[In the following review, Rapping offers positive evaluation of City of Darkness, City of Light.]

Marge Piercy writes a lot of novels. Each is refreshingly political, in the most blatant （as opposed to subtly subtextual） sense. Each is passionately feminist. Each—most remarkably—is written, and successfully marketed, for a mainstream audience.

I am, I confess, a Piercy admirer and fan. But I read each new novel with my fingers crossed. For as admirable as her efforts are, she doesn't always hit the mark. Works like Woman on the Edge of Time, Small Changes and her recent The Longings of Women are to me classics of feminist fiction which can open a reader's heart and mind to radically new views of the world. But others simply fail to catch fire. Their characters remain abstractions, their ideas prosaic and preachy

As I read City of Darkness, City of Light—an ambitious, dense and demanding rewriting of the history of the French Revolution which includes and integrates the roles and perspectives of some of the many women involved—I could not decide, for quite some time, which category it belonged in. Was it a work that large numbers of readers would find engrossing enough to stick with and learn from, or a misfire, doomed to be put aside in frustration and confusion—as I was tempted to do more than once? But one hundred or so pages into the book, I found myself, finally, riveted.

Piercy centers her narrative on six historical figures, from whose rotating points of view the revolution—and what precipitated and ensued from it—is seen. Pauline Léon is a Parisian chocolate shop owner who, as a child, witnesses the torture and execution of those who riot for bread, and goes on to become a leader of the radically feminist Revolutionary Republican Women. Beautiful Claire Lacombe escapes provincial poverty by joining a theatre group, and works with Pauline to make the voices of women and the poor heard during the Revolution. Manon Philipon—better known as Madame Roland—is a worshipper of Rousseau and the life of the mind who marries an aging bureaucrat and becomes a political force as his ghost-writer, strategist and salon hostess.

The men's names are more familiar: Maximilien Robespierre, the utopian idealist who, once in power, becomes the author of the bloodbath called the Terror; Georges Danton, opportunist and compromiser, Robespierre's comrade and sometime opponent; and Nicolas Condorcet, aristocrat, feminist and intellectual, who believes in the principle of constitutional law above all. Through these six characters, diverse in class, gender and political perspective, Piercy brings the blood and guts, the ideas and passions, of the revolution to life, with all its idealism, its contradictions and its ultimately horrifying failures.

The narrative begins with key incidents from each character's childhood. The earliest chapter is dated 1765, and the last 1812, some eighteen years after the story proper ends. Some events are familiar from the history books: the women's march on Versailles; the brief period of the Paris Commune, before the tragic decline of the revolution into the Terror; the execution of the radical Marat by the Girondin Charlotte Corday. Other incidents are personal, often marking formative moments in key characters' lives. We see the child Manon, taken to the home of an aristocratic lady, feeling shock and contempt at the superficiality of this supposedly superior being. We share young Max's disappointment and disillusion when he is chosen to represent his school at a celebration for Louis XVI and his queen, only to be sprayed with mud as the royal carriage, hours late, speeds past the waiting crowd without stopping. We listen in at the salon of the Condorcets, where such notables as Lafayette and Tom Paine gather, and on meetings of the radical Cordeliers and Jacobins, where political liaisons and strategies are hammered out. Each episode is clearly intended to reveal the characters' developing political agendas, as well as the human traits, values and flaws that drove them.

Every major and minor character, event and document has been prodigiously researched and portrayed in factual detail; Piercy even translates （with uneven success） actual speeches into contemporary English. As she explains in her “Author's Note,” she has imagined dialogue, thoughts and feelings with the help of diaries and letters from the period. A lengthy appendix summarizes key details about each character and organization.

Piercy has chosen to present this mass of emotional, historical and philosophical material in brief—three-to four-page—chronologically overlapping chapters of rotating personal narrative, a structural device that is often cumbersome and confusing. So much detail is stuffed into so limited a space that the reader must concentrate mightily to keep track of it all. It is particularly difficult, until far into the narrative, to get a sense of the key characters themselves, and the textures and intricacies of their relationships. One longs to linger on the emotional and dramatic meat of each situation, to see the nuances of political and emotional conflict and contradiction spun out into deeper, richer dramatic patterns.

These are the novel's flaws. But they are largely, if gradually, compensated for by Piercy's masterful employment of shifting points of view. We see and hear each event, often several times, from different characters' perspectives, revealing the nuances of class and gender difference that are the meat of the story.

