Pure puff

The era immediately preceding the French Revolution presents such rich pickings for the historical novelist that the relative scarcity of English-language fiction set in the period comes as a surprise. We might charitably suggest that our authors are intimidated by the long shadow of A Tale of Two Cities, or less generously remark that they are too busy picking the corpses of the first world war to attend to an earlier conflict with altogether more ambiguous historical overtones.

Andrew Miller’s Pure strides with admirable self-assurance into the pyretic atmosphere of Paris in 1785. We meet our hero in the Palace of Versailles, an ambitious young man supplicating himself to the ancien régime. As an intelligent, aspiring provincial, Jean-Baptiste Barrate calls to mind Julien Sorel, the champion of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and patron saint of every young man who has ever fought the conflicting urges to climb society and destroy it.