Customer Reviews

Pure

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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.

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.

"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.

In 1780 the huge ancient cemetery next to the Church of Les Innocents in Paris (today it is the area of Les Halles) was so full that the authorities said there were to be no more burials. The stench of decay was so pervasive that in 1786 the French government ordered the exhumation of the cemetery - the bones to be reburied in what is now known as the Catacombs near Montparnasse, and was then known as the quarry at the Porte d'Enfer. The church, the tombs in the crypts and the charnel house were also to be demolished. The area was then to be turned into a market place.

These are the historical facts underlying this novel, and Andrew Miller is steeped in the history of that time just before the French Revolution, when the ideas of the Enlightenment were challenging traditions. The clearing of the old cemetery becomes a symbol for the mood of disposing of the past. Jean-Baptiste Baratte, the young engineer who is put in charge of the work, is one of the "moderns"; so is his friend Lecoeur, who comes to do the work at the head of a team of thirty Flemings from the mines at Valenciennes where Baratte had himself once worked and with whom he had at that time spent many hours imagining an Enlightened utopia they called Valenciana. Symbolic, too, is the resistance (in one instance taking a very violent form) they encounter: many of the local have got used to the stench of decay and are opposed to the removal of familiar landmarks; others find this work of "purification" sacrilegious (though Armand de Saint-Méard, the organist of the barely visited church and another "modern", welcomes the change in the full knowledge that he will lose his position - anticipating those clergy who would take part in the early stages of the French Revolution). Anti-royalist and anti-clerical graffiti which are daubed on walls in the neighbourhood drive the context home.

If this seems a rather schematic plan for the book, it is full of people and incidents that flesh it out. Some of the incidents seem to me rather tangential, including Barette's curious love-affaire. The life of 18th century Paris and of 18th century Normandy (where Barette comes from), the state of the roads, the dependence on candle light, the clothes "of the future" which the "moderns" liked to wear, the medical theories of the time (propounded by none other than Dr Guillotin) - all this is brought out vividly. Miller is also throughly familiar with the geography of old Paris - it would have been nice to have had a map on which we could have followed the many streets to which he refers but which no longer exist.

The dialogue is often banal; and I don't feel that this a very organic book. Many actions, including two major acts of violence, do not seem to me to be to arise naturally out of the story - I wondered whether they were based on historical research, which might account for their inclusion. The book engaged my interest less and less towards the end, though there is a set-piece climax in the last few pages.

Though arguably not as strong or as striking as 'Ingenious Pain' it is great to se Miller return to a historical setting, given his ability to conjure up a forgotten world in all its gritty detail.

Though it centres on a Parisian cemetery - with a wealth of gothic florishes and beautifully observed detail - this is, in essence, a love story; and concerns the ability of characters to bury their past, as much as to inter (or disinter) their forefathers.

I've bought all of Andrew Miller's books in hardcover first edition, and believe him to be a much more gifted writer than many of his more commonly lauded peers - including Ian McEwan.