Pure [Paperback]

Andrew Miller (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Sceptre (January 5, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1444724282
• ISBN-13: 978-1444724288
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #738,366 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars City of Death, June 1, 2011

By 

Keris Nine - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Pure (Paperback)

On the surface, Pure seems like a straightforward historical fiction. Set in Paris in the year 1785, in the years just preceding the French Revolution, there is however evidently something more significant going on beneath the surface.

Getting beneath the surface is exactly what Jean-Baptiste Baratte, an engineer from Normandy hoping to make his fame and fortune in Paris, has been tasked to do for his first commission for the government, excavating the vast pits of the cemetery of les Innocents near les Halles market in the centre of the city, and taking down the church along with it. Bodies have been piled into the cemetery for centuries, and the king is concerned about the growing problem of filth and contamination that is emanating from one of the foulest areas in the city. It's a huge and deeply unpleasant task, but it's a necessary purification that needs to be carried out for the good of the city and the working population of the area. That's pretty much a subject of historical record, the bones excavated eventually ending up in the famous catacombs of Paris, and Andrew Miller's fictionalisation of the story follows the progress of the engineer and the relationships he develops with the workers he has employed, the family he boards with and the people he meets in the neighbourhood.

Although there is no shortage of incident in the story, it all arises fairly naturally out of the project to such an extent that it's easy to underestimate the skill with which the author depicts the simmering undercurrent of dissent and revolution that is simmering among the people and looking for an outlet. Even though in his idealistic days Baratte and his colleague would imagine their own utopia, the engineer doesn't realise just how important his purification of les Innocents is in bringing with it the idea of change, making him an unwilling and unwitting figurehead for the revolutionary slogans that are beginning to appear on the walls of the city. None of this is overstated, but it's clear by the end that the author has sown the seeds of the coming revolution of "purification" that will result in more piles of bones, and done so in greater detail and with greater subtlety than you could imagine possible from such a simple story.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Miller's Tale, June 10, 2011

By 

Ryan Williams (Lichfield, Staffordshire.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pure (Paperback)

I read and loved Miller's debut Ingenious Pain - surely one of the best British novels of the 1990s - and enjoyed his next two, Casanova and Oxygen. After that I moved on to other authors. Picking this one up, his latest, is like re-establishing a priceless friendship.

At first, it looks like a return: going back to 'doing history' (specifically Paris, 1785). Miller does his research as well as the next person, but it's the sensuous detail, the stuff that illuminates day-to-day living, that impresses and tells, as with all the best historical novels I know of - Norminton's Ship of Fools, Tremain's Restoration, Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White. Miller's phrases are as polished as ever, too. I could go on quoting them, so I'm going to flip my copy open and stab out a sentence at random: after a heavy downpour, a preaching cross-fire has been reduced to 'a heap of smouldering black beams, like the doused wreck of a small cottage'.

I'm going to have to get hold of his other two novels, and soon.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pure delight, August 14, 2011

By 

Hande Z (Singapore) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pure (Paperback)

"Pure" is a is a simple, straightforward story about a young engineer Jean Baptiste assigned by the minister to destroy and remove a cemetery and the church that was on its grounds because it was believed that the cemetery, long closed, had fouled the air and the breath of the people nearby. It was feared that it might soon affect all of Paris and the King and his ministers too. The story spanned just about a year and Andrew Miller captivates with an enchanting account of the efforts of Jean Baptiste in his task, and in the process, the various people he met, including some interesting women, Heloise, his love, Jeanne, the daughter of the sexton of the desolate church on the cemetery, Ziguette, the mysterious daughter of Jean Baptiste's landlord. The most fascinating person was perhaps Armand, the organist of the church who took the fate of the church and the organ in it with stoicism but not without sentimentality. Then there are the miners and their foreman Lecoeur, the men who committed the menial work in the destruction of the cemetery, and how the process affected them.

The story flows easily and and engages the reader with a spell that grabs him and hold him to the book, like the spell that enveloped the cemetery and the eerie corpses they buried there. How do people fall under spells, the nature of which is ineffable and the only clue identifying the involvement of the mysterious if not supernatural, is gleaned only from the inapproppriate conduct of the victim? It is this feeling that will affect the reader through the entire book, and the last breath from him upon reaching the end of the book will be tinged with pure relief.