1In Paris Echo (2018), the writer Sebastian Faulks, who is also an investigative journalist, displays again an interest in the history of France and 20th-century wars. These themes link the novel back to his earlier works Birdsong and especially Charlotte Gray. The motif of the big city as an archetype of merger and obliteration also materialises once more, whereas London was the focus and setting of A Week in December (2009). Its satirical portrayal of the British capital in the times of Neo-Liberalism has elicited considerable critical attention (see Gymnich).

2My contribution to the present volume addresses Paris Echo as a narrative representation of social (in)visibility with its historical conditions and their effects. A major intradiegetic aim of this novel, I contend, is to make the lives of invisible characters audible. In her book Social Invisibility and Diasporas in Anglophone Literature and Culture Françoise Král analyses the invisibility of ethnic minorities and migrants. With her introduction she defines an individual’s or a group’s (in)visibility as ‘the level of social recognition, political validation and the right to participate in the life . . . of a community’ (2). Of these parameters especially the socio-political circumstances reveal themselves as relevant for invisibility in Paris Echo too. Král explicitly mentions literature as one of the disciplines which inquire into invisibility as ‘a polyvalent category’ (41). In Faulks’s narrative about an American historian’s empirical research in Paris, sociological issues such as the distinction between individual and collective recollections, official and private, or personal and historical memory (see Král 2) are also touched upon. The fictional text does not avoid distressing or shameful remembrances that emerge with the visibilisation of marginalised individuals. Rendering unheard voices audible can itself become a harrowing process, which is evident for the narrators of the frame story in Paris Echo. As Vanessa Guignery explains in the opening pages of her collection of essays titled Voices and Silence in Contemporary Novels the fictionalised remembrance of embarrassing, painful or traumatic experiences has produced ‘narratives . . . voicing the unvoicable [sic]. They reflect the difficulties involved in the process of anamnesis, in the exhumation of the past, be it private or public, and in any attempt to reveal, expose or explore the realm of the intimate and the traumatic’ (3). The objective pursued by Hannah, the female first-person narrator of the frame tale of Paris Echo, who does research on women’s lives in Paris during the German Occupation, remains the visibilisation of marginalised women and their unheard voices. Using empirical-sociological methods for her investigation Hannah is expected to apply a high standard of cognitive reflection and emotional restraint. The academic purpose as plot of a fictional narrative involves distinctive intricacies.

3Spatial distance and its traversing strike as the novel’s visible structural feature, including a strong metaphoric connotation. Emotional remoteness and the tension between detachment and commitment mark the perception of both alternating first-person narrators of the frame story, Hannah Kohler and Tariq Zafar. Their mindscapes are challenged by the embedded narratives they listen to and by their own situation as outsiders, with which they need to come to terms. In addition, a cultural and experiential distance between these two narrators shapes the process of receiving, absorbing, and communicating the unfamiliar. Hannah and Tariq only have in common that each comes from a secure, by comparison socially and financially carefree background. They show dissimilarities in every other respect and equally contrast with the lives of women in Paris presented in the embedded narratives, or the life stories told by Tariq’s acquaintances from the Maghreb, whom the student from Tangier meets in the French capital. The novel’s figural constellations emphasise contrasts.

4The trajectories of the nineteen-year-old Moroccan Tariq and the American postdoctoral researcher Hannah, who becomes his landlady in Paris, accidentally cross. He is penniless and without shelter, but curious to find out more about the environment and culture where his long-dead French-Algerian mother grew up. At the end of his dangerous voyage to France he only states, ‘Europe was strange’ (Faulks 14). In Paris, Tariq, who could consider himself privileged at home, enters the social invisibility of the ‘shadow class’ (Král 11) of illegal North African Muslim immigrants, whose lives and occupations unfold in a parallel world supposedly based on ethnic and religious, but doubtless on economic differences. Despite her more secure status Hannah feels invisible upon her arrival in a city associated for her with personal unhappiness and a foreign language. She tries to organise her assignment of a sponsored academic project while she is uncertain how to make it successful. Regardless of their inequality and respective worries, Hannah and Tariq in a surprisingly united effort unravel the recorded testimonies of a sample of Parisian women during the Occupation of 1940 to ’44, of their connections and experiences with the French environment and the German occupants.

