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Summary
Summary
"Signs, wonders, and witchcraft beset 17th-century France" in this "grim but spellbinding" novel of a mother searching for her son inspired by true events ( Kirkus Reviews ).
France, 1673. A young woman from the country, Charlotte Picot must venture to the fearsome city of Paris in search of her last remaining son, Nicolas. Either fate or mere coincidence places the quick-witted charlatan Adam Lesage in her path. Adam is newly released from the prison galleys and on the hunt for treasure. But Charlotte, believing him to be a spirit she has summoned from the underworld, enlists his help in finding her child. Charlotte and Adam--comically ill-matched yet essential to one another--journey to Paris, then known as the City of Crows.
Evoking pre-revolutionary France with all its ribaldry, superstition, and intrigue, "Womersley weaves a haunting tale of the drastic lengths people will go to achieve their deepest desires" ( Publishers Weekly ).
"A gothic masterpiece."-- Better Read Than Dead
Author Notes
Chris Womersley 's previous novels have been awarded the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction, the Indie Award for Best Fiction, the ABIA Award for Literary Fiction, and have been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, The Age Book of the Year, and the ALS Gold Medal for Literature. His short fiction has appeared in Granta , The Best Australian Stories , Meanjin and Griffith Review . Womersley lives in Melbourne with his wife and son.
Reviews (6)
Bookseller Publisher Review
It's quite a change of setting from 1980s Melbourne in Chris Womersley's previous novel Cairo to the world of magic and witchcraft in 17th-century France in City of Crows. It's a time when the claims of science and reason have not yet asserted themselves against popular beliefs and superstitions, a time of potions for ailments, poisons for foes, and fortune tellers to make a future wish come true. For Charlotte Picot, life's injustices are piling up as she loses several of her offspring to fever, and then her husband. When her only surviving child is snatched by bandits, potentially for some perverse ritual, she is desperate for a remedy. A forest encounter with a kindly witch and a compact with a Parisian ne'er-do-well and notorious assistant at black masses gives her hope that she can track her son down. Based on real-life personages associated with the 'Affair of the Poisons' during Louis XIV's reign, Womersley's immersive tale is written with great felicity and reflects prodigious research. I liked the little contemporaneous nods too, for instance, to the connections (already then) between the church and paedophilia, or the construct of the witch in a patriarchal culture ('what they call a witch is really a woman with power,' a character remarks). At times it's a little laboured in the telling, but overall this is a well-realised, entertaining historical fiction. Martin Shaw works as a translator and literary agent in Leipzig, Germany. He remains a bookseller at heart
Publisher's Weekly Review
Womersley (Bereft) makes the early history of French witchcraft the backbone of this ghoulishly pleasing novel set in 17th-century Provence. To save the life of her last remaining child, Charlotte Picot flees her small village of Saint-Gilles after the plague kills her husband and two daughters. Just after leaving, Charlotte is attacked by bandits who capture her son. She wakes alone in the woods with the help of an old woman who pulls her back to life and gives her sinister powers that allow her to summon demons. Meanwhile, Adam Lesage is freed from prison in possession of a map that shows the location of a hidden fortune in Paris, guarded by dark spirits. On his way, Lesage meets Charlotte, who believes that Lesage is a demon she summoned to help retrieve her son. Fascinated and frightened by Charlotte's powers, Lesage agrees to help find her son in hopes that she too will help him find his fortune. Together, they travel to Paris-the City of Crows-and enter the dark, evil underworld of spirits and witches. Based on medieval popularity of witchcraft in France and the history of the plague, Womersley weaves a haunting tale of the drastic lengths people will go to achieve their deepest desires. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Signs, wonders, and witchcraft beset 17th-century France in Australian author Womersley's (Cairo, 2014, etc.) fourth novel.This grim but spellbinding book is a danse macabre to the tune of Womersley's incantatory prose. The year is 1673. In the rural hamlet of Saint-Gilles, Charlotte Picot's husband dies of plague. Now she has only her son, Nicolas, her other three children having succumbed to various illnesses. Hoping to avoid contagion, mother and son flee their village. On the road, marauders ambush the pair: Nicolas is kidnapped. Charlotte, wounded and delirious, wanders in a Bruegel-ian dreamscape but is healed by Marie Rolland, a hermit witch. Marie passes her knowledge and her black book to Charlotte, instructing her to use them wisely, advice Charlotte almost immediately ignores. Thinking she is summoning a demon, she's actually crossed paths with a man named Adam Lesage, who, released after five years as a galley slave, is on his way back to Paris. In order to bend him to her will and enlist his aid in reaching Paris to look for Nicolas, she threatens to cast him back. She means to hell; Lesage thinks she means to the galleys. Almost immediately, the reader's credulity is challenged: Lesage (based on a known sorcerer later caught up in a plot against the Sun King) seems too jaded and sophisticated for such a misapprehension. Womersley's Paris is a tableau vivant of repellent sights and scents, overcrowding, nonexistent sanitation, and abject poverty. Lesage rejoins his Parisian accomplices: charlatans, magicians, and witches who profitably exploit the superstitions of the spoiled nobility. Desperate to escape his imagined bondage, he traces Nicolas' whereabouts to a den of child traffickers and agrees to ransom himin return for his help in recovering a hidden treasure. Fascinating historical truths clash with swashbuckler tropes until Womersley's only way out is through improbable plot development and puzzling character behavior.Worth reading for the writing alone, but the close will confound and frustrate many readers; a sequel may be the only remedy. