The Magic Circle (81 page)

The techniques Neville used in designing these large, complicated computer systems would later prove vital to handling the complex themes, intricate plots, and large casts of characters of her novels. But writing did not come as easily to Neville as drawing or painting, and she knew she needed an innovative structure for the kind of fiction she wanted to write—big, multilayered novels within which different tales could unfold and be interwoven. Fortunately, one of her colleagues at a data center introduced her to the work of black writers who were creating a new literary form based on ancient oral storytelling techniques that could capture the wisdom of an entire culture. Neville took a year’s sabbatical to study African literature in graduate school, focusing on the works of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Amos Tutuola.

But Neville’s fiction breakthrough was short-lived because she had to go back to a full-time job. After a year of repetitive work for an international consulting firm, designing computer systems in a variety of industries, she was ready to quit. But on the very day she planned to resign, her firm’s senior partner announced that a new project was starting up in Algeria for a small petroleum cartel called OPEC. Neville said, “I’ll go.”

This is how Neville ended up in North Africa just months before the OPEC petroleum embargo took place, an event that would swiftly change the course of East-West detente and bring to light the story of Arabs, Islam, energy, and oil. Neville’s project group of international consultants reported to Algeria’s minister of industry and energy, affording her what she later described as “a worm’s-eye view from inside the apple” of global events. With Algeria marking the tenth anniversary of its revolution against France, people were focused on liberty and equality. Neville was reminded of the French Revolution, which brought down not only the monarchy, but the bourgeoisie as well, putting the reins of power in different hands. It seemed to her as if a giant chess game was taking place all over the world and an unexpected move had come from across the board. This experience sparked her to write her first published book,
The Eight
, the tale of a fabulous, bejeweled chess set that once belonged to Charlemagne and was buried within an abbey for one thousand years. During the French Revolution, when soldiers are looting abbeys and monasteries, the nuns at the abbey dig up the chess pieces and scatter them across the world. From the revolutionary 1790s to the 1970s during the OPEC embargo, people thirsting for power seek the marvelous chess set because it contains a dark, mysterious power. Historic figures such as Napoleon, Voltaire, and Catherine the Great match wits with fictional characters in a giant two-hundred-year chess game that forms the plot of the book.

Upon her return to America in the mid-1970s, Neville was hired as a computer expert by Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, the premier nuclear-safety research lab in the country. The lab was about to conduct the first major test of a reactor’s loss of fluid, which is known as the China Syndrome, because a bared reactor core was predicted to melt down through the earth all the way to China. As chance would have it, the movie
The China Syndrome
was released, and simultaneously the accident at Three Mile Island took place. Once again, Neville the novelist had the worm’s-eye view of a major news issue and would be inspired by her observations to write
The Magic Circle
, her novel about the release of energy and the two-thousand–year cycle of the Aeon.

While in Idaho, Neville was approached by Bank of America to work in San Francisco. She accepted, with one condition: The moment she wrote her first book, she would retire from the computer industry. Neville spent ten years in the Bay area, writing by night in her tree house in Sausalito.

In 1987 she sold her first two books to Random House’s Ballantine Books and subsequently retired forever from data processing. Her financial thriller novel,
A Calculated Risk
, became a New York Times Notable Book and caused a furor in financial circles. The quest novel
The Eight
was published simultaneously in twelve countries, from Japan to Germany, and eventually became a bestseller in forty languages. It was widely lauded as the template for the new genre of “literary bestsellers” and for paving the way for novels such as
The Da Vinci Code
.

While editing
The Eight
for Random House, Neville met Dr. Karl Pribram, the world-famous brain scientist. In the years that followed, the two lived in Austria and Germany before returning to the States. They continued to travel and lecture in numerous countries on four continents.

Neville has been a speaker on NBC, the Voice of America, and National Public Radio and at the Library of Congress, the James River Writers Conference, the Ateneo de Madrid, the Turkish Culture Ministry in Ankara, the Orkney Science Fair in Scotland, the World Affairs Conference in Boulder, Colorado, and the University of Menendez y Pelayo in Spain. She was the first author invited to join the advisory board of the Smithsonian Libraries. She currently resides in a historic Japanese house in Virginia, where she is painting up a storm in preparation for her new book about painters in the seventeenth century and modern times.

Neville in Algiers in 1973.

A scene from
The Eight
: El Marad’s mountain stronghold.

The author in Tizi-Ouzou (“Gorge of the Heather”), Algeria.

Neville on Pikes Peak in Colorado, 1974.

Headshot of the author by Nicholas DeSciose, 1977.

The interior of Neville’s tree house in Sausalito, with the original manuscript of
The Eight
in the foreground.

A photograph of the author in San Francisco’s Marin Headlands, California, 1985.

The author in Pompeii, conducting researching for
The Magic Circle
circa 1988.