PARIS ECHO
SEBASTIAN FAULKS
Hutchinson, 296pp, £20, Oldie price £12.29 inc p&p
It has been two decades, observed John Boyne in the Irish Times, since Sebastian Faulks’s novels treated the French subject matter that made his name in Birdsong and Charlotte
Gray. Boyne noted that Faulks ‘has never been a critics’ darling, possibly because he sells a lot of books and enjoys a wide readership’, and found much to admire in the novelist’s return to France past and present in
Paris Echo – ‘a stimulating read’ about the (non-romantic) ‘relationship between two kind and gentle souls’. Vanessa Berridge in the
Express agreed, praising in particular the novel’s young male protagonist, Tariq, ‘a well-fleshed-out character whose ignorance is beguiling’; Berridge called Paris Echo ‘another impressive achievement’, declaring ‘There is humour and humanity in this bold, perceptive novel.’
But at the Spectator the novel found a somewhat more jaded recipient in Andrew Taylor, less than wholly convinced by the ‘precociously self-aware’ Tariq, and still less taken with the ‘glum’ female fellow-lead, the American academic Hannah. Taylor also thought Paris Echo thematically overburdened: ‘The problem at the heart of this often brilliant novel is that the clanking machinery… can drown out the fiction.’ Boyne and Taylor were at one on the excellence of Faulks’s interpolated narratives from survivors of Vichy France, which Boyne reckoned ‘could easily make a non-fiction book in itself’.