Pure

By: Andrew Miller / Narrated By: Ralph Cosham

Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins

All surface, little depth… how on EARTH did this wind up being a Fave?!

I cannot TELL you just how much time I spend scrolling through Chirpbooks’s Featured Deals. Once upon a time, a person could pick up audiobooks paired for cheeeap over on Audible if you got the Kindle versions, but they wised up to audiobook addicts, and they started charging WAAAAY more for these pairings. And now, “Sales” there? Who can afford them? Soooo, basically this opening paragraph is a mighty huzzah to Chirpbooks where a person can still stumble upon some unexpected gems. Why, a person might even dabble in a new genre, or get a story that seems odd but appealing… all without having to sell one’s firstborn child to the highest bidder to afford the risk…

THAT’S how I came to take a chance on Pure by Andrew Miller. Compelling cover art, unexpected premise, and dude! Ralph Cosham (Juuuuust experienced/listened to Bloodlands last week, and I’m still glowing from his fine performance)!

It is 1785, and Jean-Baptiste Baratte is newly arrived in Paris. Waiting in Versailles, he’s feeling very much a country mouse now in the heart of mass-civilization. It turns out that his skills as an engineer are wanted, and he soon learns that he is tasked with figuring out a way to disinter the extRAOrdinary amount of corpses in the very much disgusting cemetery, Les Innocents, an ancient burial ground that is now causing stench and distress, disgusting water, gross living conditions for the people who live in the entire area.

Leaving the palace, feeling mighty big for his provincial britches, the ambitious young man starts weaving himself into polite society, goes so far as to buy pricey spiffy-patoot clothes after being flattered into them (NOT green! Nooo, they’re pistachio!). NOW he’s a Man About Town, this fine young Engineer. And so he’s off to his boarding house in a community that’s seen much better days.

Getting workers to toil most strenuously in the miasmatic fug is difficult, especially with winter upon them all, then there’s the sludge and mud in the spring. All of it, all of it is to go. Les Innocents and its population of the putrid dead, the church, the grand organ that’s a work of history. And Baratte is right there, being guided by some pretty awesome side-characters, being guided by his own ambition.

Oh sure, every now and again, he feels a tug, or a ripple, of remorse. The cemetery is part of the culture of the area. And the sexton and his granddaughter? It’s a shame that they’ll be turned out, but that’s just the way it is, has to be. Boarding with the family hosting him? Yes, they’re hiiiiighly unsettled by his task, but why consider them, their feelings, ANYthing about them. Their daughter who pines for him? Yawn. The sexton’s granddaughter whom he emotionally devastates? Ho-hum, yes, there’s a sensation there, an I Should Have… but why consider it? It flits into his mind, and it verily floats away.

Sounds like this character is a jerk, and hard to craft a whole story around, huh?

Ahhhh, but those tiiiiiny pangs, the little bits of time where his heart stops, or where he gets a distinct tinge of remorse and regret. And the woman, that prostitute he sees from time to time. Oh how wonderful that she saw him, the real him, as well.

He might seeeem like a flat character, but he isn’t really. He’s simply a DESperately emotional being who understands most certainly, most assuredly, that despite his grand tasks, his extraordinary skills: He’s just a cog in the machine, is seen as nothing and no one. All during a time of pre-Revolution France. Unrest, graffiti, threats, a stomping down of the poor and the working class. It’s all in Pure.

At first I thought that Ralph Cosham might have been the wrong person for this (Yeh, I KNOW! Just after raving about the most previous narration of his that I’d listened to). There’s a sort of even-keel(ishness—I KNOW again! Not a word, but it totally suits!) to his opening for the story, and the kinda spiritual deadness of Baratte had me doubly unengaged. But as we see bits of Baratte’s ice cold exterior being chipped at or melting away, Cosham adds that itty bitty bit of emotion to Baratte’s awakening. Dunno how his French was, it sounded flawless and it flowed with ease… but I do NOT speak French; all I can say is that it seamlessly fit in with dialogue or description, nothing disruptive about it.

Fascinating, truly compelling, a bit of a heart-warmer with the sweetest romance you could see coming a mile away—but I did NOT see it coming for the reasons it did. So there was that surprise to capture my heart, stir my sensibilities.

An odd little book, but I came outta it feeling so delighted, so enchanted, despite the graphic imagery (Dude! he’s amongst decay and filth everywhere). The keenly written details about lives led in squalor and poverty. The simmering unrest of the populace. Human behavior/human interactions? Some, well: MOST! despicable. A terrific sense of place, of time.

And flat characters who are sooo completely ground down by Life and the Powers That Be that they’re numb because it’s easier to live without hope. And finally?

That sloooow waking up, from a bad dream, from a place with no options to a world of promise.

A world of Hope, even amongst the dead, the burned down ground…