To Capture What We Cannot Keep

By Beatrice Colin

(Allen & Unwin, £12.99)

Review by Richard Strachan

CATRIONA Wallace, a young widow, has little to look forward to but a life of genteel destitution after the death of her husband in the Tay Bridge disaster. Answering an advert for a paid companion to two siblings as they undertake the Grand Tour of Europe’s capitals, Cait finds herself chaperoning the son and daughter of William Arrol, the renowned Scottish engineer who has just been commissioned to build a rail bridge over the River Forth. Jamie Arrol, unable to settle into his apprenticeship at his father’s engineering works, is dissolute and hedonistic, while his sister Alice is vain and self-centred, concerned only with securing a rich husband. Ending their tour in the City of Light, the travellers find Paris dominated by talk of Gustave Eiffel’s grand folly, his eponymous tower which has just started construction and, when finished, will be the world's tallest structure. Chance brings the group into the orbit of Emile Nouguier, the engineer who has designed the tower. While Jamie wants to use Nouguier to lever a position for himself in Eiffel’s company, Alice sees him as a potential catch. For Cait, hand, Nouguier rapidly becomes the love of her life, someone who can efface the memory of her violent husband and offer her a new beginning, if only the demands of family and social convention didn’t make the match impossible. While Jamie throws himself into the fleshpots of bohemian Paris, Alice finds her naivety exploited and her expectations dashed, and Cait struggles against the drab future the world seems to promise her.

Beatrice Colin’s competent if unoriginal historical novel does an effective job of portraying fin de siecle Paris in all its squalor and glory, from the vast building site of the Eiffel Tower to the cafes, galleries and artists’ studios of the city’s bohemian underworld. The confidence and vaulting ambition of 19th-century engineering is well established both in Nouguier’s feverish enthusiasm for the Tower ("It will be magnificent, groundbreaking, monumental" he argues, to his unconvinced elderly mother) and in William Arrol’s more grounded satisfaction in the structural challenges of the Forth Rail Bridge. The seedier side of the city constantly threatens to derail the characters’ nobler ambitions; as the novel begins, Nouguier is tormented by his relationship with Gabrielle, a demi-monde and artist’s wife, while Jamie’s reckless spending at high-class brothels soon sees him in serious debt. Alice, linked socially with Nouguier, finds herself the victim of a jealous Gabrielle’s embittered vengeance after she arranges for Alice to be seduced by a decadent aristocrat. Even for Cait, intelligent, well-read and far more level-headed than her young charges, her affair with Nouguier threatens to overwhelm her, plunging her into a guilty recollection of her life with her late husband.

To Capture What We Cannot Keep covers all the expected narrative bases. Barriers are thrown in the path of true love, while the Arrol siblings are both undone by their own peevish self-importance. Emile Nouguier, noble, an artist at heart, maintains his dignity in the face of all romantic and professional provocation.

No sooner is a problem raised than the story finds a way around it, and even the most perilous scenes have their tension defused by a tidy solution a few pages later. Jamie and Alice, whose selfishness and naivety leads them into considerable difficulties despite Cait’s attempts to shield them from the consequences of their actions, suffer no real ill-effects and the narrative shuttles on to the next problem. The characters may grow a little after each upset, but not in a way that makes their development feel earned or hard-won, and the social conventions that make Cait and Emile’s relationship so difficult don’t feel like the insurmountable barriers they should. While each scene is well structured and Colin convincingly portrays the spiralling disasters that make each individual feel trapped by forces beyond their control, the book as a whole is a little too predictable and its conclusions too neat to fully satisfy. Even Paris, a central character in its own right, feels too conventionally displayed. Rather than a bold reimagining of the city, it’s often little more than a series of hackneyed images through which the characters drift. As Cait thinks at one point, "they were simply passing through the city, tourists ticking off the sights one by one, nothing else".

Beatrice Collin will be at Glasgow book festival Aye Write! on Saturday March 12 at 6.30pm. The Herald and Sunday Herald are the event's media partners www.ayewrite.com