With the invention of the guillotine came curiosity as to how long its victims could remain conscious after decapitation. While Lora Jones’s debut is largely concerned with the impact of the French Revolution on the role and advancement of women (despite women’s involvement in some of the revolution’s most important moments, the new French constitution did not especially concern itself with female liberty, equality or fraternity), “lucid” decapitation also briefly features in this highly visual, immersive novel.
In 1788, teenage sisters Lara and Sofi live in Marseilles. Times are tough, and after a family tragedy the sisters move close to Paris to work at the Oberst factory, famous for its exquisite wallpaper characterised by highly stylised floral and pastoral scenes. (Jones was inspired by Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf’s Toile de Jouy patterns, which remain popular today.)
The girls strike up a friendship with factory heir Josef, who is mourning the mysterious death of his mother years earlier. Josef’s spoilt aristocrat wife Hortense grew up at Versailles, of which she says: “One day it is like being trapped inside a sewer, the next like being trapped inside the sun.” Enjoyably for the reader, even when angry, Hortense’s spirited rudeness delivers the novel’s many moments of sly humour, such as: “Mama pushes a whole, peeled egg between her lips as though trying to recreate its laying in reverse.”
In the Oberst chateau, the woman depicted in the wallpaper’s many vignettes is Josef’s late mother, and Sofi finds these constant reminders of a dead woman unsettling: “I cannot work out whether it is romantic or obsessive.”
While Sofi gets caught up with the political fervour brewing among her fellow workers, Lara increasingly believes the wallpaper is mirroring her life. As the revolution draws closer, Hortense too, becomes unnerved by the potential meanings of its repetitive scenes. For the reader, two characters obsessing over the wallpaper creates overlap, which means the domestic tension occasionally flags by comparison with the vivid, brutal chaos of Paris.
Jones’s research uses contemporary detail to enrich rather than drive description. In her hands, the revolution is a tumultuous time in which the lives of three women – white, red, blue – are no longer mapped out from birth, but have the potential, even briefly, of a fresh, blank page.
