Englishman Paul West is living in Paris (where he arrived long before Emily, by the way) and he’s gearing up for the 2024 Olympics.
Paul accepts a job with a French group who are campaigning to get pétanque adopted as an official Olympic event. In Paul’s opinion, lobbing lumps of lead around while drinking pastis is barely a sport – it’s more an excuse for Provençal men to avoid cooking dinner. But he needs the cash.
Meanwhile Paul falls in love with a French tech genius – who thinks he’s an idiot – and tangles with his treacherous ex, Elodie.
Paul also applies for French nationality and has to embark on a war of attrition with France’s Napoleonic bureaucrats.
In the background, Paul’s friend Jake the grunge poet decides that the Olympics and Paralympics discriminate against the lazy, and invents the “Nolympics”.
Let the fun and games begin.
Stephen Clarke is a British writer who writes mainly about France. He has published six novels featuring a British protagonist named Paul West.
My thoughts: this was very funny, I’ve played petanque in the beach in France as a kid, my family are all Francophiles and my great-grandmother was French. I have also been to Paris, which is very different to other parts of France, so I appreciated Paul’s constant bewilderment despite having lived there for some time.
French bureaucracy is infamous and he encounters it both in attempting to get citizenship and in trying to get petanque (sometimes known as boules) registered as an Olympic sport for the Paris Olympics in 2024. Although Olympic bureaucracy might actually be even more impressively labyrinthine than the French.
For Paul, it means tangling with ex-girlfriend Eloise, while attempting to impress solar panel entrepreneur Ambre, translate for a rather rude Provencàl petanque association president, in an attempt to not offend every Olympic official, and avoid being associated too closely with Eloise’s right wing politician and dodgy businessman father.
Paul is a bit hopeless and his friends are rather strange, see Jake the poet, but he’s well meaning and never intends to cause harm or offence. He has a very British take on the French (which is the author’s I imagine) and it comes through in the humour and gently teasing nature, much as we always do when talking about our closest frenemy. It’s been almost 1000 years since the Norman invasion and we will never stop ribbing the French and their strange ways!
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 