Paris Echo by Sebastian Faulks

Imagine for a moment that The Beatles had started their LP career with Abbey Road. Where is there to go from there?

Instead the whole world appreciates the slow build to the dizzying heights of Sgt Pepper and the contemplative beauty of the last couple of records.

I think that Sebastian Faulks, who continues to produce beautiful, fascinating novels, may be a victim of best first legacy.

His second novel ‘Birdsong’ is the most amazing and brilliant book on the 1990s. I have returned to it a couple of times since first reading and it still leaves me feeling overwhelmed and grateful. How can a person so obviously born forty years later have researched so meticulously that it reads just like a contemporary novel?

Life goes on for us all and after the dazzling success of his first trilogy, he had to carry on writing. He has done so for these past thirty years and each new novel is another direction and another area of life meticulously explored.

I have just finished reading ‘Paris Echo’, his book from 2018. It has a dreamlike quality that I have not seen before.

It is clear that the writer has a deep love of Paris and he makes no attempt to do otherwise in this book. The Paris is just pre-internet and less connected than today  - it is the Paris I knew well when I lived nearby at about the same time. I was lucky to have some of 1993 and 94 on the outskirts. Perhaps the last chance to experience Paris as it had been for the previous hundred years – the Paris of daily newspapers, faulty TV reception, creaking plumbing and rattling metro cars. I loved it, and it is painted here in its quirky, original colours. No Uber or KFC here, just Flunch and a cream Mercedes to ferry you from quartier to quartier.

The story revolves around Tariq, a boy seeking adventure from North Africa; and Hannah, an academic from New England. Their lives intertwine but there is pleasingly little that is predictable. There is nothing shocking or nasty, which I found a relief as so many novels today are ruined by the desire to shock.

Instead, there is a meditation about the nature of Paris and its many layers of history and people.

As with anything Sebastian Faulks writes, I am left wit ha feeling of having spent time in an alternative place. I am never sure if the characters are real. I love that, and I love the small glimpses into other lives.

It made me want to return to Paris.