- Sebastian, welcome to Waterstones! - Thank you.
We're here to talk about your new book, Paris Echo. It's an incredibly rich, vibrant book.
It's full of life, it's full of character. But at its heart are two characters, Hannah and Tariq,
and they come from very different backgrounds, they have very different
lives. What made you want to bring these two very different characters together?
Well I suppose crudely speaking they both represent different ways of living.
Hannah represents a very educated and informed and historically-aware way
of living, the very grown-up way of living if you like. And Tariq represents
a more youthful, a sort of YouTube generation way of living and his
education has not really included much history and he's never felt it necessary
to learn or remember anything. And so they represent these two different
ways of being alive and coming at new experiences and Paris being the
experience they share. But of course the book then goes on to the big question
the book asks is how much do we really need to know to live a valuable and
worthwhile life? Is being very well-informed about everything, does that
necessarily make you a better person and living a more valuable life or is it
possible to live like a lot of younger people live being sort of permanently
surprised by things and being a bit like a pinball being bashed around in a
machine. But of course with characters in a novel you can't take the
reader with you all the way through if they simply represent an idea; they've
got to be living people, the flesh and blood, and so on themselves.
I mean it is called Paris Echo and it is full of echoes of history, from the French
Resistance through to the Algerian war and it seems particularly interesting in
terms of the way in which societies and individual's lives are affected by
history and would you agree that this is a story that is in some ways about how
individual experience interacts with collective memory?
Yes it is, in a way I've always been interested in that. I mean most of the books I've written I've
dealt in some way with the way in which people's most private, passionate,
individual dilemmas and feelings and emotions and love affairs and the
terrible decisions they have to make in their lives are actually, in ways they're
not always aware of, influenced by what has gone before. Either by the big
movements of history or by the things which have happened to their parents or
their grandparents and so on. Because I don't really think that any child,
any young person, any person of any age - we are not an
island, we are the product of what has gone before. And you know one of the
questions you ask yourself in your life is how much do you want to know about
that? How much do you want to let that influence you? How much do you want to
break free? But of course until you know what you're breaking free from then
you're a sort of captive in a way. And you know one of the things behind Paris
Echo was I had done a lot of work on a something called the Government Advisory
Group for the commemoration of the First World War which is a lot of very, very
important people, plus me, sitting around in a committee room trying to advise the
government on how we should remember this, or commemorate that. And it's been
going on for about five years. And you know there's a lot of stuff about 'it's so
important that young people must learn from the lessons of history' and so on
but you know sometimes I wonder if that's just not a lot of pious old
nonsense. I mean do we ever learn from the lessons of history? I mean we're not
gonna have another First World War because we haven't got a Tsar or a
Kaiser or an Archduke or a king in control anymore. So you know what our
young people supposed to learn? Ah yes, I mustn't assassinate someone in Sarajevo!
Well, you know, it's much more complicated than that and that's one of the things
I'm trying to do in Paris Echo, sort of muddy the waters a bit.
And do you think your perspective on that has it's changed in terms of how history filters into
fiction and how you navigate the two? I'm thinking of this point when
Hannah talks about the historical, the real and the possible; and they all seem
to kind of be packed into this book.
Yes, I mean for her you know the past is as
real and perhaps rather more real than the present and you know maybe that's a
personal issue that she needs to come to terms with and indeed does fight with in
the book. It's not all about history, it's also about this young woman's feelings
about herself and her past and a particular lover and trying
to liberate herself. She's trying to liberate herself from her personal
history even as she engages with the national history of another country.
But, you know, Paris is such a great place to think about these things
because it has this paradoxical thing of every metro station and every street
name has a historical significance which you can either sit on
the metro and just see Censier – Daubenton or Sèvres – Babylone and just say, oh, great names
and who cares what they're for. Or you can look at them and think ooh gosh yes
that means that, that means that. But the paradox of France is that it is both
very self-aware of its past and very proud of its past and its history but
it's also very secretive about what has happened in the last, well, 50 or 60 years.
And so that makes this theme of history you know very very dramatic in Paris.
Do you think there is a danger both individually and socially in trying to
deny one's past and trying to kind of put it in a box.
I think there is but as they say 'denial is not just a river in Egypt'. I mean it's
quite a useful tool actually. I think in certain circumstances
a stiff-upper-lip and putting a lid on things can work. I don't believe that
in cases of individual trauma or individual difficulty, talking
excessively and wallowing excessively is always the right way. Sometimes it is but
sometimes it isn't. And France has taken a lot of bets in the last 70 or so years
that the gamble that de Gaulle took at the end of the Second World War was we
will simply deny this happened and he had to take that view because if he
hadn't then there would have been a civil war in France. So he had to pretend
that France had resisted the Germans all the way through and that most French
people had joined the resistance and fought tooth and nail, which is
completely untrue; France backed Germany most of the war. And so it wasn't until
50 years later that this sort of septic wound began to really suppurate.
And that's been problematic for France but I think basically they're
waiting till everyone's dead and then it will eventually go away. And the same
really with Algeria. I mean de Gaulle's view on that, when the Algerian, when
suddenly they conceded and said Algeria can have independence after this
appalling war of ethnic cleansing and torture and so on. And one of his
colleagues said to him 'Are you sure mon Général, so much blood has been
spilt.' And he said, 'Nothing dries faster than blood.' His calculation was that
people would just forget and that Algeria was an insufficiently developed
country to properly memorialize its own history. And he's sort of right about
that but then not really because you know the Islamist problem in Paris is
different from the one in London and it is connected to the Algerian war, so
hasn't quite gone away.
And you do have the, in terms of the resistance, you have
these voices and you've let the voices speak for themselves, of the
the women involved in the French Resistance and collaborators as well.
And you have real characters in there, people like Andrée Borrel
and then you have these other women's voices. Did it
feel particularly important to have them speak for themselves?
I think it makes the book much richer for the reader, I hope so, if
they can share the experience of Hannah the researcher when she
goes to this library and she plugs into this audio history and she can dial up
any one of a number of women talking about their lives. And you
you know if you're a reader you don't really want to read them saying well
this person told her something something, you want to hear the voice.
And it's quite a challenge to invent a voice which is, you
know, colloquial and of its time and so on and don't forget it's supposed to be
in another language and so on so it's quite technically difficult to get the
right cadences for it. But I felt the reader would really enjoy that sense of
being directly connected to the past, which you can only get from that voice.
And I think that the thing for me I loved most about this book was the
fact that it feels as though you're in the middle of a huge kind of flow
and there are all these characters who come in from different sides and some of
them whose stories you just touch on and others who you know you get more time
with; but the sense of stories carrying on long before the book begins and also
long after it ends. Is that something that's important to you, that sense of it?
Yeah well it became very important as the book went along, I began to see that was
what it was partly about, this constant churn and flow. And you
know there's this rather beautiful girl you know tripping down the steps of
the Metro at that station but there's another version of her there and there
are different lives being lived. And I do have a sort of
sense, maybe I have a sort of autoscopy thing myself, but I do have a sense of
alternate lives going. And somehow, for some reason in Paris this
sense is very acute. I don't know why it is, but people seem to have responded to that.
It gave me the real sense that every character is an incidental
character in someone else's story, even if it's their story at that
point. That everyone is someone else's incidental character. But it's a, I thought
it was a brilliant book, a haunting book in lots of different ways and thank you very much
Well thanks for your questions, they were really good.