If Joanne Harris' popular Chocolat made a beautiful, romantic (if
perhaps too Hollywood) film, then her newest novel, also set in France,
also seems perfect for the screen. This book, unlike her others, does
not focus on food, but rather on community and on pride. Coastliners is
big, bold, sultry. Like many stories set in France, this novel is steeped in generations of
family secrets and passions; it seems just begging for a cast including
Gerard Depardieu.
Coastliners' protagonist is Mado, a seascape painter who has been
living for a decade in Paris but returns to her island home of LeDevin
to care for her estranged father and to examine her need to return. This
is a tiny, isolated island whose people are quite poor:
"Indeed it
scarcely deserves island status at all, being little more than a cluster
of sandbanks with pretensions, a rocky spine to lift it out of the
Atlantic, a couple of villages, a small fish-packing factory, a single
beach."
The community of Les Salants, her ancestral town, is feuding with the
more prosperous town of La Houssiniere. Enmities going back centuries
still exist and will not easily be repaired.
Mado's elderly father, Grosjean, a boat owner, has become a hermit,
barely speaking to anyone yet full of rages and passions. He is "deeply
superstitious." Grosjean is not well and takes poor care of himself.
Although Mado is not his favored daughter (that daughter lives in
Tangiers with a husband and two little boys), and he alternately rants
and raves and is deathly silent, eventually the two come to a sort of
understanding.
The focus of the novel's action is the citizens' heroic, sometimes
death-defying efforts to save Les Salants and its livelihoods, fishing
and some tourism. Mado and a British friend, Flynn (who Mado's father
has let into his tiny world), lead the efforts to save the one good
beach from erosion. Mado tackles the project to re-involve
herself in community and, in part, to win her father's love. A hint of
romance surfaces between the two leaders, but this comes to little and
is almost incidental against the raging sea and familial emotions of the
novel.
The pull of tradition and the Catholic church are fiercely at play in
the two communities. Mado must once again accept these things if she is
to stay. Helping the community survive and witnessing her father become
a bit stronger emotionally help her accept this isolated life she has
chosen, as she reiterates throughout the book what she calls the
beachcomber's maxim: "Everything returns." (This might have been a much
more effective title for Harris' novel.)
The reader might wonder how someone not French can grasp the French
sensibilities and passions so well. Part of the answer lies in the fact that,
although born in England, Harris has a French mother and extended family in
France. A former teacher, the novelist lives in England with her husband and
daughter. She has also just come out with a cookbook, My
French Kitchen: A Book of 120 Treasured Recipes.
Coastliners is a strong novel examining the power of a severe climate
and generations of families with long-standing traditions and a fierce
pride. Readers who want a traditional love story or who depend on lively
dialogue may be disappointed. Vivid descriptions of the climate, the
place and the centrality of community remain at the book's core.