Historical novel unfolds as Eiffel Tower rises
In an age when overexposure threatens to sap the magnitude of everything’s physical presence, the Eiffel Tower is one of those rare treasures that never loses its power to awe. Constructed for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, the iron lattice rose 1,000 feet into the sky, soaring past the Washington Monument to become, for decades, the tallest structure in the world. Guy de Maupassant called it a “giant and disgraceful skeleton,” and Leon Bloy dubbed it a “truly tragic lamppost,” but it nonetheless survived its intended 20-year life and then, toward the end of World War II, Hitler’s order to blow it up. Now it remains among the world’s most visited monuments, still inspiring a blend of recognition and surprise.
There’s a little of both those qualities in “To Capture What We Cannot Keep,” Beatrice Colin’s historical novel about the construction of the Eiffel Tower. Even while telling a very intimate story, Colin attends to the extraordinary mechanics and publicity surrounding this controversial project. We learn, for instance, that the tower required 2.5 million rivets and that citizens of Paris worried that it would function as a giant lightning conductor that would electrocute all the fish in the Seine. (On the end-sheets of the book, ghostly photos of the tower being built suggest just how eerie it must have looked.)
Gustave Eiffel struts through these pages, of course, but he is already distracted by his doomed Panama Canal project. Instead, the story focuses on Émile Nouguier, the elegant civil engineer who co-designed the famous tower for Eiffel’s company. We first see him floating high above Paris in a hot-air balloon. A practitioner of the latest craze — photography — he is taking aerial pictures of the city when a woman suddenly grabs his arm: “Excuse me,” she says, “but it looked like you were about to … fall.”
“Not today,” Émile jokes, but he is about to fall — in love. As romantic settings go, you can hardly beat floating above Paris in a balloon. Still, this will not be an easy flight for Émile, nor for the Scottish woman who has reached out to him. She’s Mrs. Cait Wallace: 31 and widowed. After sliding perilously close to poverty, she has taken a job as a chaperone. Her charges are Alice and Jamie, the adult wards of their wealthy Glasgow uncle, who has sent them on a grand tour of Europe.
Colin is a talented literary engineer herself, even if she’s working with some rusty conceits. Émile and Cait are both lonely adults, barred by their own versions of responsibility from pursuing happiness. They are as right for each other as any of the perfectly matched parts forged for the Eiffel Tower, but they will be the last to admit that. While Émile carries on a joyless affair with a beautiful opium addict, he knows he must find a young woman to satisfy his dying mother’s hopes for a house full of children. Cait, meanwhile, is so haunted by her failed marriage that she feels “stuck between floors, between rooms, between youth and old age, a person without status, without a husband, without a future. Was this living or merely waiting for the inevitable?” She looks forward only to “a life of polishing pews and arranging flowers, of prudence and parsimony.”
We never get to see just how well Cait could polish a pew, but she proves a rather incompetent chaperone, which supplies most of the story’s humor and calamity. Alice is pretty and Jamie is good-looking, and, naive as they are, they’re both crafty about slipping away to pursue their respective libidinous adventures in the City of Love.
If you have never read a novel by Jane Austen or watched a costume drama on BBC, “To Capture What We Cannot Keep” will provide a string of shocking plot twists. But it’s a shame the story is not more ambitious, a little more charged by the radical dimensions of its central image. Although several famous figures make cameos, they appear so faded by time that they offer little impression, and the revolutionary artistic movements of the era are reduced to scenery.
The larger problem is a certain structural timidity that assures us early on that these dear characters are always protected no matter what temporary challenges they may face. That’s matched by a stylistic slackness that keeps the novel from offering much beyond its pleasant plot. At the climactic moment, for instance, Cait sighs and thinks, “Rules were made to be broken, weren’t they?” — all part of a steady drizzle of cliché that dampens the fireworks of this affair.
The Eiffel Tower may have ripped through the science and aesthetics of its era, but this novel about it feels small and safe.