Paris Trance is both a novel and an elegy about romance, destiny, intimacy, and the rise and fall of an intense, short-lived friendship between two couples living an expatriate existence in 1990's Paris. The main character, Luke Barnes, arrives in Paris animated by a half-formed desire to write a novel, or perhaps make a film and live in a world of possibilities where one can move towards the center of one's own life; rapture, intimacy, consuming and discarding each moment. Luke forms a strong, brotherly bond with Alex, another Brit expat for whom Luke becomes one part of a vicariously lived whole. The two men hook up with girlfriends, and far too much time is spent on the humdrum details of each relationship/romance, which seems to slow the novel down considerably. But this problem is more than made up for by the strong focus on the bonds of friendship and intimacy between the two couples, deepend by the shared experience of tripping on ecstasy while being blasted by loud, house music until six o'clock in the morning; "They were still full of chemically engendered expectation but that anticipation was gradually coming to refer to the past, to something that had already taken place. They were wide wake, distracted, glowing." But Luke's quest to reach the peak of happiness, to "move to the center of one's own life" is seen by Sahra, Alex' girlfriend and Luke's friend, as a destructive flaw; "He doesn't really have emotions. Just appetites. At the moment he's as happy as a sandboy because there's so much still to gobble down. But what's he going to be like when he's tried it all ? " The emotional void/greed of Luke is further explored by his desire to hang on to, for a moment longer, a "tantalizing echo" of an experience lived just seconds ago; "And at that moment you glimpse the Eternal Recurrence as a potential fact, as a mechanism, rather than a metaphor. That is the solution contained in the riddle of deja vu. All memories are premonitions, all premonitions are memories". The novel also explores what one might call an expat view of existentialism, of seeing one's destiny not from the perspective of the positive will to achieve, but from that of failing so absolutely that one embraces it as one's true self, true destiny, the triumph of negative possibilities; "By letting things occur as they did he believed he was penetrating more deeply into himself, getting closer to the core. "All of the things he associated with happiness came to be lodged absolutely in his past. "his falling short was a kind of triumph; he was being faithful to some part of himself, to his destiny". One can't help but be reminded of the main character in Albert Camus' The Stranger, and of the "Black winds" of one's negative destiny. Luke never writes his novel, never makes his film, breaks up with Nicole, a woman he loves deeply, and separates himself from everything that makes him happy in an effort to confront his true self, his blighted destiny; "there are all sorts of propensities in people-but there are other kinds of negative potential: the potential for wasting the talents we are given, for blighting our prospects of happiness". Geoff Dyer is as close as Gen-X will get to reading their own version of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Paris Trance is an excellent, if extreme, example. This novel is not spectacularly well written, but it does (or should) strike a powerful chord with nearly anyone in late twenties or early thirties who have ever lived to eat up whatever happiness they could grab, and wondered if there was anything worthwhile beyond rapture.
