out that for this love story to work, Sophie and Simon had to give up what they loved most for the other.
In the companion book The London Restoration, the hero and heroine explore the Greek Forms of Love in their relationship, and even though not expressly pursued on paper, Simon and Sophie’s relationship has moments of that as well. And I wanted it to all culminate in each of them giving up the one thing they love most in all of the world for the other.
There’s a line where Simon learns he has to sacrifice pieces on his board in order to gain ground in his chess game, and I really thought about how this figures into the question of Eternity. In The London Restoration, I use [Sir Christopher] Wren a lot and his famous quote was “all architecture aims at Eternity.” In Mozart Code the eternal is more through the lasting power of music, of Mozart, of the treasures interred on earth but also in heaven “where dust and moth cannot corrupt.” And so I was able to sacrifice a few things because ultimately this is one part of the path and one step toward the end game. Playing with the idea that the choices we make and the lives we create might outlive us is fascinating to me as a symbol and faith metaphor.
And so in Simon and Sophie’s case, they really do emblemize the willingness to die to the parts of the themselves where they harbor their pride and insecurity for the other.
Ironically, the final product is a lot lighter. Most of this book was written during the long lockdowns of the pandemic, and it was getting SO dark my editor continually had to send it back for me to lighten it up. So even though I hope the sacrifices are still poignantly packing a punch, hopefully they are a lot more readable than before, when we called this “Simon’s Dark Night of the Soul.”
Q: Sophie is committed to keeping a promise she made to her grandmother, even when it threatens her relationship with Simon. Why is it so important to her?
A: This is so the Miss Havisham thing playing in and a way for me to concretely explore a heroine who, like myself, has a lot of trouble expressing love. People may think: That’s ridiculous, who has that much trouble saying I love you? Well, me for one. There are actual guarded people out there who really worry about the vulnerability that comes with sacrificing parts of themselves. And I think, given Sophie and Simon’s history, it worked very well into the tapestry of their familial issues.
Illegitimate Simon’s mother says she loves him, but only in secret so as not to unveil the wrath of his father. Sophie sees her parents using love as a societal gain. Sophie would rather forgo vulnerability with Simon to keep in his sphere and maintain her relationship with him than lose him (even though, ironically, she almost does), and her grandmother, I think, is a good excuse for this. I also think Sophie is a little bit frightened: She recognizes that for someone like Simon, so deprived of love, his love is all-consuming. That she is his entire world, and it is fine when they tuck it under their collars and banter and dance and share cigarettes (also emblems of their own commitments that sew them more deeply into each other) but quite another to finally express it.
Some readers may interpret Sophie as immature or cold, whereas really Sophie expresses love differently. She shows it constantly through her loyalty, her defense of Simon, and her keeping in Simon’s orbit.
Q: I know you’re working on your next novel already. What can you tell us about it?
A: I have two books coming out in 2023. The first is a collaborative novel with two other authors (Aimie Runyan and J’Nell Ciesielski) called The Castle Keepers, and it is set at a rambling Yorkshire Castle across three wars: the Boer War, WWI, and post-WWII (my portion).
Then later I have Operation: Scarlet, which is my homage to The Scarlet Pimpernel in Vichy France. Phineas Fulham moonlights as a “Spiv” with the Marche Noir, whereas really he is feeding intelligence to COHQ back at Whitehall that will aid the Allied effort and usher in D-Day just as the tail end of Rouen’s Red Week (constant bombing and destruction) comes to a head. At the same time, he and his league of resistance fighters save socialists and freemasons from German and French collaborators and find them safety before they’re thrown into La Falaise internment camp.
Q: Is there a chance that you might revisit the characters from The Mozart Code in the future?
A: Well, they still visit me. I have never in over a dozen books had a hero talk to me as much as Simon does. He still does. However, I long knew how I wanted to leave the characters Brent and Diana and Simon and Sophie, so I have no plans to go back to them. I like to think they’re happy, though, and I know in my head what the next years bring for them and that is enough for me.
(Cover image copyright Thomas Nelson)
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Great interview! I love Rachel's books. The sense of place she creates allows me to get lost in places that I will probably never travel to. Her characters are rich and well thought out. All around great writer and I can't wait for her 2023 books.