A Citizen of the Country - Hardcover

Smith, Sarah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345433025 ISBN 13: 9780345433022

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2000

Synopsis

"Stunning," raved the New York Times of Sarah Smith's first novel, The Vanished Child. USA Today called her second book, The Knowledge of Water, "as satisfying a mystery as the Mona Lisa's smile." Now the bestselling author of two New York Times Notable Books has created a new, intricately plotted story of intrigue, passion, love, and the most terrible of betrayals.

"My wife will murder me unless I murder her first."

In the ancient, bloody region of French Flanders looms Montfort castle, home of Count André du Monde, owner of a famous Paris horror theatre. To repair his fortunes, he marries an heiress. Sabine is young, blameless, beautiful, and rich, a perfect leading lady for André's first film--but the eccentric count suspects his wife is a practicing sorceress.

Then the Grand Necropolitan Theatre is suddenly stricken with disasters: an unexpected death, a puzzling disappearance, and the savage beating of lead actor Jules Fauchard.

André believes Sabine has placed him under a curse. No one believes him, not even his old friend, Alexander von Reisden. To watch over the couple, Reisden agrees to take a part in their film--and finds his own secrets threatened and his marriage becoming as poisoned as theirs.

Amid escalating tension, the players assemble at Montfort to begin filming André's movie. Then, within the deep medieval basements of Montfort, life and fiction intersect--as the Grand Necropolitan becomes a true theatre of horrors.

Filled with a host of unforgettable characters whose agendas tangle as secretly as the underground tunnels of Flanders, A Citizen of the Country is a compelling novel of desire, poisonous secrets, and love gone terribly wrong.

About this title

About the Author

Sarah Smith has lived in Japan, London, and Paris. A Harvard Ph.D., she has taught film and eighteenth-century literature, and she now writes and designs documentation for advanced computer products. She is also the author of the New York Times Notable Books The Vanished Child and The Knowledge of Water. Ms. Smith lives near Boston, Massachusetts, with her husband and children and their twenty-two-pound Maine coon cat.

From the Inside Flap

ng," raved the New York Times of Sarah Smith's first novel, The Vanished Child. USA Today called her second book, The Knowledge of Water, "as satisfying a mystery as the Mona Lisa's smile." Now the bestselling author of two New York Times Notable Books has created a new, intricately plotted story of intrigue, passion, love, and the most terrible of betrayals.

"My wife will murder me unless I murder her first."

In the ancient, bloody region of French Flanders looms Montfort castle, home of Count André du Monde, owner of a famous Paris horror theatre. To repair his fortunes, he marries an heiress. Sabine is young, blameless, beautiful, and rich, a perfect leading lady for André's first film--but the eccentric count suspects his wife is a practicing sorceress.

Then the Grand Necropolitan Theatre is suddenly stricken with disasters: an unexpected death, a puzzling disappearance, and the savage beating of lead actor Jules Fauchard.&l

