Paris

 

Paris – Edward Rutherfurd

I’m reading all of Edward Rutherfurd’s novels in order.  This, I believe, is his eighth. It’s also his best. By far. Rutherfurd uses places as the titles of his books – “London”, “Ruska”, “New York”, etc. In addition to telling a story of people who live in the particular place, he also educates his readers on the history of said location.  For those who are familiar with many of the works of legendary author James Michener, the style of Edward Rutherfurd is very similar.  The drawback to this type of novel is that it’s really hard to tell a good story (or stories) when also giving a history of a place that can sometimes last over 10,000 years.

The method for Rutherfurd is usually to begin his novel a long long long time ago, introduce us to some characters, put them in a major point of history, and ensure that his characters breed so that future chapters can continue with later times in history with all of the relations of the people we were first introduced.  These books always come up with a very helpful, and very necessary, family tree of the four or five families that we read about over several millennia.

The downside to this is that it can be awfully difficult to digest such a huge number of characters over thousands of years.  This was my biggest gripe of all of Edward Rutherfurd’s previous novels.  The good news is that he does something slightly different with this novel, and it works beautifully.  We don’t begin our story until about 1875, and about 80% of the narrative takes place between 1875 and 1945.  Occasionally, he’ll interrupt his story and we’ll be transplanted several hundred years prior for a somewhat brief story of the elder relatives that lived long ago along with key points of history.  This is incredibly helpful, as we can still learn about the rich history of Paris without having to plod through thousands of years.

There have been times in this author’s works where he’ll start a section of his book with a header with a year, say ‘1565’.  He’ll give us about 2 pages worth of material, and then before we know it, we’re now in ‘1591’.  As a reader, you’re like, “Whoa.  Slow down a bit.”  I mean, we just about get settled with some new characters, and before we can exhale, we’re already reading about their grandchildren.  Fortunately, to my recollection, he only does this once in this novel.  Again, it was incredibly refreshing to basically stay with the same people over 70 years.

Another minor gripe that I have about these types of novels is that the author is, obviously, devoted to telling the history of the location.  This means that there are many times when a section of this book consists of two people sitting at a dinner table, and all they do for several pages is converse about the history, the government, the agriculture, etc.  So not a lot of action, but a lot of history.  This is prevalent in this book, but it does seem to be much more “natural” than what we’ve been exposed to in previous Edward Rutherfurd novels.

Some parts of the history of Paris get a lot more attention than other parts.  There’s a good chunk of the second world war here, but surprisingly very little about the first.  The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 is basically ignored, but there’s a good bit about the building of the Eiffel Tower in the years that immediately followed.  There’s also a lot about the French Revolution and the many schisms between Catholics and Protestants.

The many French names of the various historical places and events tended to be a bit overwhelming, but it never deterred from the main story.  I can’t honestly say that I have any sort of huge desire to visit Paris and see what I read about in this book, but this was still an excellent story. Rutherford manages to juggle storytelling, history, and genealogy better than most, and better than he ever has before.