Ian Critchley
In a Station of the Métro
Sebastian Faulks’s fourteenth novel shares many of the preoccupations of the previous thirteen. As in his early trilogy (Birdsong, The Girl at the Lion d’Or and Charlotte Gray) and in much of his most recent novel, Where My Heart Used to Beat, France is the setting, and the story draws heavily on experiences of war. It also continues Faulks’s ongoing interest in the effects of memory and how the past has an impact on both the individual and society.
Unlike many of his novels, however, Paris Echo takes place almost in the present day. It is 2006 and two characters from very different backgrounds are drawn to the French capital. Tariq is nineteen years old and desperate to leave his home in Morocco. Excited by images of Paris he has seen in films, and also drawn there by the fact that his deceased mother was French, he enters France illegally in the back of a lorry. The Paris he finds is somewhat different from that shown in the cinema. He dosses down in decrepit tower blocks and scrapes a living working in a fast-food joint called Paname Fried Poulet.
Then he lucks out. He meets Hannah, an American who has come back to Paris after a ten-year hiatus to research the lives of women during the German Occupation of 1940–44. Hannah takes Tariq in as a lodger and they establish an uneasy but fruitful friendship. Their attitudes towards history
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The eight years he has spent in solitary confinement have had a devastating impact on his mental health ... human rights organisations believe his detention is punishment for his critical views.'
@lucyjpop on the Egyptian activist and poet Ahmed Douma.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/ahmed-douma
'We nipped down Mount Pleasant ... me marvelling at London all over again because the back of a Vespa gives you the everyday world like nothing else can.'
Ali Smith writes this month's diary.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/temple-of-vespa
We were saddened to hear of the recent passing of the novelist Elspeth Barker, a valued contributor to Literary Review over the years. (1/2)