Pity our poor ancestors. How they ever got anything done in those dreadful clothes is a mystery (all that whalebone and scratchy wool, all those corsets and girdles and buskins and farthingales). Nor were they free to act as we do, to speak their minds, to make the kinds of choices we take for granted. Clothes caged their bodies, while society caged their minds.
Thus the dilemma of the historical novelist. Modern folks are boiling cauldrons of self-awareness; they're lots of fun to read about. But the long dead weren't as psychologically free as we are. Some novelists will try and spice things up by grafting an updated consciousness onto their characters, but Andrew Miller knows that's cheating.
So in Pure, his sixth novel and the recent winner of Britain's Costa Novel Award, he stays prissily true to the times he's chosen. Because of this, his characters sometimes lack vivacity and seem like museum pieces, if not outright clichés. Still, it has to be said that this is one scrupulously curated museum. What Pure lacks in id, it more than makes up for in atmosphere.
It is 1785, and engineer Jean-Baptiste Barratte has been tasked with an interesting, if gruesome, commission: to dismantle Les Innocents, Paris's largest cemetery. It has existed for centuries, and its ground is now overrun with bodies. Many of these are buried 16 metres underground in mass graves, but many others are hardly buried at all. To relieve overcrowding, bones have been dug up and stored in charnel houses along the cemetery walls. The measure hasn't helped much, since air pollution in the area is powerful enough to rot meat or destroy fabric. On a visit home, Barratte's family is repelled by his lingering stench.
Barratte may be a fictional character, but the story of Les Innocents is not; all credit to Miller for exhuming it. The idea that huge numbers of the living would blithely conduct their affairs on the perimeter of such a cesspool (in the middle of one of the world's great cities!) is astonishing. All the more so, as the cemetery was destroyed a short time before the French Revolution, at the behest of the King and not his negatively affected citizens. Imagine the Love Canal tragedy, but in reverse.
And yet life in the constant shadow of death does have its price, as Miller illustrates. Flemish miners brought in to help with the task sink into debauchery. A young girl is raped and beaten, and another, with whom Barratte boards, tries to bash his head in. A local doctor named Guillotin – never said to be the one who inspired the guillotine, but that's what we can assume – treats his injuries. "You Normans have nice thick skulls," he says. "You wouldn't care to leave me your head, would you?"
Miller paints a vivid portrait of Paris before the storm. From the gilded halls of Versailles to the muck of an underground grave, each vignette is richly detailed. His lean, present-tense narrative rolls like a souped-up tumbrel, and his descriptions enforce the period feel: light that lies "like lengths of rinsed muslin"; a troupe of rude actors absconding with "stolen chickens and scrumped apples."
But his prose style also feels true to the period, which isn't necessarily good. The writing is arch, if elegantly burnished; it feels translated from the French, though it isn't. And while Miller peoples his canvas with colourful characters (a louche church organist, a hooker with a brain of gold), they are two-dimensional. This includes Barratte, a young man so oppressed by circumstance that he cannot quit his vile job, even when he wants to.
Still, this is that rare historical novel that feels as though it were written in its own time, and not in ours. That's to be commended, as is Miller's fascinating choice of milieu. Is Paris so full of life because it is so conscious of death? Perhaps; the bones of Les Innocents were ultimately housed in the Catacombs, now a major tourist attraction. There, you can read a sign that echoes the spirit invoked by this book: "Lunatic that you are, why do you promise yourself to live a long time – you who cannot count on a single day?"
Cynthia Macdonald is a Toronto journalist and critic.