I had promised reviews of love stories and therefore I must preface this review by saying that this novel would not naturally fall into this category (needless to say I will follow through on that promise at a later date).
I think I have started 2011 reading enjoyable and engaging books but waiting to really be struck by something, a novel I couldn’t put down and that I itched to carry on reading. Reading this book captured something of that feeling and certainly ranks as one of the best new publications of the year I’ve read to date for its originality, haunting narrative and powerful emotional intensity.
This is a story about two characters whose lives run in parallel, criss-crossing the streets and underground network of Paris on their daily lives in disparate but sympathetic turmoil. Mathilde, independent, confident and resilient, is a woman whose life has become absorbed, and gradually crushingly overcome, by a relentless power-struggle with a zealous, vindictive colleague.
Thibault, an on-call paramedic, has found his bustling, energetic passion for the life and people of the city has been changed by unrequited love and a draining sense of powerlessness in the face of human desperation. Both these characters, who have independently been empowered, invigorated and entwined with the driving force of a city in motion, now find themselves crushed, cowed and irrevocably changed by their engagement with it.
This is a book about the personal vs. the machine. It is a novel which hums with the everyday noises of industry and achievement through routine and a mass of people in flux; moving, charging ever-onwards an addictive, compelling tide which pulls the individual into its throng. It is a book which questions what happens when those individuals can no longer meet that pace. It asks what happens when a sense of self is overridden and whether this process of being beaten down by the pull of the mundane is inevitable.
De Vigan’s first novel ‘No and Me’ was enormously successful and a much gentler and more forgiving novel than ‘Underground Time‘. Parts of this book made me want to cry in sympathy and rage internally at the rank unfairness and cowardice of peer-pressured behaviour. This isn’t an easy read but it’s characters are so compelling and their lives so thoroughly well-drawn that you can’t help but be pulled into the humble drama of their very ordinary lives. French novels often carry off the balance between the tragic and the domestic and this is writing very much of this tradition. At the best moments of the narrative the writing evokes that awful sense of being at your most alone in a crowd; of standing stock still whilst the world around you turns and turns again without you.
It’s not a laugh a minute read and the ending might leave some people feeling abandoned without clear resolution to the plot but I found it to be genuine and absorbing. Vigan conjures heartfelt compassion for her characters and creates drama and tension out of thoroughly ordinary events through writing that sizzles and jumps off the page.
To Capture the Castle 