In the midst of France’s année terrible, there’s a panther loose in Paris. It’s “black as a hole and [moves] like liquid”, and those who see it take it as a bad harbinger. Who can blame them for suspecting the supernatural, when their city’s been turned upside down? Although there’s a more mundane explanation – the panther has escaped from the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes – it’s emblematic of an extraordinary and terrible year. Stef Penney’s fourth novel opens in May 1870, just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war. It chronicles the siege of Paris – four months of shellfire and starvation – and even then is only halfway done. After the French defeat in January 1871, Paris is far from peaceful: revolution follows, and the radical Paris Commune takes control of the city until its violent defeat in May 1871. To cram all these events into one novel is ambitious, but the result is electrifying.
Admittedly, things start slowly. The novel roves among Parisians who have little inkling of what the year will hold. Ellis Butterfield, dissolute nephew of the American ambassador, dabbles in poetry and struggles to repress his experiences as a surgeon in the American civil war. The Lamy family – whose photography business marks them out as only semi-respectable, even without the erotic shots that pay their bills – have ambitions for their daughter’s marriage, while their Canadian assistant Lawrence Harper tentatively circles a romance with another man. The most immediately arresting of this cast is Anne Petitjean, Creole inmate of the Salpêtrière asylum, who is obliged to be hypnotised on stage by her physician, and who harbours a passionate fascination for the tiger in the nearby menagerie.
