Paris Settings: Works of contemporary and historical fiction by two Master Novelists.

Two novels, each of which features some action set in Paris, each written by one of my top 10 authors.

Love is Blind by William Boyd

Set at the end of the 19th century it tells the story of Brodie Moncur, his life as a young musician turned piano tuner, and the woman he falls in love with, Lika Blum, his battle with tuberculosis and his flight from Lika's vengeful suitor. 

What Amazon says:

When Brodie is offered a job in Paris, he seizes the chance to flee Edinburgh and his tyrannical clergyman father, and begin a wildly different new chapter in his life. In Paris, a fateful encounter with a famous pianist irrevocably changes his future - and sparks an obsessive love affair with a beautiful Russian soprano, Lika Blum. Moving from Paris to St Petersburg to Edinburgh and back again, Brodie's love for Lika and its dangerous consequences pursue him around Europe and beyond, during an era of overwhelming change as the nineteenth century becomes the twentieth.

Love is Blind is a tale of passion and revenge; of artistic endeavour and the illusions it creates; of all the possibilities that life can offer, and how cruelly they can be snatched away. At once an intimate portrait of one man's life and an exploration of the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Guardian Review: 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/14/love-is-blind-by-william-boyd-review

Boyd is one of my favourite authors, this is not his best but it is a heart-warming love story.

Paris Echo by Sebastian Faulks

Francophile Sebastian Faulks made his name with bestselling France-set period pieces. Birdsong transported readers back to the trenches of the First World War, while Charlotte Gray told the story of a British agent working with the Resistance in Vichy France during the Second World War. As such, it’s fitting that his new novel, although ostensibly set in the present, is thoroughly steeped in history. The author’s affection for Paris drives the stories of a French-Algerian teenage immigrant and an American academic in the city.

The Literary Review has said that "Faulks has the rare gift of being popular and literary at the same time"; the Sunday Telegraph called him "One of the most impressive novelists of his generation ... who is growing in authority with every book". Faulks' 2005 novel, Human Traces, was described by Trevor Nunn as "A masterpiece, one of the great novels of this or any other century."

Paris Echo is a novel about and composed of tangled threads. Faulks has two central protagonists: 19-year-old Tariq, a runaway from Morocco; and the 31-year-old American postdoc researcher, Hannah, whose box room Tariq ends up lodging in. Hannah is in Paris to examine the testimonies of women who lived through the German occupation. She listens to the extraordinary witness of the women in her desire to understand their lives. Through them she finds a city bursting with clues and
connections. Tariq, meanwhile, has some vague idea of finding out more about his mother’s history. She died when he was 10, but was brought up in Paris, born to a French father and an Algerian mother. Though all the more pressing is losing his virginity. For him in his innocence, each boulevard, Métro station and street corner is a source of surprise.

As the narrative flits back and forth between them, so too the stories Hannah spends her days listening to – which Tariq sometimes helps her to translate – become part of the book’s narrative, while also slowly infiltrating the characters’ experiences of the contemporary city.

Traversing the city on the Metro, Tariq finds himself in a strange shadow land of such “daylight ghosts” – at certain stations he sees passengers littering the ground, their used tickets folded into the “V” for victory that so angered the Germans during the war.

It is in the passages that relate to wartime that Faulks finds himself, yet again, in that territory about which he writes so graphically and movingly. For example, passages towards the end of Where My Heart Used to Beat, another of his historical novels, are heart-rending.

The Guardian Review:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/03/paris-echo-sebastian-faulks-review

Gone to Earth

Gone to Earth by Mary Webb

A potted bio:

Mary Gladys Webb (25 March 1881 – 8 October 1927) was an English romantic novelist and poet of the early 20th century, whose work is set chiefly in the Shropshire countryside and among Shropshire characters and people whom she knew.

Her writing in general was reviewed as notable for poetic descriptions of nature. Another aspect throughout her work was a close and fatalistic view on human psychology.  She won the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse for Precious Bane. After her death Stanley Baldwin, then Prime Minister, brought about her commercial success through his approbation; at a Literary Fund dinner in 1928, Baldwin referred to her as a neglected genius. Consequently her collected works were republished in a standard edition by Jonathan Cape, becoming best sellers in the 1930s and running into many editions.

Stella Gibbons's 1932 novel Cold Comfort Farm was a parody of Webb's work, as well as of other "loam and lovechild" writers like Sheila Kaye-Smith and Mary E. Mannand, and further back, Thomas Hardy. Literary critic John Sutherland refers to the genre as the "soil and gloom romance" and credits Webb as its pioneer.

Gone to Earth  tells the story of Hazel Woodus, a child of the wilds who comes from the earth. and, in the end, returns to it.  She is the daughter of a Welsh gypsy and an eccentric harp-playing bee-keeper. She is happiest living in her forest cottage in the remote Shropshire hills, at one with the winds and seasons, protector and friend of the wild animals she loves. But Hazel's beauty and innocence prove irresistible to the men in her orbit. Both Jack Reddin, the local squire and Edward Marston, the gentle minister, offer her human -- and carnal -- love.

Hazel's fate unfolds as simply and relentlessly as a Greek tragedy, as a child of nature is drawn into a world of mortal passion in which she must eternally be a stranger.

What I thought:
I loved the lyrical descriptions of the wild landscape in which Hazel lived and roamed, her familiarity and passion for the animal life. These make up a substantial part of the text and some might be tempted to describe it as purple prose. 

There is a delightful passage where it describes her sucking the nectar from the beautiful, translucent bilberry flowers.  She is a naïve child of nature, gullible in her dealings with the two men who vie for her affections.  As she vacillated between the two, ambiguity a part of her character, I sometimes found myself feeling impatient with the choices she made.  Silly girl I found myself thinking.  I also had to concentrate when reading passages of dialogue in the rural Shropshire dialect which voices are wholly authentic and bring much to the atmosphere and mood of the narrative.