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Australian scribe Womersley transports readers to seventeenth-century France in a novel based on a true story. Charlotte Picot flees the small village of Saint-Gilles after her husband succumbs to the bubonic plague. She and her only surviving child, nine-year-old son Nicolas, are headed for Lyon when they're ambushed by kidnappers who seize Nicolas and leave Charlotte for dead. She's rescued by Madame Rolland, an old woman who nurses her back to health and offers Charlotte a chance to save her son if she'll agree to take on the book of black magic Madame Rolland has been protecting and become the Forest Witch. Madame Rolland promises Charlotte will have a demon to do her bidding, so when Adam Lesage, recently released from prison and searching for the Forest Witch, stumbles across Charlotte, she believes he's the demon sent to aide her. The two set off for Paris, where Charlotte is certain her son is being held and Lesage plans to find a hidden treasure. Womersley offers a richly imagined historical adventure with a truly shocking finish.--Kristine Huntley Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
BY 1673, the year in which "City of Crows" is set, the papal bull officially recognizing the existence of witches had been stoking superstition in Europe for nearly 200 years. The bad luck of seeing a spider in the morning, the methods of assisting a husband "in the bedroom" and the hovering presence of Hellequin and his Wild Horde, "leading fresh souls to the underworld," capture that superstition's all-pervading nature. By interweaving the trivial, the humorous and the grisliest of the grisly, Chris Womersley straps us in for a shivery ride. It starts with a bang. Immediately, we are confronted with the grotesqueries of the plague by which Charlotte Picot, an already bereaved mother, is about to be widowed and from which she flees with her sole surviving child, 9-year-old Nicolas. Mother and son are quickly separated, and Charlotte's desperate hunt for him yokes her to Adam du Coeuret, a man she believes she has summoned from the spirit world. In reality, du Coeuret (later Lesage - in a nice pun, he abandons his "coeur") is a convict recently released from the galleys, his crimes "impieties and sacrileges" and his talents tarot card readings and sleights of hand involving wax balls and sulfur. Crucially, he is also a man in search of a witch. To the sorceress/mother and the convict/charlatan are added a whole host of others, including the old crone Madame Rolland, with her "black book"; the troubadour family Leroux; and the Parisian witch Catherine Monvoisin. It's a colorful cast, some of them fictional, some of them real, and when you include the child-trafficking into which Nicolas has been pitched, a side story involving the king's mistress and, naturally, an old map leading to buried treasure, there's enough plot for several novels. This abundance supplies admirable energy. It does, however, reduce the narrative's scope for subtlety and this is a problem, not least for Lesage. The revelation that he fell into sorcery through love of his "dimwitted" younger son and his pivotal cry, "One cannot unlearn what one has learned," are touching, but still his occasional tendernesses seem more contradictory than poignant. Along with the plot, there's no stinting on description. With the same "ghastly and exhaustive detail" that Lesage observes in a depiction of damnation hanging in the house of an Amsterdam burgher ("extravagant debauch.... Men garroted and impaled on spears. Armies of grinning skeletons. ... Corpses in piles. Parting nuns, strange-faced priests"), Womersley lays out life in a Prench prison, a public hanging and the "hearty stink" of Paris. Of course description alone, however detailed and unsparing, isn't enough to grip, but the author's enthusiasm fuels the slow-burning horror of his tale. And isn't he enjoyably sly! When Lesage is summoned to the prison governor's office, Womersley knows that the rattling off of his number "double one five double four" will set bells ringing for the post-"Les Mis" reader, so with a wink and some chronological disregard, he has Lesage think about his "old friend" Jean. We know too that, as befits convention, Charlotte will read the black book she has been warned against. Despite the artful tongue-incheek, the result is still shocking. Sometimes in a Gothic novel authors lose courage and prettify the end. No danger of that here. Unafraid to go where the novel has taken him, Womersley produces a finale that's both slippery and perfectly in keeping. And beware. Just when you think it's all over, the author's note turns out to be as Gothic as the novel itself.
Library Journal Review
Charlotte Picot has known nothing of the world outside of her small village in 17th-century France, but when a bout of plague carries off her husband and leaves her with Nicolas, their one living son, she understands that they must escape the disease. Their journey to safety is disrupted when Nicolas is kidnapped on the road, leaving Charlotte to resort to witchcraft in an effort to find him. Her story is further complicated by the mysterious Lesage, a cunning magician with a complex history. Ultimately, Charlotte must make terrible choices and sacrifices in the name of her loved ones. Highlighting the experiences of the poor in times of crises past, Australian author Womersley (Bereft; The Low Road; Cairo) challenges audiences to suspend perceptions of reality and, at times, morality in favor of his storytelling. VERDICT Though at times a laborious and often bleak read, the narratives of two unlikely companions create an entertaining and intelligent work for historical fiction fans.-Rachel Sanders, Univ. of North Carolina Libs., Greensboro © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