5The transnational features of Faulks’s book are enlarged by the perspective of the Briton Julian, Hannah’s ephemeral acquaintance in Paris. The situatedness of ‘dehors’ rather than ‘dedans’ (a reference to Le Blanc’s title) emerges as significant for the narrators of the frame story and their response to the nested narratives. The agitation and loneliness of a temporary displacement suffered by Hannah and Tariq reflect the position of the stranger holding an outsider’s gaze on an alien past and present. Their inner distance to the embedded life stories and their female authors is eventually reduced. But in contrast to the narratives from the 1940s, Tariq remains an alien to the tales about the French-Algerian war of the early 1960s told by the North Africans he meets. At his workplace he learns for the first time about the invisibilised ‘Pieds Noirs’ and the ‘Harkis’—French settlers and the native soldiers belonging to the French army who protected them—after the war for independence of Algeria (Faulks 78–79). Tariq’s abstract summary of an Algerian immigrant’s retrospect shows the boy’s detachment: ‘It was a bit of a long story and I may have not got all the details down exactly, but the gist of it was this’ (78). He is shocked at the condition of the other man’s socio-political invisibility, who answers Tariq’s question if he is illegal with ‘It’s more that I don’t exist’ (79), since his Algerian parents never got French citizenship. Social invisibility ‘which amounts to a symbolic death’ because of the denial of any form of recognition (Král 40) thus reveals itself here as a recurring condition.

7Faulks’s construction of a frame narrative with diverse embedded stories is demanding as well as distracting because of the frequent interruptions and resumptions of the different storylines. Juliette Lemaire’s narrative on the tape recorder (68–72, 131–34) recalls her experience as a 22-year-old shop assistant, the only child of a conservative working-class family. Her decision to go out with a German officer causes controversies and conflicts which she relates in detail. The American historian, who thought she had arrived well prepared by history books and university seminars in the United States, completes Juliette’s confessional narrative by explanatory details of the historical background. The novelistic representation, using a remarkable discursive variety, also inserts a statement in third-person narration. It clarifies that for an ingenuous girl such as Juliette ‘life became even more morally uncertain’ on account of the publicly perceived frictions between the Wehrmacht and the SS (71). Together with other particulars, this is communicated as a neutral report distinct from first-person narration. Such brief interjections from an unfocused viewpoint admit no doubt about the factuality presented, but the absence of omniscience becomes evident. Pieces of historical information are soon qualified by the embedded voice of the narrative subject speaking from a personal situation revealed as insecure. The precarious state of an individual in Paris during the Occupation could not only compromise the subject’s integrity but also the crucial question how to adequately speak about this plight. As criticism addressing precariousness concedes: ‘But such lives do not only pose an ethical challenge—they are just as often a challenge to representation’ (Korte and Regard 7, see also Guignery 3). In Paris Echo, diversity of discourse and perspective is the answer to this challenge.

8With the polyphony of voices Faulks creates a discontinuous narrative which comprises collected and fragmented memories originating from different time levels up to the narrative present. The multiperspectivisation of the novel visibilises individuals and their predicaments without immediately offering an evaluation of the told, the telling, or the teller; one opinion contrasts with another estimation, self-characterisation alternates with characterisation through other narrators. The evaluative restraint pertains to the women’s tales about the Occupation; but their listeners, the first-person narrators of the frame story, reveal that they also try to cope with a condition which leaves them powerless and vulnerable. Irrespective of Hannah’s reserve to moralise about her witnesses, certain places in the city give rise to the historian’s ponderings. Spatial history inspires her reflection when she passes the Place des Ternes, which stands seemingly unchanged and oblivious of the past:

