Paris Echo, Abide With Me and Paradise Lodge

I was looking forward to the new novel from Sebastian Faulks, but ultimately Paris Echo was a big disappointment. In some ways it just seemed to be a tourist's journey around the places, streets and metro of Paris. Even the penultimate paragraph name checks eight of these. Just as if the author was showing off his new found knowledge of the city. And then the story was just a backdrop to the geography.

Still. the writing was as good as ever, and I liked the alternating chapters of Hannah and Tariq, both written in the first person. Hannah researching the stories of French women during the Nazi occupation, and young Tariq finding our what Paris might have meant to his dead mother. But the writer's research overpowers the their story. 

I thought that this was the weakest of all Elizabeth Strout's novels. I never looked forward to returning to, what on the face of it is, a pretty boring story. But her writing just kept me interested to the end. The book is full of gossip, back biting, snarling and downright anger. Tyler Caskey, the minister of West Annett, tries to stay calm, but even he is beginning to wilt.

I enjoyed the time change in the middle, but the tone never lets up. Was this the writer railing against small town attitudes? I could have done with more of the clashes of big city wealth and the town's small minded citizens. But in the hands of our accomplished author, it is never dull. 

After reading Nina Stibbe's first novel "Man at the Helm", I found "Paradise Lodge to be much better. We do seem to be following the author's early life, what with the former's narrator Lizzie Vogel being nine years old, and here she is now fifteen. There are no literary gimmicks as a linear story follows Lizzie working in an old folks home in Leicestershire, of all places. At fifteen?

School does seem to take a very back seat as her mother is more interested in a new relationship and her own problems. But there are some great characters at Paradise Lodge and lots of humour in the events that follow. A light, warm and clever story that has some very funny highlights.