Have you ever got the end of a novel and asked “What was the point of that, then?” In a sense I know this is a futile question – there is no ‘point’ to Van Gogh’s Sunflowers or Beethoven’s Fifth. Equally not all novels have a point – they exist as a work of the author’s creativity and can’t be judged for their utility. I can think of some exceptions to this rule – there is a very definite point to Gulliver’s Travels, for example, or Animal Farm, but most novels are not didactic – they just tell a story, introduce some characters, and tell us something about the human experience.

Sebastian Faulks’s ‘Paris Echo‘, however, left me with this reaction – I simply wasn’t sure why he had bothered. It features the strangely lifeless parallel stories of two outsiders in Paris – American post-doctoral researcher Hannah and runaway Moroccan teenager Tariq, who ends up living in Hannah’s flat. This certainly isn’t a conventional portrait of Paris –  the traditional tourist spots are largely avoided, instead showing us the underbelly of the city and its migrant population. Tariq – and perhaps Faulks – has a strange fascination for Metro stations and has some aimless encounters with characters on his journeys. I understand of course that they aren’t intended as random encounters – they all contribute to the overall themes of the novel, about the way Paris is struggling to escape from its past and will only eventually move on by facing up to….and so on. But I really struggled to care.

As you would expect and can gather, the novel has serious aspirations. Hannah is studying recordings of women living in Paris during the German occupation – but this isn’t research, the stories have already been collected by someone else, relatively recently, and all she is doing is listening to them with her imperfect grasp of French. Precisely why she is doing this is never made clear. Tariq is theoretically in Paris looking for traces of the mother he barely knew, although in practice he makes no real attempt to look for her, focusing instead on his job in a downmarket fried chicken shop, in his spare time smoking weed and stalking women on the underground. He is not an engaging nor interesting character, despite his naivety and at times stupidity (he is embarrassed not to know who Charles de Gaulle was).

Hannah eventually leaves Paris to be swept into the arms of her admirer, in a totally unconvincing happy ever after resolution to her story, while Tariq goes back to  Morocco to pass his exams and win the affection of his female admirer. Tariq’s casual successes with women irritated me  – male novelists of a certain age seem to always create characters like this as a form of wish fulfilment.

Faulks’ Amazon page collects some quotes from reviewers, shown below, which I find very revealing in their lack of enthusiasm – these are the edited versions intended to show the novel at its best, with any criticism or reservations cropped out. I’ve highlighted some telling understatements.

Faulks] is as skilful as ever. . . . With lyrical precision, he reveals Paris and its wartime past. . . . And Paris Echo, for all its tragedy, is one of his most buoyant novels, flawlessly paced and deftly constructed.” ―Wall Street Journal