Pure Paperback – 2 Jun 2016

Like many other readers here, I found the book attractive but a little mystifying. There's no real resolution and the book has the feeling of a Victorian novel with its density of description, its creation of mood - but without any sort of conclusion or any sense of arrival.However, I enjoyed it enough to get a Kindle sample of his earlier book Ingenious Pain. I was astonished at the similarity between the two. Naturally, Andrew Miller likes to explore a time period that he is interested in - I like a bit of eighteenth century myself - but the characters, their clothing, even the details of their appearance are identical. There are religious men, there is a very large-breasted woman, there are one or two young women who quietly give a sense of strength without saying much, there is a fascination with (and long descriptions of) the dead and their interment..... We expect a writer to have his likes and interests of course, but these books were almost indistinguishable. So if you did enjoy Pure, don't buy Ingenious Pain - and vice versa.

The subject is a disused cemetery. The bodies – or what remains of them – are to be dug up and removed. Not an obviously attractive subject. That the cemetery – and its clearance – were real, would not seem to make it any more appealing. However there’s more.The Cimitiére des Innocents lay in the heart of Paris and these events took place in 1785. Revolution is as much in the air as the noxious miasma from the charnel houses. Andrew Miller has delivered an atmospheric novel.The cemetery proves a powerful metaphor for the decay and corruption of the ancien regime. Its cleansing, its “purification”, ordered by Versailles, is prophetic.The job is assigned to Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a provincial engineer and admirer of Voltaire and the philosophes. He brings to his task reason and planning, but events in the burial ground take a direction of their own. As they were to do soon enough throughout the land and beyond in place and time. This is a world about to explode. A better future is suggested by the flowers that bloom again over the emptied graves, other possibilities are prophesied in sudden acts of violence – as though dark forces have been uncovered, too.It is hard not to read meaning and significance in every shovel of earth and disinterred corpse. If that’s all Pure was about it would be a clever allegory but not a great read. But it is more than that.The author assembles a wide cast of characters. The family with whom the engineer lodges, the sexton of the church and his granddaughter, a musician, a courtesan and many many others. I particularly liked the serving girl Marie, a smart little madam from the Faubourg Saint Antoine, of whom Jean-Baptiste notes, “she has a small but effective range of facial expressions, all of them faintly unsettling”.The clearance brings great changes to the lives of them all. There are winners and losers, love and loss. He captures such details that you can almost smell the city – the better boxes in the theatre come with a chamber pot, which is sometimes emptied, oysters might be on the menu and are sometimes safe to eat. It convincingly evoked France on the eve of 1789.It won a prize – I think it deserved it.

This book has had many honours awarded to it so it does not need a positive review from me to attract anyone's attention to it. I found it gripped my interest from the very first page and introduced me to a cast of characters who were both fascinating and believable. The story centres around a grim task that the engineer, Jean Baptiste, is contracted to do by one of the King's Ministers (the story is set in 1785, just in advance of the French revolution), which is to purify (hence the title "Pure") the cemetery "Les Innocentes" in the centre of Paris. The smell from the cemetery is polluting the area. This is the backdrop to an exploration of a range of relationships which all carry huge interest, and on occasions, excitement for the reader. It is not a long read but it is wonderful in the rewards it provides. I wholeheartedly recommend it to you. (NB there is an interesting conversation about the book between the historian, Kate Williams, and the author, Andrew Miller, on YouTube)

This story is set in Paris just before the French Revolution. The main character is an engineer who's first big job is to demolish a church and clear its grave yard of its thousands of corpses which are polluting the neighbouring properties.You would think such a story would have its limitations but the author tells it so well you can almost smell the decay. It's both interesting and highly unusual and I found the historical detail fascinating.I think there should have been more on the discontent with the royalty of the time and the ending wasn't great. However because of its uniqueness I would definitely recommend