Novel set in London, Paris, and Marseilles, plus Talking Location With … author John Tagholm

24th November 2016

A Girl Called Flotsam by John Tagholm, novel set in London, Paris, and Marseilles.

Beatrice Palmenter is 36 and a successful film maker, having just won a BAFTA for her recent work. She is considerably less successful in her personal life, however, having a series of failed romantic attachments behind her and only the most strained relationship with her mother. Her best friend is fond of telling her that she’s good at exploring other people’s lives, but can’t look at her own and an ex boyfriend once described her as missing an important bit of the necessary emotional machinery for relationships. Certainly the Beatrice at the start of the novel is restrained and unemotional to the point of downright coldness. And then, during a spell of voluntary cleaning up of the Thames, she discovers a child’s skull and, as she holds it in her hand, she finds that something inside unlocks and the emotions begin to flow.

The skull proves to be Anglo Saxon and Beatrice becomes caught up in the quest to discover as much as possible about Flotsam’s life, aided by archaeologist Harry Wesley, who is also instrumental in helping Beatrice look at her own life. Alongside this quest, in her professional capacity, Beatrice begins to research the early life of famous restaurateur Joseph Troumeg, whose official biography seems to be incomplete. This quest takes her to Paris and Marseille where she begins to piece together the true war-time story.

Tagholm juxtaposes the story of Beatrice’s investigations and her developing relationship with Harry with the fictional account of Flotsam’s life in Anglo Saxon England and France. Beatrice visits the places where the most dramatic events of Flotsam’s life took place and the reader is made to reflect on the hidden past beneath the stones of the present. He also provokes thoughts about the way relationships change, for this novel also explores mother/daughter relationships. Beatrice has never managed to sustain a relationship with her mother, who is constantly critical of her and Troumeg became completely estranged from his mother. The only really solid mother/ daughter relationship in the book is that between Flotsam and her mother. He seems to be showing us that life in Anglo Saxon times may have been brutal and short but family bonds were much more powerful and enduring than in more modern times.

This is a very polished and skilful piece of writing. It is also real page turner; the reader becomes as desperate as Beatrice to discover the truth about Troumeg’s parents and about Flotsam’s life. It’s clever historical fiction and a good detective story and a powerful love story that provokes a lot of thought. What’s not to like?

Ellen for the TripFiction Team

In our feature #TalkingLocationWith…  John explains how the setting of the book is an integral backdrop to the story:

The great American writer, Elmore Leonard, wrote a book called 10 Rules of Writing. Rule 9 is: ‘Don’t go into great detail describing places and things’ for if you do, he warns, you may well lapse into what he called ‘hooptedoodle’.

As a writer who loves to use place as part of a story, I always bear Mr Leonard’s warning in mind. Any hooptedoodle, description for the sake of it, is, I hope, eradicated at birth.

In my latest book A Girl Called Flotsam, two regular locations appear, the River Thames and France. The book begins with Beatrice Palmenter discovering a small skull on the foreshore of the great river and anyone who has ever mudlarked will know the excitement of random finds, even if they’re not always as dramatic as a child’s skull. The atmosphere and smell of the Thames invade every page of the book.

The river is, for me, a connection between past and present, an unchanging thread through history and in A Girl Call Flotsam it links an Anglo-Saxon girl with her present day equivalent, Beatrice Palmenter. I wanted to join the same physical places that existed a thousand years ago with those exact locations now, the junction of streets, the rise of a hill, the site of a church, a bend in the river, to give the feeling that the past is still with us.

But A Girl Called Flotsam is not a history book, nor a travel guide. The story is the most important factor and any facts that get in the way of the unfolding drama become hooptedoodle immediately.

France is a country of great contradiction and tension, a natural theatre for drama for it manages to be both revolutionary and deeply conservative at one and the same time. Paris, where part of the book is set, is physically almost the same now as it was in the Second World War and it is here I place the key conflict in the book. France is still coming to terms with what happened during the German occupation and it is this ugly background, in a city of such great beauty, that adds natural tension to Beatrice Parmenter’s search for the truth. She can sit in a café on the Boulevard St Germain and imagine a naked Frenchwoman being beaten in front of her for collaboration. It happened and the street and café are the same now as they were then.

She also has to go to Marseille in her quest to discover more of the background of Joseph Troumeg, the restaurateur I based loosely on the character of the famous Robert Carrier, a man with whom I made several television series. Robert once described Marseille to me as a town ‘brilliant in the sunlight and more than a little sinister in the shade’. It’s also the most unlikely town in France, almost more North African than French. The shape of the harbour is still the same as it was a thousand years ago, once again linking past with present and if you narrow your eyes in the old town up on the hill, you will be transported back over a millennium.

John at the 1000 km point of his walk from Sangatte to St Tropez

It might not surprise you to know that I once walked across France, on footpaths that took me between Sangatte on the Channel and St Tropez on the Mediterranean. I used some of this knowledge in my first novel, No Identifiable Remains and again in Elsewhere, the factual story of that 1000 mile adventure. I described the paths, like the Thames, as tunnels through time on which I would not have been surprised to find a Crusader, or a weary soldier returning from the Somme.

In Elsewhere, I quote Emile Zola describing a huge painting of the French countryside by Camille Pissarro: ‘One feels that man has passed, turning and cutting the earth. And this valley, the hillside, embody a simplicity and heroic freedom. Nothing could be so banal were it not so great.’

I hope A Girl Called Flotsam takes you on a journey through time and place and that you don’t find too much hooptedoodle.

Thank you to John for such wonderful insights and especially for introducing us to the notion of hooptedoodle!

You can catch up with John via his website

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