How many years did it take to forget? How small was the failing of a school or teacher that its pupils might somehow never learn? The human drive to ignorance, as Professor Putnam had once told her seminar group, is a force as powerful as its opposite—as strong as curiosity itself. (Faulks 122)

9Such abstract thoughts are rare in the novel compared to the share of subjective tales. Hannah and her friend Julian interrupt the tapes’ playing back to discuss details over dinner, then resume their listening to the recorded account. Young Tariq, who has his own peculiar encounters with Parisians mainly on the Métro, experiences ‘the shame of not knowing’, but gradually learns more about European history, which causes him to suffer from homesickness in places burdened with the past (142).

10Resulting from the discontinuity in telling with its frequent cutups, each story of the four protagonists—Hannah and Tariq, Juliette and Mathilde—is interfered with or augmented by other stories, so that the framing and the embedded narratives are broken up and their parts entangled. This pattern of a fragmented mise-en-abîme obstructs a continually focused perception for the recipients inside and beyond the fictional text. The different narrative levels of the mise-en-abyme in Paris Echo are, starting from the periphery, firstly the narratee’s or reader’s, secondly that of the frame story’s narrators, thirdly the embedded testimonies of Hannah’s female witnesses or Tariq’s work mates, and finally the statements and stories of diverse individuals which the embedded narrators retell. On each level the ethical position of the respective subjects towards the telling and the told is or asks to be negotiated. Moreover, recipients cannot long concentrate on one and the same story. Readerly attention swerves to the self-awareness of the frame narrators, to the problems which Hannah has with love or friendship and Tariq with the Algerians or his own historical ignorance. The American researcher’s conversations with Julian the Englishman, who starts researching the documentation of the Resistance, gain in importance when Hannah finds her work upsetting. Their exchange precludes any discussion of the ideological stances of Nazism, but especially Julian reflects about the Vichy regime and its influence on the inhabitants of Paris during the different stages of the war as well as after its end. Hannah emphasises her ethical point-of-view: that she is most interested in understanding the attitude of women (144–145) and aims at finding out more about the thoughts and emotions of ordinary citizens.

11Different voices also accumulate in Juliette’s embedded life story, so that a network of points of view is created. Her bewilderment at her experience with a polite German officer are accentuated on the background of diverse opinions on the Occupation: those of her father and mother in 1940/41, of a couple of girlfriends at the time, and finally Hannah’s, the historian’s, in 2005. Juliette herself never utters political views. The question how to behave when meeting German soldiers in Paris is controversially debated in 1940/41. Eventually, ‘everyone went along to some extent. You couldn’t be a hermit’, Juliette says (133). She remembers that her father

was a bit more easy-going than my mother. He said everyone was making up the rules as they went along, so there were no rules. Like most people then, he thought the war would soon be over. The Germans were sure to win and it was up to us to make sure we were their second-in-command in Europe afterwards. He’d had no problems with any of the Germans he’d had dealings with and he saw nothing wrong in planning ahead. (133)

12The reason Juliette gives in 1998 for her acceptance of two stylish invitations from the friendly German major despite her social embarrassment is that she was young, wanted to be independent, and that there was hardly any dissipation in the city at the time.

13Insecurity and ambivalence, however, remain Juliette’s dominant feelings in the days of the Liberation (197–202) because of the opportunism she observes and her own ambiguous personal experience. She is denounced by the manager of Maxim’s restaurant where she had dinner with the German officer, is briefly arrested, interrogated by the police, set free, then hunted down by a crowd and seized. She has her head shorn but can escape. What in many others causes euphoria seems mere chaos for Juliette, who feels torn by the war of consecutive narratives. In 1944, the divisive conflict ends with the public condemnation of ‘the now-defeated Occupier. But, she said, everyone had collaborated. “Collaboration”, after all, had been the official national policy, announced by marshal Pétain . . . . How could it now be treason?’ (198) The weeks following the Liberation are partly summarised by the American Hannah, whose respect for this contemporary witness and her credibility increases. She detects in Juliette ‘an ability to live with contradictions—a willingness just to report experience and leave the judgment to others’ (197). This abstinence is ethically approved by the historian.

