The Paris Peacemakers by Flora Johnston

 

The timeframe for my fiction series begins in 1935 and I am now writing about the Second World War. The global political situation of the 1930s is central to my work, in particular the economic depression and the concomitant rise of extreme right-wing populism, leading to the sad inevitability of what happened in September 1939 and all that flowed from that. A warning from history, you might say, for people who believe the venal spoutings of Suella Braverman and Nigel Farage and co, and can’t see the banal repetition of history unfolding in front of us.

 

All of that, the political strife in Europe in the 1930s and the economic collapse of the 1920s that preceded it, can in part be traced back to the Treaty of Versailles at the conclusion of the Great War. What was meant to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reframe the world order for peace and harmony across nations and ages became a mendacious exercise in punishment and greed.

 

This makes the backdrop for Flora Johnston’s second novel, The Paris Peacemakers, a particularly engrossing one for me. Everything she writes about in 1919 Paris, as the Allies try to forge a peace treaty in the aftermath of the German surrender, leads directly to the grim circumstances that inform the political context of my novels. Flora brings to life in an extraordinary way the mistakes and arrogance and self-interest which set the world firmly on a path that led to Hitler and Stalin, and Putin and Xi.

 

This is a political novel, then, but it is also an intensely personal one. The search for a better political future conducted by Woodrow Wilson and the participants at the International Peace Conference is mirrored in the novel by a search for a better personal future by its three main protagonists, all of whom are seeking a compromise with the past and passage to a more hopeful world.

 

Stella Rutherford is a young woman from Thurso, in the north of Scotland, who takes up a secretarial position at the talks in Versailles which aim to fashion the finished peace treaty. Her older sister, Corran, is a classicist, at a time when women were not expected to concern themselves with abstruse subjects such as Latin. The third main character is Rob, Corran’s fiance, a Scottish rugby internationalist and surgeon who enlists during the war and is traumatised by his experiences.

 

Indeed, the experience of war underpins the drama, with each of the central characters affected by it in different ways. Stella struggles to overcome the grief she feels over the death of her beloved brother Jack, killed on the Western Front but constantly in her thoughts, a ghost from better days.

 

Corran battles with the knowledge that, as a woman, her life has been circumscribed by men and mores. She could take her exams at Cambridge but not graduate. She could work, but only until she married. She would be a wife, and a mother, and produce the next generation of leaders and attendants, men and women, perpetuating the status quo. She wants to fashion a different future.

 

Rob, his psyche ravaged by his experiences as a surgeon at the battlefront, is not yet sure he even believes in a future. In a moment of clarity, he sees the “blessed silence on the Western Front was likely no more than a pause.”

 

This observation is central to the novel. The Treaty of Versailles was the greatest – or perhaps worst – missed opportunity in human history, a moment when the world could have been reset but chose instead to protect the interests of the existing elite, to perpetuate the narrow, bigoted worldview of the western, white, male establishment. Women’s voices were largely excluded from the discussions at Versailles. The views of non-western nations were peripheral. The conference became an echo chamber and, inexorably, the optimistic aims with which it began withered and died.

 

This self-interested bigotry is expertly explored. The casual sexism that both Corran and Stella endure, and that is endemic in the society of the time, is an underlying theme which builds throughout the novel until we understand that such bigotry is not simply small-minded, or ignorant, or self-serving, but positively dangerous.

 

Given what we know, it would be easy for a novel about the treaty negotiations to become bleak and depressing. Flora Johnston’s The Paris Peacemakers is assuredly not that. Her blending of the political and the personal, the macro and the micro, polity and morality, creates a story which is emotional and engaging. Her characters come to life on the page and we urge them on in their quest for something better, something brighter.

 

Something different.

 

This is a very fine piece of writing by a novelist who in her two novels to date has shown a breadth of vision and ambition which is exciting and refreshing.