‘Paris Echo': Sebastian Faulks grips you to the last page

Sebastian Faulks. Photo: AP

If your idea of Paris is pavement cafes, accordion music, the Eiffel Tower and high-end shopping on the Boulevard St Michel, then Paris Echo will come as a rather rude awakening. In Sebastian Faulks’ latest novel, even the baguettes cause constipation. This is the Paris that most tourists either don’t see or choose not to see – the Paris of rough sleepers, illegal immigrants and the notorious banlieues, the suburbs at the end of the Metro lines that have become perilously close to ghettoes.

And this is also a Paris haunted with the “echoes” of French colonialism in North Africa and the Vichy government, of wartime collaboration and inhumanity on a grand scale. This, then, is a novel about history, about forgetting and about guilt.