17The American can barely veil her wish to have Mathilde show remorse about her discreditable act while the Occupation lasted: the fatal denunciation of another woman she considered her sexual rival. Mathilde accepted her boyfriend’s affiliation with the Resistance and his rebuke not to refer to Parisians wearing the Star of David as ‘Sunflowers’—an order which underlines the situational ambiguity of (in)visibility. Yet the girl Simone is accused by the vindictive Mathilde irrespective of her hate for the Occupier: ‘The next day I went to the prefect of police in Belleville and reported an enemy of the French state living on the second floor, at number 12, rue Milton, Ninth arrondissement’ (156). Paid a bounty by the police she declares in the interview that she should have asked for a larger sum, which she says she did when she denounced someone else the next time (188): ‘They didn’t give me enough money, the police. They were supposed to give me more than that. Marshal Pétain had asked everyone, every schoolchild in the country, to inform. I didn’t even know you got money for reporting an enemy of the state’ (187). By her verdict, her compatriot is banished from the ‘imagined community’ (Benedict Anderson), whose conceptualisation has been destabilised. I want to argue that for very personal reasons Simone is rendered ungrievable by Mathilde, who in the given situation saw herself empowered at first to take revenge and thereafter to briefly emerge from precariousness. The questions rising in the narratee, ‘Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makes for a grievable life?’ cruelly take shape ‘in the light of global violence’ that also characterises a world war (Butler 20, original emphasis). The same questions will surface again shortly and again remain unanswered. After having listened to Mathilde live Hannah wordlessly locks herself in her room. Her withdrawal into lonely grief affects her flatmate as a speechless, inscrutable distancing.

18The social invisibility of the two old women and their stories has been alleviated by their narration. The producing of another person’s literal invisibility—disappearance from view—is enacted in Mathilde’s case as an individual condemnation fuelled by the desire for revenge. In 2005, she does not fail to add that in the early 60s she had accidentally seen her former boyfriend in a street, where both ignored—or denied seeing—each other in an act of private invisibilisation. Françoise Král’s study, which focuses on the diasporic condition regarding groups of migrants and immigrants, maintains that visibility is performative and situational (56). The women’s narratives in Paris Echo are also a case in point. In addition, they reveal visibility as potentially dangerous because of the war during the rule of Nazism, and as conditional on political propitiousness at any time. As the author of a publication on (in)visibility as a field of social theory contends, social visibilities underlie two different and possibly opposing perspectives, firstly that of the political process ‘most often enigmatically referred to as “power”’, and secondly a more democratic point of view (Mubi Brighenti 168). The latter facilitated the attentiveness recently paid to the women. Only after power dynamics regarding the Occupation had changed twice—during the years 1944/45 and the 1990ies in a breakthrough of democratising visibilisation—could the silenced voices be retrieved as collected memories.

I was with them, just for a moment, right behind them, as they climbed [the stairs]. And I hoped that maybe it would have meant something to them to know that many years later, someone, even just a nobody from Africa like me, would come to listen to their voices (241).

20Separately from his host Hannah, who had not shared her thoughts with him, he wants to believe that ‘an act of remembering’ is all he can do (241). His mourning at the place of anguish and suffering responds to narratives he received from persons who could affect him psychologically.