Reviews

Set within both the city of Paris and mysterious fictional Montfort Castle in Flanders on the eve of WWI, this stylish and literate historical drama rings down the curtain on Smith's popular trilogy (The Vanished Child; The Knowledge of Water) that illuminates society in early 20th-century France. Dark snatches of memory still trouble Alexander Reisden, director of Jouvet Medical Analyses, an eminent Parisian mental health clinic. Did he murder his grandfather? Is he the heir to an American fortune? As war threatens, Reisden's personal troubles are pushed into the background. On the verge of procuring an important contract with the French army for the mental competency testing of soldiers, he learns that former military hero Maurice Cyron stands in his way. Cyron, who intended a military future for his stepson, Andr?, the count of Montfort, blames Reisden for encouraging Andr?'s theatrical bent. Fascinated by death (for reasons Smith eventually reveals), Andr? channels his dark thoughts into his work at the Grand Necropolitan Theatre, where he is driven to act out his obsessions. Though recently married, he ignores his seductive wife, Sabina, and accuses her of trying to poison him. While struggling to appease Cyron and help Andr?, Reisden strives to satisfy his own wife, Perdita, a legally blind concert pianist who wants to resurrect her career with a trip to America, where she hopes to compel Reisden to come to terms with his past. When Andr? and Cyron join forces to make a military film on the grounds of Montfort Castle in Arras, with Reisden's participation, Smith ratchets up the tension. In addition to providing fascinating background on early filmmaking, the author adds French military secrets, murder, blackmail and witchcraft. Though the buildup to the revelation of Reisden's dilemma seems unnecessarily complicated, readers will care about the splendidly realized characters, whose fates are decided in an eminently satisfying conclusion. Agent, Jane Otte. 3-city author tour.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The conclusion to Smith's neo-Victorian trilogy (The Vanished Child, 1992; The Knowledge of Water, 1996) is a virtuosic fusion of speculative history, boldly stylized character drawing, and intricately plotted rousing melodrama.The action takes place in 1911 in Paris and the Flanders countryside (and, briefly, in America). Physician Alexander von Reisden, who heads the underfunded Jouvet medical research institute, is pressured to cure deeply disturbed André du Monde, Count of Montfort and owner of (as well as writer-performer for) the Grand Necropolitan Theater, whose horrific productions seem extrusions of André's own dark psyche--by the Count's wealthy stepfather Maurice Cyron, a potential contributor to France's desired military buildup in anticipation of a forthcoming German invasion. Complicated, n'est-ce pas ? Not really--at least until André's ambitious production of Citizen Mabet, a Gallic silent film version of Macbeth, encounters various problems, leading its star, André's wife Sabine (who dabbles in witchcraft and appears to have taken a demon lover), to agree only reluctantly to a scene involving a working guillotine. Only a sadist on a par with a very executioner would reveal the subtly enfolded details of Smith's dazzling plot. Suffice it to say that it involves the secret of Montfort (the castle where filming occurs), persistent rumors (spread by Hungarian blackmailer Ferenc Gehazy) that the embattled Reisden (already known to us as a child murderer) may have been a German secret agent, and the multiple tensions that almost destroy Alexander's happy marriage to the trilogy's estimable heroine, blind concert pianist Perdita Halley--whose climactic outburst oh, my goodness, Alexander, orgies and curses? It just isn't believable understates the case beautifully. All is unraveled quite logically by the eye-popping resolution, which evokes fond memories of Poe, Agatha Christie, Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, and Polanski's Chinatown, among other expertly assimilated influences.Fiction just doesn't get any more entertaining and satisfying than this. A bloody triumph. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Now that he and his concert pianist wife have a young son of their own, physician Alexander von Reisden wants more than ever to wipe out a past full of hidden identity, tangled relationships, and murder, but a dangerous blackmailer forces him to confront his demons and accept himself and a family relationship he has tried desperately to forget. The trouble starts when von Reisen is forced to take on the case of the deeply disturbed Andr du Monde, sponsor of the Grand Necropolitan Theater, whose ghoulish productions feature his young wife. Smith's concluding volume to her "Vanished Child" trilogy, set in a bellicose France on the brink of World War I, is a murky and sinister tangle of political and domestic intrigue, witchcraft, and murder. It will resonate more with readers familiar with The Vanished Child (LJ 2/1/92) and The Knowledge of Water (LJ 8/96), but it offers compelling reading for everyone. Highly recommended.DCynthia Johnson, Cary Memorial Lib., Lexington, MA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

How do you tell your baby you have committed murder?        

Murder didn't define Alexander Reisden any more. He had got over being
guilty of it (got over, he thought, as one might get over a heavy cold);
he was well, more or less. But in his work, he saw how murder affects
families. It is a disease, claiming victim after victim. And Toby was so
little, and Toby's fingers, with the perfect little nails, grasped his
father's thumb so trustingly; and Reisden adored his baby boy; and
someday, some terrible day, Toby would know.

Toby might forgive him, might perfectly understand. But how would it
affect him?

Reisden had committed his murder at eight years old. He had had excuses;
it had been necessary; but no one knows that when he is eight years old.
Toby would learn, but Reisden desperately wanted to save him from it until
he was much older than eight.

This was morbid. Toby was only seven and a half months old. You could have
held him up and said into his face "Your papa killed his grandfather," and he would only have giggled and tried to grab your nose.

