Paris Echo by Sebastian Faulks
In his top-floor bedroom near the Medina, nineteen-year-old Tariq sits behind the moucharabia screen that stands before his doorway, always unsure whether he’s being watched by his stepmother or another member of the household. The small Moroccan city he calls home seems drab and stifling, and he decides to get away to some place more exciting.
Arriving in Paris, the intelligent and easygoing Tariq soon lands a job. When he starts working at Fried Poulet, his boss gives him a Koran printed in French. “Have you read it?” the young man asks his French-born Algerian employer.
No, says Jamal, “I’m not a believer. I don’t need religion to know what I think.” Darkly hinting at the atrocities of Franco-Algerian history, he continues, “I don’t need a god to hate this country. I just need to remember what they did to us.”
This makes no sense to Tariq. Why, he wonders, “If it’s just the same old war between our people and the French,” do the jihadis always go on about religion? The conversation is interrupted before he gets an answer as his fellow workers begin to argue. Hasim wants to open up another shop in the Marais, but Jamal, who has never never ventured into central Paris, dismisses the idea, saying the place is full of “Jews and falafel.” As the argument escalates, with the men shouting “your mother this, your sister the other,” Tariq takes it in stride, and thinks his own thoughts.
Though he doesn’t take abuse personally, he has a pretty good idea of what people think of him. When his friend invites him to meet Hannah, a historian, he assumes that being American, “she’ll take one look at me and think I’ve come to blow up the Eiffel Tower.” But he does meet her. Soon he becomes her lodger, and afterwards, her friend.
This novel offers a few good laughs and a lot to ponder. Paris, known as the city of light, is also a city with many ghosts, and we learn, along with Tariq, about some of the things that happened in Paris during the occupation in WWII. Accompanying Hannah when she interviews Clemence, an old woman who remembers the war, Tariq hears that “The Germans were always buying things…they couldn’t get at home” because “their shops had been bare for years.”
Frenchwomen reacted very differently to the blandishments of the German officers. While some women allowed themselves to be bought for food and luxury goods, others resisted fraternizing with them, taking the long view and wanting to to have the comfort in old age of knowing they were on the right side.
According to Hannah’s friend Julian, the pragmatic French just wanted the war to be over, passively supporting “whatever means would bring that end about most quickly.” When “the Germans and Vichy” didn’t work out, they turned to “the Allies and the Resistance.” Clemence remembers Coco Chanel, “sleeping with German officers in the Ritz all through the war” and “getting her pick of paintings and furniture from Jewish flats she’d informed about.” The beautiful trees on Paris boulevards were burned for firewood, and “walking on the streets for more than five minutes was dangerous.” Bitter to learn of her Resistance lover’s infidelity, Clemence openly admits going straight to the police to report that “an enemy of the French state” is living at the other woman’s address, and for this, she is paid.
In contrast to Clemence, Juliette, who fulfills her original ambition to become a teacher after the war, regrets only that “her youth came at the wrong time.” She feels certain that the bitter memories of the war will never go away “until every last person who lived through it is dead.” She knows about war’s end in France, the “tearing hurry to avoid a civil war,” and that it was “more important to maintain order than to have justice” as the new post-war government “tried to run ahead of the mob.” The Milice, who Tariq’s research has outed as “a force of uniformed thugs put together by the French government to do the Germans’ dirty work” are unsure what to expect when war ends: “Firing squad or a new uniform” with a new position attached.
Curious after hearing the stories of the old survivors and conscious of his ignorance of history, Tariq learns not only about the Milice, but the deeply shocking fact that Jews were rounded up in the velodrome, and later shipped off to Drancy. As the young Moroccan explores the Metro and checks out the Pantheon, he thinks about “all the boys my age, with no work or college, in drug gangs, wearing English football shirts, looking down on the closed city they were barred from.” He misses home, and realizes that perhaps his life there was not quite as boring as he thought.
Tariq is a wonderfully vivid character. His travel experiences mature him, and he returns to Morocco changed by the few months he spent in Paris. His fresh and open perspective is also a help to Hannah, as she struggles to exorcise the memory of a long-ago Russian lover who periodically bursts from a dormant state “in some zombie hinterland” to trouble her dreams.
In an entertaining and thought-provoking way, the author shows us some of the ghosts of Paris. He also raises big questions and expresses certain preoccupations seen in his other works. In contemporary society with its attendant technology, not only are we becoming more ignorant, we’ve even lost the ambition to preserve and maintain the knowledge we once had.
Can understanding the past help you live better? The characters wonder, but find no real answer. An even more serious question is discussed. What if, Hannah asks, all the assumptions about the importance of remembering the past “is all just pious nonsense?” It’s a rhetorical question, but she asks Julian what is “the difference between the commemoration of an atrocity and the perpetuation of a grievance?”
Faulks also raises the fascinating possibility of temporal synaesthesia, “a condition in which you confused not two senses, like sight and smell, but in which different eras become merged.” This question also has no clear answer, but he suggests the possibility that “Some things have both banal explanations and more interesting ones,” and “to some extent, we’re free to choose.”