Customer Reviews

Radiant City

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George Orwell's 1933 Down and Out in Paris and London, comes to mind when reading Lauren B. Davis's thought-provoking novel. Orwell, having lived among the downtrodden, intimately portrayed poverty, misery and despondency in the first decades of the twentieth century. Davis sets her story against the backdrop of a contemporary version of Paris' underbelly. Far away from the tourist sites and the city's glamour, her characters are refugees, immigrants and survivors of violence and war, seeking forgetting , physical and emotional healing or redemption in the anonymity of the "radiant city".

The novel centres around war correspondent Matthew Bowles, who, having witnessed most of the world's recent wars and civil conflicts, is struggling with accumulative post-traumatic stress. He is "hiding" in a tiny attic flat in the 8th arrondissement, attempting to write his memoirs, courtesy of a solid book advance. Sometimes, images of recent trauma are so immediate and overpowering that he has to escape into drink and the haze of sleeping pills. He runs into a former colleague, Jack Saddler, Vietnam vet, ex mercenary and now photographer, who has his own demons to fight. The shady bar scene, the dark corners and alleyways of the city's immigrant quarters bring as much temptation as danger to body and soul of the vulnerable. Matthew is drifting into a downward spiral of mental fog and easy violence. Will he be able to save himself?

A kind of counterbalance to these "walking wounded" is Saida Ferhat, who runs the Lebanese cafe across the square from Matthew's place. She exudes calm and competence on the outside, yet under the surface she also has to struggle with her own traumas and memories. Increasingly, she is also deeply worried about her sixteen-year old, impressible son Joseph. She hopes and prays that Matthew and his friends can influence the boy away from the gangs and dangers in the neighbourhood...

Davis's novel depicts a colourful cast of characters: each is trying to deal with life and the obstacles, real or imagined, that stand in the way. She astutely captures the vulnerabilities and the dramatically and constantly changing moods of her primary protagonists. In small doses, the back story to each of them comes to light, allowing for a fuller understanding of their current conditions. Her straight forward and precise descriptions and her detached tone, even when recounting highly disturbing incidents, create, in this reader's view at least, a sense of distance and detachment from the characters. We can observe without much engagement. Matthew and to a lesser degree Saida, are the only characters allowing the reader some insights into their inner self, their emotional turmoil and struggle to cope and to attempt recovery.

Paris is an exciting and vividly evoked setting, the author's intimate knowledge of the city is evident. Having lived in Paris for some ten years, she leads the way through back streets and alleyways just as confidently as she depicts the steamy and lewd nightlife in the Bois de Boulogne. At times, however, the elaborate details are in danger of moving the reader away from the essence of the story. [Friederike Knabe]

How much pain and tragedy can one person absorb? How do such experiences change us? This is the riveting story of a war correspondent who has seen recent history up close and way too personal, his friends who have dealt with their own measure of violence, and an exiled Lebanese family he befriends. These are people whose personal suffering forces them to grapple with responsibility in new and different ways. Set in Paris, where the author has lived, and whose neighborhoods and changing immigrant face are vividly portrayed, the novel is finely written. Some passages, even when they are describing impossibly difficult issues, are extraordinary.

I've just finished The Radiant City and feel almost bereft. I hated to leave the characters in the story, so many of whom I had come to deeply care for. The book is brilliant - exquisitely written, metaphorically stunning and so rich in detail and philosophy that words fail me when it comes to describing the intensity of my reading experience with it. The book hangs on a terrific story but at the same time is a meditation on cultural and class relations, family dynamics, friendship, good and evil and that tricky blurred area in between those extremes. It also explores how so many of us are wounded at the core and the way that past trauma somehow always lives in the present despite our best efforts to move on. The characters in the story are deeply drawn and the descriptions of Paris are lush with contrasts. The author puts you right into each scene and you can see, taste, hear and smell the Paris of this story and the people in it as you might while watching a beautifully made film or having a very vivid dream. Highly recommended for anyone who likes a great story that also makes you think.

Ann Fischer

Although the POV, (3rd person present tense), was startling at first, Davis's easy style and the story's beautiful language draws this reader in effortlessly. Soon the unfamiliar POV was an afterthought and I was swept away on a poignant and gripping tale about Matthew Bowles, an ex-war correspondent who escapes to the streets of Paris, the Radiant City, hoping to do nothing more than to lose himself and his painful memories. He's agreed to write a book about his experience in war torn countries around the world but struggles, as each page brings the memories and trauma of those years flooding back to him.

Matthew meets Saida, a Lebanese woman who runs a café near Matthew's apartment, along with her son, Joseph, and her father and brother, Elias and Ramzi. Saida has survived horrific events as well and seeks to find that safe place she used to know within her family's loving embrace. But her family is pulling away from her and she is as lost as Matthew in many ways.

This is only a brief and very vague description of Radiant City, within the pages Davis creates a world that we all have visited, although perhaps not as literally as Matthew and Saida. But that darkness, that place of hopelessness and hope, is a place many writers glimpse from time to time. A place that the wise writer embraces. Davis embraced it and then some.

There are parts that speak directly to the reader, forcing you to look inside yourself, to remember thoughts and feelings long forgotten. Many bring tears to your eyes, one brought a little chuckle, as I remember doing and feeling something very similar as a child:

"He puts the book down with a stab of regret, as he sometimes does with inanimate objects. It is an old childhood fantasy that he has never been able to shake completely, that things have feelings and careless abandonment harms them. As a young boy, he cried at the thought of toys left rusting and lost in the woods, wept to think of their terrible, immobile loneliness. His weakness irritates him." Page 135

And then there are the sections of darkness, where Davis beautifully, yet blatantly forces us to acknowledge what is within everyone, and how easily it could be brought out:

"You get down in the dark with dark things and you just do it, and then after a while it stops feeling weird. It starts feeling good because disciplining yourself to do these things means you can overcome everything, even yourself--your own sense of what's right. Everything becomes possible then. There's no line that can't be crossed. At first you were afraid, see, that doing these things would mean you were a sick f***, but it takes almost no time to talk yourself into believing it doesn't mean that at all, because you're on the right team--the good guys. You can overcome anything, even yourself and every Sunday School lesson you've ever been taught, right? Because you have been turned into one tough motherf***er." Jack to Matthew Page 311

Lauren B. Davis is an author whose writing will resonate in your mind long after you close the book and walk away. Her words haunt your dreams, your thoughts, and leave you feeling, as the cover blurb states, "The necessity of participating in life rather than simply observing it."

A great Canadian writer that you should definitely check out.

Lauren B Davis is one of the significant expatriate Canadian novelists of the 21st century, and The Radiant City explores vital contemporary issues of war, loyalty, violence, and identity, in terse, stylish, and visceral prose that fully captures the intensity of the story. I recommend all her writing.

The Radiant City is written in beautiful language. The author really is a master story-teller, and it's clear that there was much meticulous research done. The settings across Paris and all war zones rang completely true. The characters and plot development grabbed my interest right from the beginning. I loved the two principal characters, the lovely Saida, and Matthew, the troubled war correspondent who rediscovers his humanity. This story is so relevant given what's going on in the world today, and yet as with the storyline in this great novel, I remain hopeful for the future!