So You Say You Want To Read About A Revolution? By David Ortiz Jr. City of Darkness, City of Light, by Marge Piercy (Fawcett Columbine Books). Hardcover, $25. HISTORICAL FICTION IS a tricky literary genre because it demands devotion to historical accuracy and an engaging story from the author. City of Darkness, City of Light is Marge Piercy's second foray into this field, with the French Revolution as the historical backdrop. She could not have taken on a more difficult subject. The French Revolution (1789-1799) is such a complex series of historical events that professional historians cannot even agree on its periodization. The nature of the revolution, its many twists and turns, forces historians to declare their political agenda at the outset. As a result, "objective" studies of the French Revolution do not exist. Marge Piercy, prolific author of a dozen previous novels and another dozen collections of poetry, provides us with another subjective reading of the revolution, this time from a feminist perspective. Piercy's book commingles the personal histories of actual historical figures, three women (Claire Lacombe, Manon Philipon, and Pauline Léon) and three men (Maximilien Robespierre, Marie Jean Nicolas Caritat--Marquis de Condorcet, and Georges Danton), into the story of revolutionary France, from 1760 to 1812. The heart of the novel traces their participation in the revolution from 1789 to 1795. Each chapter--there are 85 of them--is told from the perspective of one of these historical actors. Four of them (Philipon, Robespierre, Condorcet, and Danton) already have copious biographical material devoted to them. Still, Piercy confesses she has had to "create" and "imagine" some parts of all of their lives, particularly dialogues between the main characters and the novel's supporting cast. Piercy has a fabulous imagination and is a gifted storyteller. The novel opens with Claire's journey from a "small and dusty" town at the foot of the Pyrenees in 1780 to revolutionary Paris. For Piercy, Claire is the heroine of a novel that begins and ends from her perspective. The first third of the book familiarizes readers with the lives of the cast as they make their way to Paris. It's slow-moving, but the author provides just enough sex and violence, interspersed with the character's early personal histories, to hold the reader's interest. However, the story really takes off in revolutionary Paris, which comes off as a seething cauldron of greed, corruption, violence, inter-class hatred, political ambition, sexual licentiousness, conspicuous consumption and journalistic excess. Piercy skillfully guides the characters through this 18th-century Sodom and Gomorrah as they are all central--in varying degrees--to the unfolding events of the revolution. At times, she seems able to transform the reader into a participant, as in this passage describing the execution of King Louis XVI, told by Claire: Until last June, she had never seen the King except on gold coins....Now she would see him die....It struck her how new was this sense they all had of being actors in history, seeing themselves in a painting by David as the event was still occurring. Sanson and his son clutched Louis and laid him on his stomach in a wicker basket with his neck in the guillotine's lunette. The voices of the crowd rose in a furious, insect-like buzzing and then dropped almost to silence. Sanson stepped back and signaled his son. The blade dropped. A roar rose from those who could see. Louis' head fell into a small basket placed to catch it. Sanson drew out the head, holding it aloft by the hair to show the crowd. The roar grew louder until it seemed to vibrate through all the bones of her body. The ex-King was dead and there would be no more kings. They were truly a republic now, no going back. People rushed forward to dip handkerchiefs and scraps of paper in the blood. Some of his effects were auctioned off on the spot, the executioner's privilege. This is first-rate prose, indicative of Piercy at her best as she almost seamlessly balances lively, engaging story with equally vivid historical reality. City of Darkness, City of Light is a notable achievement of historical fiction, though not a flawless one. It is important for Piercy, and historically accurate, to underscore the pivotal role of women in the French Revolution. But Piercy overplays her hand. Women were important at key times throughout the French Revolution, but they were not its sole driving force. The real winners of the revolution were neither the women nor the men, but the people of Paris. The novel contains a number of important historical accidents which reveal the heavy hand of the author. Some niggling historical inaccuracies--for example, the novel's cover is Eugéne Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, a painting commissioned by King Louis-Philippe to commemorate the Revolution of 1830--are bothersome. Another inaccuracy allows Manon, a feminist, to admire the treatment of women found in Rousseau, one of the most anti-feminist figures in history. These objections aside, Marge Piercy's novel is an engaging, subjective look at a fascinating period in human history. Historical fiction is often like your first experience with cotton candy; it's big, fluffy, and insubstantial. But if readers of City of Darkness, City of Light can get through the appetizer, they'll be rewarded with a full-course meal and dessert besides.

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