THE MESSENGER by Megan Davis

THE PASSENGER

Megan David (megandavis.co.uk)

Zaffre (bonnierbooks.co.uk)

£14.99

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Alex Giraud has just spent seven and a half years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Now, back on the streets of Paris, he’s determined to get to the bottom of his father’s murder, and prove his own innocence and that of the friend who was accused of striking the fatal blow. Paris is a city under siege, a spate of terrorist attacks dividing the city into the “haves,” inside the Péripherique, and the “have-nots” outside. As Alex digs into his father’s final days he discovers that it’s all related, and that the attacks plaguing the city may not be what they seem. With two people dead because of what they knew, Alex finds himself playing a deadly game that doesn’t seem to have any rules.

Welcome to the City of lights as you’ve never seen her before. The Messenger, Megan Davis’ debut novel, takes us to Paris, and shows us the city’s dark underbelly through the eyes of Alex Giraud, a young Frenchman who’s a stranger in his own country, having spent the bulk of his formative years in America with his journalist father. As the novel opens, we find him visiting his father’s apartment with Sami, who flees the scene moments later covered in blood. The Alex of seven years later is a man in his mid-twenties whose youth was stolen from him, along with his father, on that fateful Christmas Eve. The story jumps back and forth in time, between the Alex of today on his quest to find the truth, and teenage Alex in the six months leading up to his father’s death. It’s sometimes difficult to get your bearings – which version of Alex are we watching right now? – which feels like a deliberate move by Davis to keep us on our toes, and to show how very little has changed in the intervening years.

Young Alex lives a privileged life, maybe not quite as rich as his school friends, but a far cry from the bread line. When he meets Sami by chance on the street, he discovers an entire side of Paris that few in Alex’s social circle will ever see. This is the world of tent cities – refugee camps filling the city’s liminal spaces – and people selling knock-off goods from carryalls on the roadside; petty criminals picking pockets, burgling easy marks, and selling drugs to rich kids like Alex and his friends. When we reconnect with Alex seven and a half years later, he’s living in a dodgy halfway house on the wrong side of the Péripherique – the Péri, as the locals know it. The city is a much more dangerous place now, seemingly under constant attack from Islamist terrorists. In one particularly intense sequence, Davis puts us in the centre of Paris as panic breaks out, and Alex and his friend find themselves following crowds, unsure of what is happening, or if they’re moving towards or away from the danger. A distant rattle that could be a machine gun; rumors of explosions on the Métro. Brilliantly handled.

The Messenger is a story about relationships, about family and friendship, and the people we become when we lose sight of what’s important. As the story progresses, it becomes clear just how much everything is interrelated, how many of these seemingly disparate characters are connected to each other in so many, often unexpected ways. At the centre is the dysfunctional relationship between Alex and his father which, in many ways informs the relationships Alex has with other people. Alex isn’t a particularly likeable character, but we find ourselves rooting for him regardless as he makes his way through a life in tatters, learning so much about himself and his family in the process. If Alex is unlikeable, then the people he encounters during the story are doubly so, and the reader feels a constant sense of unease and suspicion as we discover with every conversation that these people know more than they’re willing to reveal.

Megan Davis’ debut is a dark and intense ride through the dark side of Paris. There are times when it feels like a touch of humour or a little light relief might help to break up the otherwise relentless onslaught of horror and misery, but it’s interesting to see an author who just keeps tightening the thumbscrews so that we, as readers, get some small sense of how Alex feels. The Messenger is noir to its core, its many layers peeling back to reveal a gem of a mystery that makes the tough journey all the more worthwhile. Not one for your beach reads but definitely one that you’ll want to read.