Pre-revolutionary reading: "Pure" by Andrew Miller

Some books are not quite what you expect. Pure was on a list of books recommended to me by a man with form for recommending well-researched historical novels, often with a francophile slant (recent example: An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris; otherwise basically anything by Hilary Mantel), viz one Julian Priestley. So what was Pure? Well, a well-researched novel set in a Paris on the cusp of the French Revolution.

The odd thing about Pure, though, is that it doesn't feel like a historical novel. There is a creepy ominousness about it which gives it the feel of a ghost story, rather than the parable of a harbinger of a new rationalistic age it ostensibly is. Of ghosts there are none. Of the supernatural even less. But both seem to be lurking below the surface, in the pre-rational psyches of the even the most rational protagonists, and emerge not as paranormal manifestations, but as inexplicable violence, strange choices or hidden motivations. This hints, in the mind of a reader who knows what happened only five years after the events recounted in this novel, at how the rational revolution can go wrong, how the highest of ideals can merge with the basest of impulses.  Explicitly, we hear little of the impending Revolution, but it is constantly there in the juxtaposition of the scientific and the irrational mindset, talk of the party of the Future, whiffs of rebellion in anti-royalist street graffiti and the staging of Beaumarchais' Le Mariage de Figaro (one of my A level set texts coming to haunt me!), the bulldozing of popular sentiment by "enlightened" authorities and in an ultimate act of purifying violence by a hitherto inarticulate and mostly-unheeded subclass.


It is a curious mix, one which stages events which are in both intention and outcome quintessentially modernising (albeit at the - in this case - behest of the ancien regime), but then subverts their apparent meaning. Some of this is implicit in the story it tells, one which inevitably sets reason up against deeper, atavistic instincts. The novel opens with a young provincial engineer of an overtly rationalist creed - he even recites a kind of rationalist statement of self-faith each night before sleeping - summoned to Versailles to be charged with a unknown task by a minister of the king. The task turns out to be the clearance of a graveyard in the heart of Paris, Les Innocents, the removal of the human remains to new sites on the edge of the city and the demolition of the rotting church looming over the site. The job, for all its gruesomeness, is progressive and rational. The graveyard is over-full, with five-hundred years' worth of corpses packed into the ground, up to twenty metres deep, creating what we would now call a major public health hazard. We learn at the beginning of the novel that a last straw was the collapse of an underground wall and the cascade of purifying bodies into an adjacent cellar. More generally, the cemetery has polluted the ground, the air and water, spreading strange illnesses and a pervasiveness unwholesomeness, seemingly also moral, among the local population. In short, this is a progressive project, the purification of urban land for the betterment of all. The land will see service as a public market place.

The engineer, Jean-Baptiste Baratte (yes, you can read into that that he is a sort of John the Baptist precursor to the main event) assumes the task with a mixture of conviction and foreboding. He enters local society, to find it composed of rationalist allies (whose rationalism does not get in the way of a fair amount of drunken hi-jinks, and indeed some ambivalence in their support for the engineer), traditionalists who, in defiance of their own real interests, prefer the proximity of the familiar, however toxic, to the promises of the New Men, and a middle ground of the ambivalent and indifferent, who, can be swayed by transactional interests of all sorts, pecuniary, matrimonial, sexual. 

Baratte succeeds in his enterprise, albeit ultimately using techniques which demand a degree of compromise with deeper primitive impulses in his crew (and probably in himself). He also achieves along the way a degree of free-thinking social liberation and self-confidence, though itself won after an episode when his reactions are all but rational, in defying convention to set up house with a most unsuitable partner. Such success is however bought at what one understands to be a high cost, a paradoxical loss of faith in the very philosophy and modernity which he has deployed for the project, and which he knows he will need in the future. 

The power and success of the novel lies in this constant tension between the new and the old, the rational and the irrational, the modern and the traditional, including where these coexist in the same individual. At the outset, Baratte's skills are put at the service of an impenetrable pre-rational state, evoked by a Palace of Versailles seemingly on the brink of a weird collective insanity, but, as his work progresses, his enterprise becomes a symbol of revolt against the regime. We understand, with Baratte, that the modern has not dismissed the pre-modern, but transformed it, from the ghosts and superstitions of the tales surrounding Les Innocents, into the powerful impulses, inexplicable behaviour and violent outbreaks he must resist, control and sometimes harness to bring his task to a conclusion. 

Is Miller out to make a point about good intentions gone wrong in the French Revolution? Why, a key figure in the novel is the kindly Dr Guillotin, whose name is remembered now almost exclusively for his well-intentioned "humane" execution device. Well, yes, but that's the least of it. One could see this a cautionary tale about human progress in general. Whatever we do - and some things we must - there must always be a reckoning with what lies under the surface and can burst through when least expected, changing, redirecting even reversing the best laid plans and the finest intentions. 

But this novel should not be seen as a thesis on progress or human behaviour, it is also a fine story, an evocation of an age and a mentality, a tale of ambition, success and failure. It is a quick, gripping read with a deeply modern sensibility. Anyway, I really liked it.

The Cemetery of Les Innocents, before Baratte's work.