He wanted, really, never to tell Toby anything, never to let anyone tell
Toby; he wanted Toby never to hear about mad William Knight or William's
grandson or the horrors that can happen to children. He wanted to keep his
boy safe.

There is a story like this, about loving parents and a curse and all the
spindles in a kingdom, but Reisden didn't know it. He only knew a father
is supposed to protect his child.
So should a mother, Reisden reflected, and Perdita wasn't protect-
ing Toby.

The first thing she'd said after Toby was born was how glad Gilbert would
be. She wrote to Gilbert every week. She sent news of Toby,
pictures of Toby, a curl of Toby's baby hair bound with thread. Don't,
Reisden thought silently, my G-d, don't curse Toby with Gilbert Knight.
Gilbert had the discretion to keep away, but Perdita insisted on writing.
Reisden snapped at her about her eyesight, which was not fair. Perdita
insisted on going out in the Paris streets with nothing but Toby and her
white cane. "Let him go with his nurse."

"But I like getting out," she said mildly, "and I must learn the streets."

"Not with him."

"Don't you believe I would be careful, Alexander?"

He did not believe it. She was not careful. She could see only colors and
shadows; she could push Toby's pram out into the street, not seeing the
bus or the horse that would kill them both. He could feel the impact in
his own flesh. He was terrified for his son; sometime, somehow, something
terrible would happen to his son.

She is risky, he thought once of the intelligent, stubborn, beautiful girl
he had loved before she had become his son's mother. It saddened him. He
loved her.

This was morbidity too; this, he thought, was perhaps murder itself, the
slow death that murder leaves in families.

"Are you afraid for your children?" he asked other fathers. Yes, they
said, of course they were.

It was as close as Reisden could come to talking about what was wrong with
his family.

Financial security, at least, one can give.

General Lucien PÈtiot looked like Father Christmas in a sky blue uniform;
he had a cloud white beard and twinkling blue eyes and was in charge of
procurement (Medical Section) for the French army. General PÈtiot bought
miles of bandages, barrels of mercurochrome, trainloads of cough
pastilles--and tests for the French army. Intelligence tests, tests of
mental competence; every man in France served three years in uniform, and
the army needed to identify potential officers and potential problems.

They had just decided to centralize.

Reisden's company, Jouvet Medical Analyses, did competency testing for the
courts and specialized neurological testing for hospitals all over Europe.
Jouvet could administer Berthet's intelligence test to large groups. In
September 1910, just after Toby was born, Reisden first approached PÈtiot.
"We want to supply medical tests and neurological work to the army."

"You're an ambitious man."

"I have a son."

For six months the men ate lunches and dinners together, spent
afternoons talking about the state of medicine in France, traded opinions,
deplored the government, and tested each other. PÈtiot toured Jouvet's
half-completed building, under reconstruction after the Paris floods. "You
want the money," PÈtiot said, admiring the expensive new lab. "I want the
job," Reisden said. "Let me talk to your staff," PÈtiot said. Through the
winter, PÈtiot became as familiar at Jouvet as the concierge's cat, poking
his nose into staff meetings, sniffing at a technician's bench, hovering
outside the locked door of the famous Jouvet medical archives.

On a cold day at the beginning of April, PÈtiot came to Reisden's office
at Jouvet and dropped his bomb.

"There's only one trouble with Jouvet's proposal, Reisden: it's you. Your
background."

They were sitting on packed boxes of books in the middle of chaos, the
wallpaper half up, the paneling still tacky with varnish, the air damp
with the smell of wet plaster.

"This is a bad time politically," PÈtiot said. "Germany threatens us, with
Spain and Austria-Hungary behind her; the French army is small and
underprepared; and at that very moment, the most intelligent of von
Loewenstein's Orphans decides he wants to throw in his lot with us. One
wonders what you mean by it. Isn't that what Leo von Loewenstein used to
say?"

"The Orphans are a myth."

"A myth, oh dear, yes," said PÈtiot. "But one of the mythical Orphans owns
a French company that does medical analysis, of a kind that would give it
access to embarrassing information about army men, government officials."
PÈtiot frowned. "Certain people are very distressed."

Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0345433025
• ISBN 13: 9780345433022
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432