In the midst of France’s année terrible, there’s a panther loose in Paris. It’s “black as a hole and [moves] like liquid”, and those who see it take it as a bad harbinger. Who can blame them for suspecting the supernatural, when their city’s been turned upside down? Although there’s a more mundane explanation – the panther has escaped from the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes – it’s emblematic of an extraordinary and terrible year. Stef Penney’s fourth novel opens in May 1870, just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war. It chronicles the siege of Paris – four months of shellfire and starvation – and even then is only halfway done. After the French defeat in January 1871, Paris is far from peaceful: revolution follows, and the radical Paris Commune takes control of the city until its violent defeat in May 1871. To cram all these events into one novel is ambitious, but the result is electrifying.
Admittedly, things start slowly. The novel roves among Parisians who have little inkling of what the year will hold. Ellis Butterfield, dissolute nephew of the American ambassador, dabbles in poetry and struggles to repress his experiences as a surgeon in the American civil war. The Lamy family – whose photography business marks them out as only semi-respectable, even without the erotic shots that pay their bills – have ambitions for their daughter’s marriage, while their Canadian assistant Lawrence Harper tentatively circles a romance with another man. The most immediately arresting of this cast is Anne Petitjean, Creole inmate of the Salpêtrière asylum, who is obliged to be hypnotised on stage by her physician, and who harbours a passionate fascination for the tiger in the nearby menagerie.
Anne, who understands animals better than she does humans, is quick to compare the two. Men, like the zoo’s star fauves – the wolves, lions and lynxes – are “important, memorable”, while she understands women as more akin to its flocks of little birds: “sometimes noisy, occasionally decorative, but not individually of interest”. The novel’s concern, of course, isn’t so much with the literal beasts of Paris as the figurative ones. This is generally handled elegantly, but can be too on-the-nose (“the siege had turned them all into animals” really didn’t need spelling out).
Flour is stockpiled, refugees flood the embassies, and parks fill with grazing livestock as Paris falls under siege. Those who can’t pack up and flee – or join up and fight – find themselves trapped, in a manner evocative of more recent lockdowns: the bewilderment of mandated isolation, the eerie powerless pause during which everyday habits are prohibited. As winter draws in things become desperate. Parisians burn garden trellises and stew cats, but high-class butchers stock an increasingly exotic range of meats, courtesy of Anne’s beloved menagerie. Those with means can now sample camel hump and giraffe neck. Wolf? “If you’ve had dog, it’s not that far off”, we’re told, in a scene both comical and horrifying.
This tension between disaster and opportunity is arresting. The 16-year-old Arthur Rimbaud, running away to join the Commune, was exhilarated to see how “left and right all wealth exploded like a billion thunderbolts”, and the second half of Penney’s novel fizzes with the same hectic energy. Coming of age in such chaos, the young poet was eager to subvert and dismantle – and to explore relationships with men, just as Penney’s fictional Lawrence Harper does. An anarchist, atheist state is full of possibility for the marginalised and oppressed, and his comrades’ “eyes [are] lifted up, not to heaven, but to a better version of their lives on earth”. Nude models take up arms, women don suits and wild beasts stalk the streets half seen. For Harper, Ellis and Anne, revolution means slipping the bonds of convention, a chance to act on instincts they’ve been forced to suppress for better or worse.
This wild and fragile foray into self-realisation becomes increasingly hopeless as the Paris Commune rattles towards “the bloody week” of its brutal suppression. The final 150 pages are astonishing, to be read breathlessly, compulsively and at speed through your fingers – and yet it’s all so well crafted, it’s a shame not to take your time. This masterful storytelling more than makes up for slight flaws elsewhere (occasional frustrating moments of exposition, almost unavoidable when there’s so much to fit in). In its balancing of exhilaration and horror, love and terror, despair and resurgence, The Beasts of Paris is a triumph.
• The Beasts of Paris by Stef Penney is published by Quercus (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
