Being "a citizen of the country," for me, means that you identify yourself with your country; you are responsible for it, for both the good and the bad that it does. It's like being married, being a parent, making something outside yourself the center of your life. Reisden has Jouvet, his marriage, his son; Andre has the theatre; Perdita has her marriage and her baby, but also her commitment to her work and to Gilbert; and they all have the sudden loyalties and responsibilities that a threat of war provides.

As it usually does, responsibility leads to trouble, conflict, desires that can't be reconciled.

For me the most frightening person in the book is Lucien Petiot, who is a citizen in a very simple sense. French security is compromised? Too bad, somebody has to die. Cyron playacts--literally--at being a citizen and doesn't consider its consequences until he sees how many deaths he's caused.

He never sees how many deaths he can still cause.

My Dutch publisher says this novel is about insanity, the form of complacent madness that doesn't really understand that other people exist: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." The only sanity is seeing that other people are real even if they define themselves as "the enemy"; their life and death are as important as yours, and in the end both of you may be citizens of the same country.

Expediency can be insane; justice, responsibility, and compassion are the same.

No. It's true. Choosing to become a mother or a father is choosing to be vulnerable forever.

It remains a problem, and not a simple one. Not only does a psychiatrist get pressure to release damaging information on someone, but he or she often has to balance the confidentiality of the doctor-patient relationship against the patient's chances of hurting someone. It's a real issue if you suspect your patient's a bomber. If you're "a citizen of the country" in any simple sense, you might decide to serve your country rather than your patient.

Reisden's country is Jouvet, in a sense, and his patients are his countrymen, but he has to decide whether Andre is a danger to Sabine.

He's not a trained Freudian psychiatrist yet. He's doing all the things that a psychiatrist is not supposed to do. He's more interested in protecting the weak and finding justice than in whether Andre's id has overrun his ego. He's a guardian.

He believes in the talking cure almost as a confession--he's a Catholic, though not a believer.

Rather an old-fashioned man, in fact. Don't tell him I said so.

I know a woman who says that, back when she was young during World War II, she used to see people on the street, mostly young male friends that she hadn't seen for a while, and then, as they came closer, she would realize that the person she was waving to was a complete stranger. First it embarrassed her; then it frightened her, because a day or two later she would hear that the young man was dead. It happened about six times, she says, and stopped after the war.

I was fascinated by the story, and I thought, "What if a woman coulde see the deaths of people she was close to? Her nurse, her father, her schoolmates? What would she do about it?"

Other people might try to prevent it, but not Sabine. She's eminently practical or a complete sociopath, I don't know which. I suspect she's a sociopath, but I rather like her. She's so uncomplicated, like Lucien Petiot. Petiot likes her himself, but it doesn't save her.

One of my first readers wanted her to survive and go to Hollywood.

Almost everything we know about the popular culture of this region comes from one book written in the 1880s. We know some things, for instance that male witches were often priests or shepherds and that they used St.-John's-wort, but it's very fragmentary. There was much more information, of course, before the Arras library burned in 1914.

What we know resembles Appalachian folk medicine and Pennsylvania Dutch witchery, which are better documented, so I used details out of those traditions.

A lot of what happens in the coven is just small-town power struggles. The spats between Mademoiselle Francoise and the new coven leader are like New England town meeting members getting into a spitting match.

Everything, down to the shape of the ground. Before I went to Flanders, I read a description Edith Wharton wrote of a motor tour she took there in 1910. I was expecting woods, flocks of sheep, lots of small villages. It's unrecognizable. Even now, almost ninety years on from the war, the trees haven't recovered and most of the villages are gone.

The fields around Vimy are marked with red signs: DANGER, UNEXPLODED BOMBS. There's so much explosive still in the ground, it can't be farmed, can't even be walked on. Around the trenches themselves, around Vimy Ridge, the ground is choppy, up and down, like frozen waves. There are huge craters from French and German sapping, big enough to swallow a building, and little craters everywhere.

In some places the trenches are only yards apart, the distance between a front-row audience and actors on stage. Men launched themselves over the edge of the trenches at one another's lines and ran into a rainstorm of bullets. Thousands of men simply disappeared, melted away.

I discovered the essence of it only when I got to Arras. I went to the tourist office in the town hall, and right outside the office was a sign, "This way to the Boves!" I had no idea what a bove was so of course I had to see. In the tunnels was the "church" where the witches met, just the way it is in the book, and I had to use it.

The next day I went to Vimy Ridge. I'd been looking for six months for a place to set the story, and there, across the Corridor of Blood, was an enormous castle on a hill. I walked across the valley to see it--mistake, it was much bigger than I thought and about ten miles away, but there was Andre's perfect castle, a ruin and a sacred spot.

