Best-selling novelist Joanne Harris returns to France for her lovely new novel, Holy Fools.
Like Coastliners which precedes it, Holy Fools is set on the French coast, except this time most of the action takes place at an abbey where the main protagonist, Juliette – now living as a nun, Soeur August – has taken refuge with her infant daughter several years before.
Set in the 1600s, it juxtaposes the sometimes extreme religious values held in France at that time, as reflected by the nuns at the abbey of Sainte Marie-de-la-Mer, and those of a rough and secular age, personified by the wandering players of the circus.
Over both of these worlds hovers the spectre of Guy LeMerle, nicknamed the Blackbird – an enigmatic risk-taker who has played a large part in Juliette’s colourful past.
Only he knows that she flew the high-wire as L’Ailée, the winged one, when they travelled the country as performers.
Will he arrive at the abbey and, if so, will it necessarily mean doom for Juliette and her little girl? This solid novel (more than 400 pages) takes the reader on a journey back and forth between Juliette’s two lives and it is not clear until near the end what is going to happen.
As in other Harris novels, religious dogma takes a battering and the free-spirited Juliette is in many ways reminiscent of Vianne Rocher from the gorgeous Chocolat.
Harris writes in a fluid and engaging way, drawing the reader on like a piper ahead of a minstrels’ caravan.
Definitely one for the book club.
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