Pure by Andrew Miller

 

The year is 1785, the location Paris.  Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young man from Normandy, comes to the city hoping for an assignment from the King and his ministers.  He is given one but not what he was expecting.  The cemetery of les Innocents is located in the heart of Paris and has become a problem.  Over the years it has been used and overcrowded, corpse upon corpse upon corpse.  The bodies have overwhelmed the cemetery and the surrounding city; their stink as they decompose poisoning the very air.  The Minister assigns Jean-Baptiste the job of cleaning it up by excavating all the bodies to be reburied elsewhere.

Although it is not the work he expected, Jean-Baptiste is grateful.  He gets his workforce by returning to the mines he worked at for two years and offering the miners there work in Paris.  He brings along his friend from that time to supervise the workers.  There is also a church which must be destroyed and Jean-Baptiste makes a new friend there, the organist who played the great pipe organ.

As he proceeds with the work, issues arise.  The workers are kept on the grounds of the cemetery and they want to explore Paris but Jean-Baptiste hesitates to turn them loose.  There are occurrences of drunkenness, fights over the prostitutes that come there to be with the men and even the rape of a young woman whose grandfather has watched over the cemetery for all his life.  Yet the work progresses and Jean-Baptiste is well on his way to making a success of his work.

Andrew Miller has long been recognized as an English author who enjoys writing historical fiction.  His best known work was The Land In Winter which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2025.  This is a coming-of-age story as Jean-Baptiste goes from a scared young man to an accomplished builder who can manage a team of men and finish an assigned job and as he makes friends and has his first romance.  This book is recommended for historical and literary fiction readers.