Reading up on Mount St. Eloi, I discovered the rumor that the tunnels extended all the way from the town of Vimy to the castle, underneath the road I'd taken back to Arras. I thought of those craters at Vimy and I knew that Cyron would try to mine the road.

Yes, and Andre is based on its director. Count Andre de Lorde was the son of a very poor French count who practiced as a doctor. That Count Andre's father really did take him to deathbeds and really did die when he was five. His mother didn't die, though; she married a famous French actor, Jean Mounet-Sully, who was much more sympathetic to him than Cyron is to his stepson.

Apart from their early lives, Andre de Lord and my Count Andre turned out very different men. Andre de Lorde had a day job as a government librarian!

Andre de Lorde cofounded the famous Grand Guignol horror theater, which is the Grand Necro with a few little extras.

Cyron thinks he's a soldier who's pretended to be an actor. He wanted Andre to be a soldier too.

But don't you think fathers and sons always have trouble seeing themselves in one another?

Working with a character is a process of discovery. When I first started working with Reisden, I thought he was going to be a biochemist forever. He's choosing a different path for himself. I had very little to do with it.

The two men both use theater to deal with problems in their lives. In The Vanished Child, Reisden acted a part that was too threatening to play in real life. When Andre can't bear to think about what his mother did, he turns it into a film. Reisden and he understand each other utterly at that level--Reisden makes him watch the film.

Because I wouldn't have to explain the plot! It was fun having Macbeth and Lady Macbeth guillotined, and having her do her mad scene on the scaffold.

The closest film to Citizen Mabet is Ferdinand Zecca's History of a Crime (1901), which has a wonderful guillotining scene; you look at it and for a moment you're sure the filmmakers killed someone.

A star dying young, a tragic accident? Brandon Lee in The Crow? James Dean? Aaliyah? It'll be huge.

It's difficult to tell what will happen before writing it. But I think they'll get married and adopt a child--a little girl. Ruthie's brother, Jules, will live with them, and they'll be quietly happy together. Who sleeps with whom? Does anyone sleep with anyone? I don't know. They're private people; they keep their doors closed.

Andre knows Reisden's illusions the way Reisden knows Andre's. Of course Reisden wants it to last, because at that moment he is very happy; and of course that moment can't last. 1914 is coming. Babies grow up. Wives have agendas.

But should it last? Goethe said in Faust that when you say "to this one moment, You are so sweet, oh! Say awhile," that's the moment at which you begin to lose your soul.

No, nor should she! In A Citizen of the Country she has an eight-month-old baby. Anyone who's been through that stage knows one's personal agendas are in abeyance. She'll get her life back. A different life.

There's another issue, which didn't make it into the book though I desperately wanted it to. Perdita isn't "a citizen of the country." She can't vote. She doesn't even have control over which country she's a citizen of. When she married Reisden, she became Austrian. When he becomes French, she becomes French. The poor woman has been a citizen of three countries in two years, and as a good American, she's getting a little annoyed.

When you write about the same characters, you've got to change focus every three books or so, or you're overwhelmed with backstory. For the moment, Reisden's story is finished. He's got what he wants, he's happy. But Perdita has a great deal to fight for.

(Hi, you, reading this: what do you think is going to happen to Perdita? Write me a note.)

That's the fun part of novels, what isn't said.

Yes, but I thought it was going to be set in 1906, 1910, and 1914.

I don't think so.

Academic training teaches you how to research. If I had paid attention, though, I'd have realized even in graduate school that I was more a storyteller than a scholar. Real scholars create theories. I was always more interested in the storyteller, her audience, and the story.

What I do have is curiosity and a really vivid imagination, and a historical detail will set it off. (You should go junk-hunting with me sometime; I'll look at anything.) Once, working in the files of an eighteenth-century magazine, I came across a phrase, something had happened "as quickly as a torch being knocked out against a wall." I could see the whole thing, the torch, the irregular brick of the wall, the splay marks of black soot where other torches had been put out in the same place, the linkman holding the torch. He needed a shave. Right then I should have known I was no academic.

It turns out that this migration from academics to writing is a fairly frequent pattern for novelists. (You out there, reading this, does it sound like you?)

It's also a pattern for biographers, and for detectives.

I read a lot about the period 1910-1913, about how the First World War absolutely could not happen and if it did, it would be finished by Christmas. I read about stage magic, films, tunneling, psychology...but the ultimate resource was going to northern France and walking around.

I'm terrible at plotting so I use an outline and index cards to organize everything. When I start writing, the characters take over and the book goes in a direction I never thought of, so an outline reminds me of what I thought the book was about.

In case any of you have similar difficulties, there's a short article, "How to Plot When You Can't," available here.

I'm working on a ghost story and a Reisden-Perdita novel about survivors of the Titanic. Alex Chisholm and I are also working on the play version of Chasing Shakespeares.