Adam Thirlwell’s first novel in eight years is set in Paris in the period around the French Revolution. When we first meet Celine, she is a peripheral figure at the court of the dauphin; at 19, she has recently been married off to Sasha, a 46-year-old minor government official and ruthless “fascist”. She has also become the focus of a series of pamphlets, provenance unknown, containing pornographic fictions based on her life. In the early pages of the novel, Celine has been made into a kind of symbol of all that is rotten at the heart of French high society, and is attempting to deal with the fallout from her unjust erotic infamy – most pressingly its effects on her thuggish and abusive husband. Along with her friends Marta and Julia, Celine hosts a series of glamorous parties, a deliberate gambit to attract writers into her orbit, as a means of wresting back control of the narrative of her life. (“In a world made of writing,” we are told, “malevolent writing could only be erased by more writing.”)
This might make the book sound like a relatively conventional work of historical fiction, but it is nothing of the sort. Thirlwell has never been one to play it straight – his 2012 novel Kapow! employed enough typographical trickery to outdo Max Porter; 2013’s collection Multiples was a sort of multilingual parlour game of literary translation – and as the use of the word “fascist” to describe an 18th-century French civil servant might suggest, his deliberate deployment of jarring anachronism is more than just a startling textural effect: it’s at the centre of the book’s artful design.
