BACKLIST

Review By Joanne Forman

CITY OF DARKNESS, CITY OF LIGHT
By Marge Piercy

One of the marks of a good novel is that it continues to be pertinent long after it’s published. Such a one is CITY OF DARKNESS, CITY OF LIGHT by Marge Piercy, first published in 1997.

The city is Paris. The time is the French Revolution. Revolutions are rare—and messy—and few. This was one of the most thoroughgoing, finally putting paid to the more than thousand-year notion that kings were necessary.

This story, in its vast aspects, has been told before, and will be told again, but few have focused on the women. Piercy has chosen actual women, including one who was guillotined (Madame Roland). It was a heady time for awhile: women were at the forefront of events. They organized themselves, and, for one of the first times in many, many millennia, felt the exultation that what they thought, felt, said, did—mattered, that it had an effect upon events.

They’re all here: Robespierre, Danton, Desmoulines—and Manon Roland,
Pauline Leon, Claire Lacomb, and the “mob.”

One of the problems with revolutions is that they’re seldom revolutionary enough: the end of the French Revolution was Bonaparte and another empire; it wasn’t for almost another century before France finally became a Republic for good, and even longer before women won equal rights.

At the end, the three surviving women meet: “We thought we were making a revolution,” says one. Replies another, “We were: just not the one we thought.”

In the time of the Arab Spring, of Occupy, words of wisdom, caution and an absorbing read.