The novelist Elizabeth Buchan usually looks forward to travelling to research a new novel. But when she became ill while starting work on her latest, Bonjour, Sophie, she had to rethink…
A new novel to write usually triggers the anticipatory thrill of travelling for research. Many summers have seen me, rucksack on back, tracking down the SOE in France and Denmark, the Cold War in Berlin or tracing the route of the tumbrils in revolutionary Paris.
The Museum of Broken Promises was set in pre Velvet Revolution Prague. On my trip there, I hunted down the ex-convent prison where political prisoners were taken, spent hours and hours in the Museum of Communism and, finally, took the train to Vienna as would-be escapees from the regime would try to do.
For the sections set in Berlin, I pitched up on a walking tour of Cold-War Berlin which ended up at one of the houses where the Stasi conducted their interrogations and was told Putin had operated there…
Two Women in Rome, a story of murder, politics and painting, was set partly during the Anni di Piombo, the Years of Lead (1960s-1980s), when the Communists, the Red Brigades and Right-wing government were battling it out and partly in the present day.
Researching it pre-lockdown, I paced the Via Giulia, where Lottie, the archivist, worked, noting every cobblestone, walked the river where, 30 years earlier, Nina’s body had been found, peered through doorways and stood silently by Keats’s grave in the Protestant Cemetery.
These were tactical experiences, filled with noise and the smells of flowers and traffic fumes, characterised by aching feet and – almost — the threat of sensory overload.
With Bonjour, Sophie, my latest, it was different because I was diagnosed with breast cancer as I was feeling my way into it. I emerged from the treatment a bit battered and for the time being confined to home.
Deprivation is the mother of invention. The internet was, of course, vital – I am eternally grateful to the enthusiasts who film every step of their trip in Rome and Paris and put it up on You Tube — but I found myself returning to the books and documents collected at the beginning of my writing career to mine fresh and riveting material.
Opening in 1959, Bonjour, Sophie is a story of displacement and of growing up in the years just before the feminism’s second wave; the era when, if a female under 21 wished to open a bank account she had to get the permission of her father or male guardian.
Sophie is the daughter of two members of the French Resistance, her pregnant mother having escaped to Sussex. Sophie spends her early years in Poynsdean, a village close to the coast.
With the marsh and the sea on one hand and the South Downs on the other, she grows up enmeshed in the sights and sounds of an age-old England. With its church, its WI where the women still wore hats, its farming practices and rural traditions, it would appear nothing much has changed for centuries.
When I was eight, my own parents were posted to Nigeria and left me behind. For the sense of the landscape, I fell back on the memories of holidays spent with my grandmother visiting relatives in Sussex to reproduce the quality of light, the feel of the marsh under foot, and the way the sea oscillated through the inner life of the communities.
In 1959 cultural change was beginning to affect the Poynsdeans. Some of the unmarried women are escaping to work in Woolworths in the local town. Its young men had been conscripted into National Service and returned with widened horizons.
In her brilliant autobiography Bad Blood, Lorna Sage described growing up in a rural village where the mores were tight and opportunities limited. How she escaped gave me the framework for Sophie’s sentimental education.
This was to be completed in Paris. Sophie is French and she (and I) were thinking smoke-filled cafes, Capri pants and Jean-Paul Sartre holding forth. However, she finds herself in a Paris where, if the trauma of the war was fading, its legacy was still omni-present.
Like many, I had been struck by the iconic photograph of the girl in the French Resistance clad in shorts with her gun (I based Sophie’s mother on her) and the stories of those street fighters were part of the contemporary discourse. Vendetta and old scores were still sharp. Houses needed to be rebuilt. Quarters revivified. The on dit circulating at the time was that Paris was due a facelift, but no one had instructed the surgeon.
La Nouvelle Paris argued that Paris “is a city through whose veins runs resistance. The alleyways, the churches, the dark streets have inbuilt subversion built into them. You have only to think of the first French Revolution.”
Reading Graham Robb’s Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris was to also to understand that most Parisians during the 18th century had no map of the city (Turgot had commissioned one in 1734 but its distribution was limited) and consequently not much clue as to where they were. They included Marie-Antoinette, who headed off in the wrong direction from the waiting coach when she escaped from the Tuileries.
Leonard Pitt’s Walks Through Lost Paris illustrates with old photographs how a city of ‘narrow and humid corridors,’ was transformed by Baron Haussmann into one of straight boulevards which, a century later, allowed the occupying Nazis unimpeded access.
When the Allies advanced and battles broke out in the streets in August 1944, it made sense for the Resistance to choose small narrow streets, often running east-west, to site their field hospitals thus preventing large German vehicles gaining access.
Journalist Stanley Karnow’s Paris in the Fifties also yielded detail that was pure gold. My favourite was of a brothel for railway enthusiasts where, in between bouts, you could watch the scenery change.
Where better place than Paris for Sophie to discover where she comes from, who she is and what her future will be?
Bonjour, Sophie by Elizabeth Buchan is published on 4 April, 2024.
See more about this book.
Elizabeth Buchan’s novels include the award-winning Consider the Lily, the international bestseller Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman, which was made into a CBS Primetime Drama, I Can’t Begin to Tell You, a story of SOE agents and resistance in wartime Denmark, The New Mrs Clifton, The Museum of Broken Promises and Two Women in Rome.
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She has written a Historia feature about the background to Two Women in Rome, Books of Hours and their role in women’s lives. You might also be interested in Catherine Hokin‘s review of The Museum of Broken Promises.
Related features you may enjoy include:
An appearance of serenity: the French fashion industry in WWII by Catherine Hokin
The French Resistance: shadier than you think and The bureaux d’achats: how the Nazis bled France dry by Chris Lloyd
Images:
- Entrance to Paris Metro, 1955: Ihei Kimura for Wikimedia (public domain)
- Le Café du Trocadéro, 16th arrondissement, June 2, 1952: Kent Kanouse for Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)
- Poynings from Newtimber Hill, 1965: Peter Jeffery for Geograph (CC BY-SA 2.0)
- “Nicole” a French Partisan Who Captured 25 Nazis in the Chartres Area, in Addition to Liquidating Others, Poses with the Automatic Rifle with Which She is Most Proficient, a portrait of Simone Segouin, 1944: US National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia (unrestricted use)
- View of Paris from the Arc de Triomphe: Kent Kanouse for Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)
