Demons and castles and the French Revolution
Where Thomas Peach was set entirely in England, this tale turns its eye to revolutionary France. It splits its focus between English characters, familiar to us already from Thomas Peach, and a new set of French faces. Our friend the English narrator (as I call him in my head) handles the former, and the much more straightforward French narrator (as I call them in my head) handles the latter.
This split in narrators is a structural mirror of one of the more charming themes of the book: the attempt to split people into one of two types. Our English narrator ruminates upon this at some length, quickly dismissing the easy binary of men vs. women as utterly uninteresting and unfit for purpose, and instead landing upon (he asserts) a far more foundational, undeniable, and universal division—namely, whether or not a person supports the French monarchy or the French revolutionaries. Obviously. Clearly. I see no problems with this fundamental universal binary.
The English portion of the tale does its best to support this philosophy. We have a pro-revolutionary poet who is invited to appear in front of the National Assembly in Paris to declaim her verses in their honour. Orbiting around her is a mysterious swashbuckling rescuer of persecuted French aristocrats, known as Forget-Me-Not, a hero lauded across English society with appalling doggerel, in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has seen the 1934 adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel, starring Leslie Howard and Merle Oberon.
As our English narrator relates Miss Farthingay's story, the action eventually shifts to France, and our English narrator is not happy about that. You see, he does not speak French very well, and so unless the French people speak slowly and clearly, he has difficulty following a lot of conversations. And furthermore, he doesn’t much care for the French, actually. French druids, for example, built their stone monuments in straight lines rather than circles like Stonehenge, which is obviously very bad and inferior to English druids, who well understood the principle of the curved line. Modern French people are just as bad, inexplicably devoted to the swearing and keeping of oaths as a matter of honour. Good solid Englishmen know that a serviceable lie is an indispensable component of an orderly nation’s government and commerce. (I don’t quite know why this anti-French bigotry is so funny to me. Is it because it’s based on such absurd pettiness? Is it because it’s over two centuries out of date, and so its teeth are drawn? Is it even possible to draw the teeth of bigotry? Evidently yes. This was hilarious.)
The other half of the tale focuses on French characters, and for that we get a French narrator. This narrator has a great deal less personality than our English narrator, but does, at least, speak French, and so we can understand all the French conversations spoken by the French people. (The French narrator does not, however, speak English, so some degree of linguistic confusion is an unavoidable component no matter who’s telling the story.) We follow here the (mis)adventures of three adventurers: a young woman, who seeks to leave her small town and see the world; a scoundrel, who follows demonic guidance in return for escape from prison; and an ex-valet, whose previous employer was also not averse to more than a little demonic shenanigans of his own.
Our French characters both support and contradict the English narrator’s claims about the Great Division of people. In support: they defy traditional gender divisions. The young woman is so large and strong that she can believably threaten to squash the skulls of men who betray her. The ex-valet is so dainty and beautiful that he is frequently mistaken for a woman; and looming throughout the narrative is a mysteriously powerful government official who is addressed both as Monsieur and Madame in different circumstances. Clearly, the distinction between men and women is pretty useless as a way of splitting the world in two, exactly as our English narrator has asserted.
But in contradiction to the second half of the English narrator’s Great Division, we find that—in France at least—a great many of the French people do not actually care much one way or the other about the state of the revolutionary government. For some, the sheer weight of living crushes out any political opinions: denouncements and disappearances weaken the labour force; but the availability of labour to bring in the harvest is a moot point, because the endless rain is rotting grain in the fields. In the teeth of starvation, what does it matter who writes the laws and collects taxes you can’t pay?
Even among those who can manage the luxury of political identities, many adhere not to the monarchy, or to the revolutionaries way off in Paris, but to their own Breton brethren on the coast of France. Our English narrator’s great division of mankind falls apart utterly when it is put to the test in the country to which it applies most directly.
Knowing the English narrator’s opinion of the French, I suspect he would probably dismiss this failure to adhere to his principles as even more evidence of the deficiencies of French character. However, since he does not speak French well enough to ask the French people themselves about their political opinions, he remains blissfully ignorant of this counterexample. As, in fact, he remains ignorant of all of the French components of the plot. In the climactic pages of the book, revelation after revelation emerges that he lacks the background to understand, leaving him spouting indignant protestations of bafflement into (he imagines) our sympathetic, equally baffled ear.
But we are not baffled. Our view of the tale has not been divided—not by gender, not by language, not by political opinion, not by nationality. We have seen all of it, and the result is a delight. I can think of no better words to end this review with than our English narrator’s own footnote. It refers to the previous book, The Infernal Riddle of Thomas Peach, in its original place in the text, but it applies equally well here:
You must take matters into your own hands. Seek out the book-sellers and the circulating libraries—hunt high and low—And find [this] volume for yourself.—Find it, and read it. We dare say, the effort will reward the toil.
Nerd coefficient: 9/10. Very high quality/standout in its category.
Highlights:
- Two narrators, both alike in dignity (well, not really)
- French Revolution
- Demons
Reference: Treadwell, Jas. A Fire Beneath the World [Hodder and Stoughton, 2024].
CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.
