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

A Sweet Caress, A Beating Heart: Lives lived to the Full – two engrossing offerings from Audible.

Sweet Caress; the Many Lives of Amory Clay by William Boyd

This title has been in my Audible Library for some months.  Somehow I had not got round to downloading it from the Cloud onto my Device, favouring more immediate urges for easy listening, by which I mean thrillers and stories that have a classic structure of a beginning, middle and end.  In point of fact once I settled to Sweet Caress I found that it had a coherent, compelling and chronological structure and was easy to get into. 

This is a story of a life lived to the full.  Through this life, that of Amory Clay, a brave, feisty, characterful woman who becomes a professional photographer, William Boyd tracks some of the defining moments of the 20^th century as told through her camera lens.

  Her professional life, during which she looks for life, love and artistic expression, spans the decadent demi-monde of late 1920s Berlin, New York in the 1930s, the violence of the Blackshirt Riots in London in the same decade and where she receives an injury that will dog her life, and to the Rhineland in the Second World War.  She also, despite her advancing years for a frontline photographer, sees ‘service’ in Vietnam. 

Amory’s father is a flaky paternal figure.  She is born in the decade before the First World War and her disappointed father gives her an ambiguous name and announces the birth of a son.  She has patchy memories of his intervals of leave and there is a bizarre and vivid incident when he drives to pick her up from boarding school, ostensibly to go off on a jaunt, and tries to drive himself and Amory in their car off a bridge to commit suicide.  It is her gay photographer Uncle Greville, who is a more stable and nurturing influence, who gives her a camera, this gift representing the defining moment of her life.

Endings are tricky.  If you have been held by a book all the way through you expect a ‘good’ ending.  It may be happy or sad but if you are me you don’t like ambiguity, you don’t like to feel you have been sold short either.  Boyd’s ending to Sweet Caress is a good one, with a twist of surprise at the very close.    

Where My Heart Used to Beat by Sebastian Faulks                                                                               

The Literary Review has written that "Faulks has the rare gift of being popular and literary at the same time"; he has been named "One of the most impressive novelists of his generation ... who is growing in authority with every book".  He is best known for his three novels set in early 20^th century France: The Girl at the Lion d’Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray.  These were published in the late 80s and early 90s.  Fast forward to 2015 and in Where My Used to Beat Faulks returns to that wartime era, but has shifted his arena for the action. 

The novel contains more than one of Faulks’ main recurring themes, the World Wars of the 20^th century and he sheds a long and woeful light over the 20^th century as glimpsed through the life of Robert Hendricks, an English doctor who has experienced the best and worst of times in that century.

  On a small island off the south coast of France, Robert Hendricks, an English doctor is forced to confront the events that made up his life.  The agent of this process, Hendricks’ host, and antagonist, is Alexander Pereira, a man who is living on borrowed time, but who seems to know more about his guest than Hendricks himself does.


To try and make sense of events and people who have shaped his life Hendricks must explore events and his experiences during the war in Italy in 1944, a passionate love that is never resolved, the great days of idealistic work in the 1960s and finally – unforgettably – back into the trenches of the Western Front.  Here Faulks has written an intensely vivid, insightful and heartbreaking passage of unbearable tragedy which epitomises the attitude of the higher echelons of military power in the arena of the First World War towards its ‘foot soldiers’, the millions of souls who were drummed up as little more than cannon fodder, whilst the generals parked themselves in their makeshift canvas headquarters at the rear of the battlefield and dreamt up new manoeuvres for their plans of campaign.

It is a complex novel, representing, in common with Boyd’s Sweet Caress, a commentary on the 20^th century.  Such a complex novel deserves a more detailed and insightful review and for this I attach the following link:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2016/01/23/struggles-heart/q8snoR1kLJN7i1gzzxaLTJ/story.html