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.

Carrying the Fire

Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys by Michael Collins, 1974, Reprint 2019

It is the measure of the achievements of Michael Collins that the foreward to his book was written by Charles Lindbergh, the great American pioneer of aviation from a different age. After reading to the end it is clear that Collins deserves his place alongside Lindbergh in the pantheon of aviators.

So many biographies of great figures in recent history do them a disservice as they are ghost-written. There is nothing wrong with employing a skilled journalist to get the story out there, but this is different. Collins, entirely through his own craft, tells one of the keystone stories of the Twentieth Century and do so with style and grace. Of the wide range of books written about manned spaceflight, this is perhaps the best.

It was written in 1973 ad published in 1974, just as the Apollo programme was winding down and scientists and politicians were looking for new horizons to explore. Collins’ book is imbued with this continuing optimism, and missions to Mars are mentioned on a couple of occasions as the logical next step. Hindsight has taught everyone that Mars is a much larger step than envisaged in the 1970s, when the success of Apollo was still fresh in the minds of the world and a trip to the Moon was commonplace.

You would expect a book written by one of the crew of the first successful trip to the Moon to be mostly centred on the great events of July 1969. Even from the short perspective of the early 1970s Collins did not do that, and instead there is a huge and detailed and carefully crafted account of the sweat, tears and lives that led up to the pinnacle of human achievement. Collins is a generous commentator and credits so many of his contemporaries for their work which led ultimately to his compatriots Armstrong and Aldrin walking on the Moon and returning safely. In the whole account there is not one whiff of jealousy for Armstrong and Aldrin, and in its place is a great satisfaction of him having completed his part of the mission successfully. Without Collins, it is clear, there would have been no Giant Leap for mankind. He is modest enough to make that clear but frame it in a way that pushes the glory back to all the groundworkers, scientists, geologists, rocket engineers and the thousands of others that made the journey possible.

A large part of Collins’ book is devoted to Gemini, the precursor to Apollo. With twenty-first century perspective Gemini seems so much of a seat-of-the-pants endeavour now. The machinery that permitted orbit of the Earth was basic, and not far removed from the 1950s fighter planes in some respects. The space suit he wore when he ventured out of his space vehicle on Gemini X was put together by ladies in a factory in Worcester, Delaware using glue pots and careful stitching.

What comes across in Collins’ account of NASA is how high-achieving everyone was, and how their test pilot background made them largely fearless. Each man selected (and they were all men, something for another conversation) was a skilled pilot, scientist, and a specialist in one field of the space programme. Each was assigned a field to oversee, advise and push forward. For Collins in was EVA (extra-vehicular activity), so when Armstrong stepped out of Eagle, lots of the work that Collins did was put to the test.

Collins is brief on family background, despite the fact that his father was an important figure in the First World War, and that he himself was a product of West Point. He does speak warmly of his wife Pat, and how her support was crucial in his success, especially in the long weeks away in early 1969 as he prepared for Apollo. In fact, the wives of all the Apollo crews make up a large part of the story and he is warm and complementary when he speaks of all of them. It was Collins who drove to the widow of one of the Apollo astronauts who perished on the launchpad in Apollo 1 and broke the news.

So what of Apollo? Michael Collins is a pilot first and a scientist second, so his account is largely of the nuts and bolts of the flight, punctuated with the scientific aspects. He found navigation difficult – Apollo still used a sextant and navigated by fixing position on the stars, which he found preposterous. But for all his technical gifts he is also a talented writer, and the emotion and scale of his enterprise are beautifully and carefully recorded. It is well known that several astronauts had private epiphanies when they viewed Earth from space, and Collins was no different. He was not as evangelical as the others, and shares his insights in a way that helps the reader to appreciate the scale of his achievements.

Collins’ story concludes with the countless messages he received from all over the world when Apollo returned safely. It shows his class as a man that he selected only a few share, and that the one he has valued the most in the intervening years is a handwritten note from Charles Lindbergh, perhaps one of the few other men on the planet that understood the solitude that Collins endured when, totally alone, he orbited the Moon waiting for Armstrong and Aldrin to return.