I hadn’t realised this was the last in a trilogy. I found the translation awkward and the story hard to get into. I should have started with the first book. That’ll teach me! Thanks to Netgalley for an arc of this book.

Exposition

The third volume of Varenne’s Bowman family saga, this novel focuses on Aileen Bowman, journalist and all-round independent woman, as she reports on the 1900 Exposition in Paris, France. Tattooed, trousered, sexually promiscuous, Aileen shocks and scandalises contemporary society. Oh yes, and there is a killer who may be her half-brother, brought up among native Americans, filled with semi-incestuous hatred.

I have stuck by this series of novels but have felt throughout that they like to think themselves a lot cleverer than they are. In my opinion the best is the first, Retribution Road, and the first part of that novel, set in a Conradian Burma, is the best of all. This final volume does not reach that level but does nevertheless hold the reader’s interest. I read it about the same time I read Jonathan Lee’s The Great Mistake. Both novels are set at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Both reflect the possibilities and promise of a new era, both with an element of irony. Lee’s story, however, is much the better one.

Aileen Bowman travels from New York to Paris for the 1900 World’s Fair, she is an independently rich journalist raised on a remote mid-West ranch. Aileen is unusual in the extreme in that she wears trousers, is sexually adventurous and tattooed on her body in respect to her Pauite Indian relatives. As Aileen writes about the changes occurring in Paris she falls for a man (and his wife), sees him murdered and takes her revenge.
Trying to write a precis of this novel is really hard, there is so much going on. Aileen is the mirror through which change is reflected. There is a theme about the changes in the art movement as expressionism comes to the fore, that changes in female rights and sexual freedom and also about the removal of the independence of the native Americans. What is important to realise is that this is a wonderful book, both entertaining and also thought-provoking.

Regular book reviewers may well know the feeling of thinking you've had the might to influence an author. I got that here, despite knowing full well that the last time I said M Varenne was all about the male human in all its nastiness, he'd already published the book at hand – the book that proves my thoughts about him wrong. For this is very much about the woman, as Aileen crosses the Atlantic to explore Paris at the turn of the last century – the latest Expo is on, highlighting such things as the electric light and the emergence of non-electric cars, and she wants to do her journalistic thing by reporting on what is both a country looking to the new century and getting the feel for the land of her mother. Quite the female libertine, and in need of a pass from the police chiefs to be allowed to wear trousers, the brazen bisexual will find her rustic, ranch-born behaviours quite at odds with the stilted, be-corseted Parisians.

It's perfectly fair for an author, with a career in writing male-on-male nastiness, to turn to male-on-female nastiness, but with this being a final chunk of a trilogy it does seem odd. (On that matter, I think this would serve as a self-contained novel, and not all the "why am I being told this?" sections that a newcomer would see relate to catching up with the previous story.) Things do seem to have a very different flavour here, from the grime of Book One's London and the nature of the middle volume, there is a big switch-up to the new-fangled gloss Paris tried to give itself for the Expo, and the tone of female flesh seems new to things.

I'd also accused the previous two books of combining to something nudging towards being a Great American Novel, which are never novel and never great to read. As I say, this would seem a black sheep in that family, but ultimately, through Aileen finding what French women of the time could not do and what they dare not think, and through finding circles back to her family's past, we do get a suitable follow-on. This is a book that is about how a country/capital/city/society cannot make a giant leap into the future, and any progress has to come second to progress for the individual. No state-mandated Brave New World will work without the state's citizens gaining the freedom of their ideal first. Americans' dreams (and by default those of the France of the setting and of the author, and of course all our countries) have to be achieved before the Great American Dream can come true.

Such deep concepts and unusual themes make this sound much less readable than it actually is, but Varenne remains a consummate author. I found a big gap between what I expected of the second book and what I got, but here I was able to go with the flow, almost as much as I had to do with the first book being so different from his usual thrillers. There are times when the writing turns a bit info-dumpy, and a la the GAN the characters can seem as cyphers and not real people at times, designed to convey a single point and not their whole personality. But the richness of this book as regards carrying research lightly, and still matching that with a moralistic theme, is very memorable. It's not been the breeziest trilogy, but it's been a compelling one, and it and this get four stars.

I read Retribution Road, book 1 in this trilogy, when it first came out a few years ago, and really loved it. For whatever reason, I never got round to reading the follow up – Equator. So I remedied that this week, and read both Equator and the Canvas of the World back to back.

Equator was a great read, but Canvas really blew me away. Its nothing short of remarkable. For a relatively short book, there’s so much depth to it. Layer upon layers of brilliant storytelling.

I loved the character of Aileen, she dominates the pages she’s on in an amazing way. The prose is masterful, Varenne can really write.

Set against the backdrop of the 1900 Paris Exposition, we get what is at heart a very personal story of Aileen’s acceptance of who she is, in a world that’s about a century too early to accept her. The cast of characters who are dragged into her orbit all work so well against her larger-than-life personality. The ending is satisfying but sad, but wraps up this incredible trilogy so well.

It’s a beautiful book, and the trilogy is one hell of an achievement.