Many years ago, I was on Rue de Rivoli near the Tuileries gardens in the heart of Paris. A man walked by eating a small cake. In a split second, a skinny child had darted between us and raced off into a side street, the half-eaten cake in one fist and a wallet in the other, the victim’s futile shouts still echoing after him. That image has stuck with me just as my fascination with life on the margins has.
Childhood memories in Ireland are equally strong and influential. I recall a boy standing in the corner of a school room with the word dunce pinned to his back; the piercing wails of a pig filling the countryside; a relic being rubbed on a sick cow; an old woman grasping a rosary beads while bent over an open fire.
I was drawn to live in Paris just as two central characters in the book were: Jane, an American, is following her dream of becoming an artist; and Karen, an Irish girl, has the good fortune to work in the city. There is much to appreciate in the wonderful monuments and museums: Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre… The narrow cobbled streets and elegant tree-lined avenues seduce. It’s a city of fashion and romance with its fountains and lights. The gardens, parks and woodlands charm. The cuisine is to die for, while the hustle and bustle of cafes and street markets invigorate. It’s a joy strolling along the banks of the Seine and browsing the booksellers’ stands.
But side by side with that picture is a darker Paris. No district displays the contrast more than Montmartre, where I first lived. The quarter has many colourful streets meandering upwards from the Moulin Rouge to Sacré Coeur basilica. It is eternally packed with tourists, and also locals going about their day-to-day lives: butchers, bakers, and residents to-ing and fro-ing.
Sitting in the middle of routine life is the grimy red-light strip of Pigalle and its thriving sex business. Like all of touristy Paris, trinket sellers and beggars abound. If we focus in at different times of the day and night we see more clearly the prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, and the dawn scavengers scouring rubbish bins. It’s also riddled with thieves. I have a morbid curiosity about pickpockets and how they operate, outsmarting and beguiling the unwitting.
The central character, Madame Lune, is a scavenger and a pickpocket. She is also a fortune teller. The name Madame Soleil is given to fortune tellers in France, but this mysterious character lives in the shadows and hence the title. She can see in the underbelly of Montmartre a serial killer who is set to strike again and that the girls are in peril. She must stop this monster and to do so is forced to track him, enter his vile mind and learn to kill. It’s a battle of good versus evil – but the boundaries between are not easily drawn.
Madame Lune takes us deep into the underbelly. Beneath Paris are the arteries, intestines and morgues of the city. There are hundreds of miles of tunnels making up the oldest and densest subway and sewer networks in the world. The catacombs, limestone quarries up to 300ft deep, are the graveyard of at least six million Parisians who died through plague, disease and war. It’s illegal and dangerous to go down there. Madame Lune, however, knows some of these quarries like the back of her hand and takes us there.
Montmartre cemetery looms in the background. Death, afterlife and the existence of something greater are universal themes. Growing up on a farm, one experiences birth and death in a unique way. For my generation, death was real and physical. We were not sheltered from witnessing the killing of a pig or goose. Watching bodies being laid out for a wake and touching the corpse were not unusual.
When religion fails to satisfy, it’s no surprise that we are drawn to mediums, psychics… We want to know what has happened our loved ones, if there is more, why all the pain and suffering. I grew up in the Irish countryside at a time when certain traditions and superstitions still flourished. I think Irish people, with our prehistoric monuments, raw landscape and bond with the sea, are sponges for the mystical and spiritual. Through the ages we have maintained an attachment to alternative beliefs, spirits, ghosts, healing.
I don’t remember learning to read or write – how lucky I am. But I’ll never forget the old classroom and the child in the dunce’s corner. Learning difficulties come in all shapes and forms. Fortunately, there is more understanding today of people left behind in school. Despite that, nobody can know the loneliness and struggles of those for whom the traditional route through the system and finding their place in society doesn’t come easily. People are excluded for various reasons: the wrong family or the wrong look.
I experienced a sliver of that as an immigrant and when I laboured to come to terms with speaking French. It was one of the reasons I was attracted to teaching English to French people. The brightest may be paralysed when they have to perform in a language foreign to them. They lose their personality and get unfairly labelled.
We constantly marginalise others simply because they don’t measure up to our norms in whatever domain. It’s all about fitting in. Madame Lune is somebody whose origins and impairments have made her a social misfit. She has lived on the margins, trawled the bins, knows how to steal and must learn how to kill. She is a woman of great intelligence, but whose intelligence is hidden behind her disabilities. Trying to find the courage necessary to overcome the humiliation her handicaps bring is key in the story and not a given. It’s a question of life and death and all the clairvoyance in the world cannot predict the outcome.
