Description
After a thirty-year absence Christopher Turner returns to Paris. He is there to extricate his best friend's son Eric from the mercenary machinations of some Parisian gold-digger — or so it is assumed back home in South Africa. Christopher, with melancholy memories of Paris, is deeply ambivalent about the city; and, as for the young Eric, Christopher remembers him as a brutish lout with little to recommend him. But far from having been corrupted by the place, Eric turns out to have been immeasurably improved by it. The spoilt son has become a considerate and attentive host with charming manners. Furthermore, as Christopher is gradually introduced to Eric's associates, he finds to his dismay that he likes them — likes, above all, the beautiful Beatrice du Plessis, in her day a supermodel, now the mother of a young daughter apparently destined to follow in her mother's footsteps. And Paris exerts her spell anew. As Christopher comes to know and enjoy this ambiguous world, he finds his moral categories shifting: is beauty a trap for the innocent young, or a self-validating, even ennobling attribute of a fully lived life? Responding to the gentle appeal of Beatrice, he feels ever more strongly that the young man's place is in Paris with her, rather than on his father's farm in Franschhoek. But Eric has ideas of his own.
Exploring the tensions between the fatherland and a larger world, Michiel Heyns turns an ironic eye on the most seductive city on earth, and traces with humour and insight the invisible furies of the heart.
Michiel Heyns is an award-winning translator and was professor of English at the University of Stellenbosch.