21Young Tariq leaves the city and its echoes enlightened and more mature; keeping a certain distance to the American’s research project he has found his own sources of wisdom. He evinces consternation at the instruction from the Algerians but enjoys his encounters with his Parisian mentors, whose tales prove more stirring for him. Especially the talks with the strange French woman called Clémence and an old puppet master, named ‘Victor Hugo’, who plays sketches on the Métro, can move him experientially. Reviewers of the novel agree that these touches of magic realism are unconvincing for readers (Bari; Boyne n.p.). Julian, the British intellectual, tries to persuade his interlocuters by arguments. He repeats the lesson Hannah had already heard in her American history professor’s seminar on WWII: ‘And there’s another reason [for silencing]. The urge to forget. The desire not to know’ (237). Hannah, whose task it was to disclose historical female experience, is like Tariq emotionally affected when imagining the views and fate of concrete individuals. As an academic trusted with scientific research, however, she desperately tries to maintain sophisticated differentiations: ‘The historical, the real, the possible . . . I knew I needed to cling on hard to these ghostly distinctions’ (254). But her detachment is temporarily annulled by her imagination, which proves so overwhelming that she can at a crucial moment only refer to herself in the third person as ‘Hannah Kohler’. She becomes a stranger to herself during her visit at the place in the Vosges where Andrée Borrel was deported (261). My argument implies that to the continuously re-emerging question ‘how to connect distances?’ from the beginning of this essay an answer is emerging here: for Hannah as for Tariq imagination bridges temporal and sociocultural gaps, because it enables these narrators to obtain a glimpse of the individual past with the eyes of an Other; this is reflected in the imagination of the fiction reader, as it was, originally, created in the writer’s. Place with its merging force inspires the imagination in the chronotope of the novel.

22Hannah shows an increasing affective disquiet about the tellers and the told, caused by a vulnerability which obliquely mirrors that of the interviewees. She admits having underrated Juliette Lemaire’s ability of a retrospective reconsideration. After the interview with Mathilde Masson, she retreats into silence. Through an inner turmoil following her visit at the place where Andrée Borrel was murdered Hannah is psychologically devastated. Upon her return to Paris from a journey into a distressing past she loses her companionship with Tariq, who has returned to Tangier, not without directing her to Julian by a note. It is her sober British friend who can restore Hannah’s equilibrium despite her declared aversion against happy endings. His advice to analyse the results of her research in a scholarly article and put down her empirical involvement with this project in an independent publication appears as the logical solution to her inner conflict between reason and affect (203). According to Julian, the detached argumentative content of her assignment must be separated from the subjective response to it, if she wants to observe those “ghostly distinctions” (254) between the historical and the possible. In employing diverse discursive approaches, Paris Echo itself realises different ways of ethical participation, stimulating attentive cognition and empathetic imagination.

23The novel’s closure abandons several ideas and grave issues as loose ends to be dealt with by the reader, a feature which a reviewer of the novel criticises as a weak point (Scholes). The open questions call for an indubitable commitment: ‘If those who narrate precarious lives have an ethical obligation, so have the addressees of these narratives’, Korte and Regard state (10-11). Intradiegetically, this request is prompted by Tariq’s thoughts. His response to the live interview with Mathilde Masson criticises Hannah, whose ambivalent reaction forsakes (the professionally required) disinterested self-reflexiveness. The interviewee’s unmitigated hatred and the failing of their dialogue are perplexing for the American; only the disengaged observer Tariq realises Hannah’s secret wish when facing the lack of regret. He seems uncertain about her motivations to elicit a trace of grief from Mathilde in 2005. The ethics of attentiveness, which are also relevant for the American’s research project, demand the consideration of a life story irrespective of the awareness that the disclosed matter reveals itself as malevolent and damaging. Tariq suspected Hannah’s inclination to push the interviewee to a revaluation resembling the one Juliette had expressed—a turn apparently more satisfactory, not only for Hannah. The young Moroccan’s recognition that Mathilde ‘didn’t see beyond what she’d done day by day’ even after more than 60 years highlights Hannah’s dissatisfaction about the absence of a moral judgment. While Mathilde’s obstinate limitedness regarding her failure to mourn can be representative of other contemporaries Hannah’s role as an authentic listener/narrator is itself questioned. If she only wants to hear morally enlightened or publication-stimulating testimonies she offends ethical objectives such as making suppressed voices heard or unveiling forgotten historical facets. These inspire, critics maintain, various contemporary writers who show a renewed social and ethical commitment through their literary works (see Korthals 9).