The Black Tower
by Louis Bayard
Published by William Morrow
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Reviewed by Sara Porter
Louis Bayard is one of the best writers of historic fiction. He has a talent for taking familiar characters in reality and fiction, such as Charles Dickens’s Tiny Tim Cratchit or Edgar Allen Poe, and turning them around.
In Bayard’s latest offering, The Black Tower, he relates a more obscure, but still memorable character, Eugene Francois Vidocq, a real-life detective who some believe was the inspiration for Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin.
In 1818, Vidocq becomes the unwilling recipient of a message from a dying man leading him to Hector Carpentier, a young medical student and the book’s bemused narrator. Following the message, Vidocq and Carpentier are on the trail to find Louis-Charles, the dauphin and supposedly missing son of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The trail leads them to Charles Rapskeller, an eccentric young man who may or may not be the prince.
Bayard writes very convincingly of a France left scarred by the Revolution and the Reign of Terror. The fear and uncertainty is filled from the highest nobleperson to the lowest beggar. Characters switch allegiances faster than most people can think, from Royalists, to Revolutionaries, to Napoleon followers, back to reluctant Royalists. There are many scenes where former revolutionaries, such as Carpentier’s mother, feel the need to hide “N” insignias and tri-colored flags that once proudly decorated their homes. Bayard does an excellent job of capturing the suspicion and paranoia reflected in France’s post-Revolution and Napoleonic days.
Bayard also writes three very interesting leads for his book. Vidocq is a brilliant and brilliantly flawed character. Very observant and deductive, Vidocq has the talent but has a very different personality from Dupin or Sherlock Holmes. He has colorful turn of phrase, mostly of the four-letter variety, and is very seductive with the ladies. When he isn’t busy solving peering through clues to solve murders or investigating Rapskeller’s identity, he is usually in the bed of a willing female companion.
Carpentier and Rapskeller are also two memorable characters and make for an interesting duo. Carpentier’s isn’t too far removed from Bayard’s Tim Cratchit, a cynical narrator with an upsetting childhood and disillusioned adulthood Rapskeller is a perpetually childlike oddity. His obsessive love of gardening and his incessant rambling make him both pathetic and sad at the same time.
Nonetheless Carpentier and Rapskeller form a strong friendship, as Carpentier protects the lonely Rapskeller and Rapskeller provides the confused Carpentier answers that he had been seeking. Their scenes together are some of the most touching and the highlights of this book.
Armchair Interviews says: Wonderful historical fiction that is a 5-star read.
Author’s Web site: http://www.LouisBayard.com