Pure

Wow a book set in Paris in 1785  just before the French revolution. There is no real mention of the upcoming carnage and terror which will hit the country but you sure get a clear message about  the filthy  and awful conditions people lived in at this time.   In fact, like the book Perfume, this book was smelly!  One of the memorable parts of the first chapter was how the people's breath smelt of rotting corpses.  In fact the title is great because there is no purity here...no one washes and there are rotting bodies of various states of decay seeping into the walls and cellars of people's houses...ummm, delightful!

A young, intelligent and forward thinking engineer moves from Normandy to Paris  to coordinate the movement of bones out of the over flowing cemetery.This cemetery is literally stuffed full of bodies, mostly from plagues and the whole area just stinks of death and decomposition. The authorities want something to be done...slowly they are becoming aware that sharing personal space with thousands of rotting bodies is not healthy and the guy from Normandy is ready for the mammoth task!

Jean-Baptiste is amazing and totally dedicated to his project I really loved him and his lovely green coat he buys by mistake when drunk.    He tries to ignore all the superstitious locals, becomes good friends with the alcoholic organist and  falls madly in love with the local high-class prostitute.  Through all the traumas of almost being hacked to death in his bed and having to find men who are willing to dig and excavate the plots he finally manages to clear the land and the feeling of achievement at the end is pretty uplifting after all that grave digging! (The chapter when the guys are digging deep down in the pits is incredibly claustrophic and totally creepy.   I obviously loved it!)

I have to be honest that the first thing I enjoyed about this book was the  cover...it really is beautiful. (This was not a kindle experience book for me) and also the first few chapters of the book were absolutely amazing. Andrew Miller's descriptions were pure poetry and I was totally transported  to the time of Louis XVI.  I liked Jean-Baptiste, his ideas and enthusiasm were engaging but many of the other characters were a bit flat.   It's as if Miller was really only interested in descriptions of places and activities rather than development of character. But I think that was the main purpose of the book;  to show how amazing and life changing events  can  take place at the hands of quite ordinary people.
 By the end of the book I felt like I had been there too,  digging and emptying out the pits, and the sense of satisfaction when the air was clean and the land purified was pretty uplifting.

This book took me ages to read and was tough going in places but I feel like I have read it twice...many bits I had to read again.Sometimes  the words were so beautiful I had to read them again!

 It was a strange and weird book, unlike anything I have read before because it was totally dedicated to death and decay but in a poetic yet realistic way. Nothing like a dose of 18th century living to give you a reality check on how much we have to be thankful for in modern times!
  By the end it had painted a pretty optimistic view of the future. (Well, any future is good when you don't have to live next door to thousands of rotting corpses any more!) Yes, I enjoyed it!