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.

What You Call Free by Flora Johnston

I suspect if What You Call Free was written twenty years ago, or even ten years ago, it would be a very different novel. Instead of the two women – both real historical characters – around whom the novel revolves, the central character would have been James Renwick, the charismatic and driven Covenanter who was ultimately martyred for his beliefs. Helen Alexander, a principled, fiercely independent and intelligent woman, would have been relegated to a supporting role emphasising the charisma of Renwick. And Jonet Gothskirk, a young woman from a poor family, would not have appeared at all. She simply wouldn’t have existed. 

Flora Johnston’s brilliant historical novel tells the story of a dark period in Scotland’s history – the conflict between the Covenanters and the Crown – through the prism of these two women and in so doing casts a wholly different light on the times. To be a Covenanter in the 1680s was brutally dangerous and the story of James Renwick and his righteous – if foolhardy – attempt to take his fight directly to the agents of the Crown is a tale of jeopardy and despair. 

But overlaid on this story of religious conflict are plotlines which reveal how difficult it was to be a woman in those times. Helen, every bit as principled as James Renwick, suffers terribly for her faith, both physically and mentally. She holds her family together despite constant threats of reprisals and punishment. She is the beating heart of decency in a truly frightful world. 

And Jonet Gothskirk, a young woman taken advantage of and left pregnant, is the most luminous creation of all. Until now, Jonet was literally only a name recorded in history: in the minutes of the West Calder Kirk Session from 1687, an eighteen-year-old woman called Jonet Gothskirk was sentenced to wear a sackcloth gown in front of the congregation for weeks on end as punishment for becoming pregnant out of wedlock. The inspiration for Flora Johnston to write Jonet’s story came when she saw that sackcloth gown in the National Museum of Scotland. In What You Call Free, Flora gives the unfortunate Jonet a voice she never had in reality and brings her alive, enabling a woman who died over 300 years ago to force us confront some uncomfortable truths in our contemporary world. 

Much has changed, and we can be grateful for that. But is it enough? In the conflict between state and subject, are dissenting voices sufficiently listened to? Is tolerance real or illusory? And what is the position of women in society? We may not force people to wear sackcloth any longer, but the title of this novel, What You Call Free, is still a rallying call for faithfulness – in both religious and secular terms – and for the strength of people to live their lives according to their own convictions. It speaks of hope, yes, but it is a hope whose origin is in the societal double standards which exist still and which mean that in 2021, like 1687, the world is still an uncomfortable place in which to be a woman.