Reading room

Delve into magic in 17th-century France as a mother risks everything to find her son, writes Juliet Rieden.

City of Crows by Chris Womersley, Macmillan.

In this haunting, evocative novel, Australian author Chris Womersley plunges readers into the dark, dangerous, magical and pungent world of 17th-century France, where the plague is brutally claiming lives at a heart-rending rate. The descriptions are so vivid you can almost smell the sour, rotting flesh and feel the pulse of terror as the bodies pile up. Having lost three children, Charlotte Picot is terrified when her husband Michel becomes the latest victim of the deadly pox. She cuts a lock of his hair to add to those of her dead daughters and son, washes his body in preparation for his burial, hand-stitches him lovingly into a winding sheet and then, fuelled by grief and fear, flees their tiny village in the heart of the French countryside with her last living son, Nicolas, in a maternal bid to save their lives.

But no sooner have they begun their flight than Charlotte is felled by an arrow and Nicolas kidnapped by slavers who, she is later told, will hope to sell the lad as a servant in Paris. Charlotte awakes in a cave with a gnarled woman staring down at her. Her hot fleshy arrow wound is “crudely stitched with twine... and thickly scabbed”, and she drifts in and out of wakefulness as she grapples with the reality that she needs to rouse herself and fast to recover her boy. “To what lengths would you go to find your son?” the old hag enquires. “I would do anything,” Charlotte pleads. “I would walk through fire.”

And so begins Charlotte’s uncompromising quest as she deals in witchcraft and sorcery to reclaim her child. Without revealing too much, this becomes a seeming battle of good and evil forces and is a brilliantly compelling read.

Chris Womersley spent six weeks in Paris researching the dark magic afoot in the 17th century, including days at the National Library “looking at grimoires – ancient books of magic spells,” he tells The Australian Women’s Weekly. “I managed to dig out a number of ‘real’ spells – for money, for health, for making people fall in love with you – but I would be too fearful of trying any of them, even as a joke,” he laughs.

His characters are based on real people and historic events except for Charlotte, who he says is his own creation. “I read a great deal about the period and although there’s very little written by or about poor, rural women, I was able to construct a personality for her from other sources.”

As for the witchcraft, even though he remains a sceptic, it fascinated him. “I think we’re still obsessed with witchcraft because it represents one of the few ways in which we might try to influence our current situations – not to mention our futures. Witchcraft is power, whereby we might not just ask for help from a higher power, but demand it.”

Fuelled by grief and fear, she flees with her last living son in a bid to save their lives.