Reviewed by Rod McLary
Dreaming in French is a beautifully written and realised novel – and ultimately a very emotionally moving one.
Set in two time periods twenty-six years apart, the novel explores the relationships between three people – Saskia, Simone and Félix. The current time period is narrated by Saskia in the first person; and the second entitled Le passé – the past is told in the third person from Simone’s perspective.
Nineteen-year-old Saskia has decided against completing her law degree much against her mother’s wishes and instead travels to France where she becomes a nanny to Juliette. Simone’s parents recently died in a car accident and now Simone is living in their villa on Île de Ré – an island connected by a bridge to La Rochelle [where Saskia is nanny]. By chance, the two young women meet and become close friends. They both become friends with Félix – twenty years old and a waiter at the restaurant which Juliette’s parents own. Félix’s family harvest salt – fleur de sel – from their salt marshes and Félix works there in the mornings and at the restaurant in the evenings. He has aspirations to become an actor which are fully realised over the subsequent years.
In writing which is both sensuous and languorous, the author captures the joy of youth when senses are alive and vibrating in the air. All the senses are engaged by such words as a place of low, hot skies over salt flats, languorous bodies on fine white sands, and a sonorous language I did not fully understand [3]. The reader is immediately taken to Le passé where Saskia is nineteen and is fully her authentic self.
Following a tragic event and a shocking betrayal, the friends separate and have no further contact. Saskia returns to Australia, where she, driven to drug-induced numbness by self-blame and guilt, marries Dylan and has two children. As she gradually forgets the French language, Saskia persuades herself that the tragic event is lost in the past. However, twenty-six years later, Simone has died and has bequeathed her villa on Île de Ré to Saskia and Félix. Simone has specified in her will that Saskia and Félix must personally sign the relevant documents at the property. Saskia asks herself: Why has Simone done this? How did she die? Was it the thing that haunted her, even at twenty-four? 13]. Saskia is now forced ‘to cross the bridge to that island [she] severed twenty-six years ago’ [13].
Through the unfolding narrative arc, the nature of the tragedy and its effects on the three friends are gradually disclosed. Returning to Île de Ré brings into sharp relief the nature of Saskia’s emotionally coercive marriage to Dylan and its silent impact on her and her two daughters. The older daughter fourteen-year-old Dee responds to the marital discord by retreating into an eating disorder. But when Saskia is brought to the point of leaving the marriage, it is Dee with inner strength who supports and encourages her mother in breaking the relationship. Saskia is further supported by her neighbour Madame Gardner who intuitively understands the nature of the marital relationship after Dylan says: She’s [Saskia] just a scared, broken girl, prone to panic attacks, who I picked up working at a bar [222].
The novel is unflinching and honest in its depiction of the events which follows Saskia’s return to Île de Ré, her learning of the betrayal by Simone and Félix – and ultimately the breaking away from Dylan and the uncertain future that she and daughters face.
Dreaming in French is a novel to be savoured – full of beautifully expressed language engaging all the senses. It is a story of love and friendship which come with the intensity that only youth can bring. But it is also a novel about an emotionally coercive marriage which almost destroys Saskia but from which she ultimately escapes with the emotional support of her daughter and a caring neighbour.
Well recommended to all readers who enjoy well-constructed and beautifully written novels.
Dreaming in French
[2023]
by Vanessa McCausland
Harper Collins
ISBN 978 146076 291 2
$32.99; 341pp