A curious case of history

MYSTERY and intrigue certainly featured strongly in the chapter of 19th-century French history known as the Panama Canal Scandal. The event, which shook France in November, 1892 had a devastating national impact comparable to the "Black Thursday" October 1929 collapse of the New York stock market - more pointedly, in terms of absolute corruption it equals the Watergate affair, and it brought down the Paris government. Over half the members of the chamber of deputies were discovered to have taken bribes, thus easing the passage of legislation favourable to the French Panama Canal Company. While thousands of citizens lost their investments, France also suffered a loss of faith in a national icon, Ferdinand de Lesseps.

It is an exciting story; it is history. Novelists often choose to avail of the facts of history when shaping narratives - yet while social history provides vivid backdrops to fiction, and one need look no further than Tolstoy's work to illustrate this, many writers have drawn on history as a way of actually making rather than simply inspiring their novels.

This practice presents problems for readers more inclined to read historians for history and look to fiction for accounts of life as lived or for novels ideas. Fictional plots based on historical events leave the reader asking, where does history end and fiction begin? Or perhaps, in the case of some novels, does fiction begin at all?

All of which may be a digressive way of saying that the very quality which serves to attract many readers to historical fiction is the one which discourages as many readers. Real life history professor Eric Zencey's debut Panama (Sceptre, £9.99) borrows heavily from history, and at times bends historical fact to suit narrative purposes; but Zencey has, by centring his story on the diffident personality of historian Henry Adams (1838-1918), evoked a convincingly atmospheric feel to his genteel tale of Paris being equally torn apart by crime and the effects of speedy modernisation. While the plot itself - generated by a cargo load of red herrings and real characters - sustains Zencey's quasi period, understated approach, the success of the novel is the characterisation of Henry Adams, a middle aged, Hamlet like individual "outpaced by a world that no longer seemed to need his kind". He is old fashioned, out of time and increasingly out of sympathy with a society racing into the modern era. When an eager young policeman tells him about telephones, enthusing "wonderful new thing . . . the entire building is being wired. We're supposed to get ours tomorrow. When they re in, you'll be able to call the Prefecture from any post office in Paris".

"It should do wonders for crime control. Very modern," his listener is unimpressed.

"Yes," Adams thought, "very modern. Very modern because it would be more abstract, more anonymous, to be talking to someone a great distance away, someone whose face you couldn't see. Of course they were the next logical step after telegraphy, but that didn't mean they were a good thing."

Zencey could easily have permitted his slightly eccentric, short, 54 year old widower, with his gracious and safely distant devotion to the beautiful and married Elizabeth, develop into a clown. Adams is presented as possibly oppressed by the legacy of being the grandson and great grandson of US presidents. A respected historian, he is also something of a natural bungler, a failed career diplomat and a nervous, clumsy figure. Haunted by the suicide of his wife seven years earlier, he hovers near Elizabeth and gratefully accepts her teasing, coyly territorial behaviour.

John Hay, destined to become US Secretary of State some six years after the events described in Zencey's novel, is Adams's practically minded and obviously careerist friend. From its almost prologue like opening, the narrative presents Adams as always correct yet slightly, surprisingly, harmlessly subversive. He steals a photograph from a house in Panama - not out of malice, merely because he is curious. His curiosity dictates the plot.

On arriving in France, again steeping himself in the aura of Elizabeth, his tantalising non mistress, he meets a young American woman. This first meeting in a romantic rural setting ensnares him. Of the young female art student dressed in boyish clothes and with a dimple in her chin so deep "it seemed to have been made by a suture," he notes "her ease of manner be spoke confidence and wit."

Back in Paris, he decides to invite her to the opera and so becomes involved in a search which leads to murder. On being called to identify her corpse, he instead sees a stranger - and historian becomes aspiring detective. Zencey's prose is brisk, exact, possesses an awkward elegance and is secondary to the plot. In the character of Adams he has the tension of an educated, refined, fastidiously ethereal sensibility becoming involved with blunt policemen who view dead bodies and severed fingers as clues. Anxiously trying to track a woman he hardly knows, Adams finds himself face to face with the hardened but charming Alphonse Bertillon, director of the Service of Judicial Identity and a pioneer in the introduction of finger printing. The forensic details are well handled and Paris itself serves as a lively backdrop for a narrative which takes place over a week. Though Panama is a long novel, the short, sharp chapters divided into near hourly breakdowns have the urgency of bulletins. The pace conveys the internal tensions Adams experiences as his path towards the missing woman twists and turns endangering his own life.

Of course there are blind alleys, this is a car chase without cars. Panama is a efficient and engagingly formal historical thriller, but above all it is a polite excursion into the mind of an intellectual prised out of his languor and above all his mind and into a life where violence, danger and the threat of the unknown suddenly take over both himself and the reader.