Andrew Taylor

A meditation on history

Tariq, a teenage Moroccan, and Hannah, an American academic, are both searching for a way of living. But the novel’s obvious themes can dominate the fiction

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a serious novel must be in want of a theme. Paris Echo soon makes it clear that it has several. It’s about the shifting nature of history and the mysterious footprints of the past in the present. It’s also concerned with the myriad and biased interpretations that we place on past events. Another preoccupation is the ambiguities of spoken and written French.

Modern Paris, the novel’s main setting, allows Sebastian Faulks to explore his themes through two main viewpoints. There’s Tariq, a precociously self-aware 18-year-old Moroccan from a middle-class family in Tangier, who comes to Paris in search of himself, his mother’s French family and an obliging woman who will help him lose his virginity. His favourite expletive is ‘frozen fireballs!’

Tariq’s story is soon entwined with that of Hannah, a glum American academic studying the lives of the women of Paris in the second world war. Hannah is weighed down by her own baggage — ten years earlier, as a young exchange student in Paris, she had an affair with a caddish Russian playwright which has left her both wary and emotionally scarred.

Despite this trauma, Hannah is sufficiently trusting to let the chance-met Tariq live rent-free in her flat. Tariq finds a job in a sleazy fast food joint run by two Algerians (whose different colonial experiences allow Faulks to examine the bitter human consequences of France’s withdrawal from North Africa).

Hannah renews her acquaintance with Julian, an English academic in Paris. Everyone except Hannah can see that Julian fancies her rotten. Her work consists of the leisurely and emotionally fraught transcription of audio interviews with women who lived in Paris through the war.

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