Chateau Laux

“Finding something and losing it too soon was much worse than never having had it in the first place....”

“If the same star could be viewed by two different people, or by the same person in two different places, under entirely different circumstances, was it indeed the same star after all?”

David Loux’s novel builds alongside Lawrence’s chateau to create a sometimes-charming and often-suspenseful narrative dealing with themes of religion, familial relationships, love, marriage, lust, the past’s influence on the present, home, war, and growing up. This novel starts with the charismatic Lawrence falling in love with Catharine and building a French-style chateau for them to live happily in. The novel takes multiple unexpected and tragic turns; the reader never knows what to expect next. For someone who is not typically a fan of historical fiction, I could not stop reading this novel. Truly a treat.

This beautiful piece of storytelling set in colonial times that will forever touch a reader’s heart and soul.

Colonial Pennsylvania, 1710 - 1715, Lawrence, a parentless young man who had been frequently demeaned by his grandfather, was rewarded by an inheritance of a prosperous brewery in Philadelphia. He hired a Native American guide to take him hunting in the wild, beyond the small farms and homesteads just on the fringes of the civilized world. When the guide decided to travel deeper into the wild lands, on his way north to the New York colonies, Lawrence remained behind to hunt alone, and during three solitary days he discovered the parts of himself not injured by his grandfather’s abuse. The imagery of this event in the novel is beautiful. “The wilderness didn’t judge. In aloneness, he found peace–if only for the moment–and his veins filled with a rushing motion, like the waters of a cold mountain stream.” On his way back to civilization, Lawrence became lost and a storm made him seek shelter at an isolated farm, just on the edge of the wild. The farmer, Pierre, and his family took him in. Pierre, older than Lawrence, old enough to be his father, had come to the colonies from France, carrying with him his own scars of family abandonment, which, like Lawrence, he wanted to leave behind. From here the story unwinds, narrated in alternating sections by Lawrence, Pierre, Pierre’s daughter, Catharine, Pierre’s son, Jean, and several smaller characters when warranted by the story’s twists and turns.

The writing in Chateau Laux is excellent, but what is most remarkable is the storytelling. The pacing in which the story is unfolded and the characters are revealed puts the reader in a comfortable chair, sitting in front of a roaring fire, mesmerized by the words in the narrative, and hoping that the storyteller will continue, without interruption, until the novel’s end. There are back stories, carefully placed, that bring the narrators to life and, in several instances, serve as portents of tragedy to come. Imagery is often employed to build the carefully constructed plot. An example is an observation made, upon Jean’s returning home to learn a dog had bitten Catharine, that “Ever quiet as it slipped into late afternoon, the day had the eerie apprehension of one thing ending and another not yet begun.” Pierre’s backstory is carefully layered into present events, and supports how important moments in the story are presented, like the arrival of Lawrence, Jean’s joining a militia, and a tragic fire. In Pierre’s past he mourned the loss of his mother, “putting her to rest while the drunken soldiers slept, placing her so deep she would never be disturbed.” He cannot forget how his father rode away to petition the king and then failed to return, or how he was shown kindness during his tenure in the tailor shop after arriving in Philadelphia. The mixing of the past and the present gives an emotional depth to the story it would not otherwise have. Pierre kept the history of his family in France close, the reader hears much of it in interior monologue, until the night before Jean left with the militia, when he told Jean about his ancestor Iñigo. This lays the groundwork for what is to come. He advised his son, “No matter the circumstance, remember that you are not an island of fear and despair.” Although delivered by Pierre as fatherly advice, this proves to be a powerful observation in the story made true by the struggles of all of the narrators. And for Pierre, the backstory of his life in France came together with his present life after the McDonall incident, when he made the self-observation that, “He had a family that needed his guidance, in spite of his shortcomings, and his father had come through for him, after all, these many years later, a whisper from the past, the voice of reason.” Lawrence did not have the good fortune of a father like Pierre’s. But Pierre in the end took on that role for Lawrence in a brilliant conclusion when he granted the Chateau, and in a symbolic manner, Lawrence, use of his name.

The character development in Chateau Laux makes the novel great. So many modern novels have poorly crafted characters, who are no more than skeletons, placeholders for cheap twists of plot and, sadly, social commentary. Chateau Laux is art, the best of creative writing, a lighthouse among dim lights. A reader will feel Pierre and Lawrence, and the rest of the narrators, in his or her heart and soul. They become real people in a real story, and the moral a reader can take away is, as it should be, a moral composed by the reader, and not dictated by the author. It is a miracle of sorts, that the world is given such a beautiful work by David Loux, an event not unlike the birth of twin foals.

Mark Zvonkovic is the author of A Lion in the Grass and The Narrows. More information at www.markzvonkovic.com.

I received this from Netgalley.com.

"Inspired by a shocking incident in 18th Century colonial America, Lawrence Kraymer is a young entrepreneur from a youthful Philadelphia."

Interesting story which is based on a true event in 1785. I felt the writing was a bit choppy in places. Overall, a good read and I would recommend this book.

3.25☆