Paris for dummies, according to Wikipedia
An encyclopaedic novel that attempts to pack in eight centuries of the French capital’s history resembles a tourist souvenir shop
Paris Edward Rutherfurd (Hodder & Stoughton, R225)
DO you know how the Parisian arrondissements work? The city’s Latin motto? How the Eiffel Tower was built? You will if you read Edward Rutherfurd’s Paris , the latest in a string of swollen, encyclopaedic, million-selling city novels ( Sarum, London, Dublin,
New York) and a book in which style, character and plot are blithely sacrificed on the altar of trivia with every turn of the page.
This is history for people who can’t be bothered to read it, an 800-page whizz through eight centuries of Parisian life in which every character has swallowed a guidebook. Credulous American tourists, 18th-century schoolboys and medieval hicks throng the pages, eager to do their bit in conversations such as: “By the way, did you know the origin of the word ‘bistro’?” and “Your name begins with a ‘de’. Does that mean you are noble?”
Rutherfurd wants his plot to take in the main historical events of Parisian life between 1261 and 1968 — the expulsion of the Templars, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the Terror, the Commune, the Dreyfus Affair, the Occupation and hundreds more — and he attempts to avoid total narrative fragmentation by making his characters dynastic. So, across history the vengeful Le Sourds have it in for the aristocratic Cygnes; the Renards laboriously Anglicise themselves, and a family of Parisian Jews pops in and out of the story between the Crusades and the Occupation. There’s obvious logic to this but there is also a kind of cumulative surrealism as each chapter of history brings another contrived blood feud or chance meeting between people with the same name.
The style is also patchy. When Rutherfurd gets his teeth into an episode, he shifts things along with economy and panache: the large chunks of the book that take place during the construction of the Eiffel Tower and the Nazi occupation of Paris are comparatively juicy as he teases nuance and suspense from the changing relationship between two brothers from the Montmartre slums. He also has fun with the indirection and verbal sparring of the worried courtiers at Versailles. At these points we get a glimpse of the more athletic narrative struggling within this massive book.
Elsewhere one senses the enthusiasm flagging, as Rutherfurd’s prose devolves to a kind of bathetic screenwriter’s jotting. “Admittedly dashing oneself with cold water from a bowl wasn’t much of a bath,” he observes chirpily in the middle of one medieval tableau, “but that was as good as it usually got in the Paris of the Crusades.”
Sometimes there’s a Dan Brownian tinge to the club-footed descriptions. One passage begins: “The tall woman paused. She was gaunt.” While other bits are simple witter: “Chaos and dictatorship, monarchy and republic, Paris had tried them all. And which did she like best? Ah, there was a question. For all her age and grace, it seemed she did not know.”
But give him credit, Rutherfurd knows his market, and it isn’t the same one that sends out for copies of Zola’s Germinal and La Comédie Humaine. Instead, this is the equivalent of a souvenir shop for lowlevel Francophiles, packaging highlights from the history of the world’s most selfpromoting city into a sequence of colourful dioramas with dialogue by Wikipedia.
And it will probably sell a million. —