Danton, for example, portrayed as an uncouth sensualist used to manipulating and conquering women of his own circle, is thwarted in his attempts upon both Manon and Claire. Recognizing Manon as the political force behind her increasingly conservative Girondin husband, he sets out to seduce her in order to win her over politically. “She has a gorgeous bosom. Nice arms. Nice eyes. Her husband doesn't fuck her, I can tell. I'll get her on our side,” he tells a more radical Cordelier comrade. But Manon's version of their relationship is very different: “She could hardly bear to look at him. … Several times he put his huge hot hands on her shoulder, her arm. Once he dared touch her posterior, giving her a pat as though she were a pack animal. She almost slapped him but political considerations … prevented her. Instead she glared and he withdrew at once, looking, she could swear, slightly puzzled.”

With the sexually independent Claire, Danton manages a night in bed, but again is left unsatisfied and puzzled. “She was sensual without being jaded, accomplished without a hint of whorishness,” he thinks. “But she did not admire him as he liked to be admired … She had a critical eye he disliked in a woman … She was good at sex, but he did not think she would be good at loving.” And, to further his bewilderment, “She left early in the morning, not lingering for breakfast or expecting a present.”

Piercy dwells on the subtleties and contradictions of this revolution, in which women and the working classes, participants for the first time in politics, continuously confound and finally enrage the male leaders—aristocrats as well as those, like Robespierre and Danton, who have risen to power from the middle class.

Social and political differences become emotionally concrete through Piercy's use of these rotating points of view. The gulf between the relatively elitist, anti-feminist Manon, who dislikes all women's groups and prefers to wield power from behind the office of a man, and the independent, necessarily self-sufficient working-class Pauline and Claire, is dramatic. So are the shortcomings of the aristocrat Condorcet: a true feminist in his own marriage and a believer in equality for all in the abstract, he nonetheless cannot fathom the rage, nor stomach the uncouth style, of those for whom bread and price controls mean so much more than the linguistic elegance of his painstakingly written constitution.

Piercy, here as always, remains true to the ideals which drove her as a feminist and New Left activist in the sixties. “Why write about the French Revolution?” she asks in her “Author's Note.” “For me, modern politics, the modern left began there as did the women's movement … I have been passionately involved in left and women's politics,” she writes, “and I knew all of these characters very well, under other names of course. What went wrong, personally and politically, is thus fascinating to me, and I hope to you.” For “women have fought again and again for causes that, when won, have not given us the freedom, the benefits we expected.”

As Piercy sees the revolution, it is at once heroic and tragic. Committed to an abstract belief in radical democracy, it is nonetheless flawed by its leaders' inability to see beyond their own class and gender interests, and by the propensity of those in power—like the despots they overturn—to resort to brutality in the interest of maintaining their own position.

Each of the major male characters, and Manon among the women, is viewed by Piercy with a mixture of respect, admiration and growing disdain, as youthful idealism gives way to hypocrisy, self-aggrandisement and a narrowing of vision. Manon, for example, is a model of what present-day feminists would call a token woman, content to serve a male order as long as she herself prospers and rises to power and influence. Only the radical women, Pauline and Claire, represent what seems to be Piercy's own position on the revolution and on democratic politics generally. Only they fight unreservedly for true democracy as it would be practiced in a world in which both male and class privilege disappeared, but not at the price of committing random, inhuman violence.

It is not only the past that Piercy hopes to illuminate, but also the present. “Americans live in an increasingly violent society that is inured to violence （as eighteenth-century France was） and one in which the top is growing ever richer and further in every way from the vast bulk of the population,” she writes. “I thought looking at a society in crisis so very strange in some ways and so familiar in others might illuminate our own situation.” Thus while gender issues are highlighted in the book, they, like everything else, are seen and understood most dramatically through the lens of class and in the context of violence—its roots, its dynamic and its results—as practiced by those in power and those permanently disempowered. For it is the failure of the middle and upper-class revolutionaries to hear and respond to the demands of the women and the poor that fuels the downward spiral of mass violence, turning the ideals and hopes for democracy into a massive bloodbath of uprisings and executions.

Piercy understands the frustrations of the poor and voiceless, and why they turn, inexorably, to violence. But she also documents the hopelessness of such desperate measures. There is something truly terrifying in her incessant, graphic chronicling of one bloodbath after another, one brutal execution after another. So fully does violence ultimately take over the narrative that the famously symbolic death of Marie Antoinette is barely given a moment's notice, so inconsequential is it among the multitude of executions of the lesser-known. Instead, it is the guillotining of Manon Roland, and then of Robespierre, whom we have come to know intimately and view with shifting emotions of admiration, affection, contempt and compassion, that is most shocking and unforgettable.

It is not on this note of tragedy and defeat that Piercy chooses to end her narrative, however, but one of feminist idealism and hope. For in the coda, we find Claire and her longtime female lover, now retired to a farm, entertaining Pauline, now the conventional wife of the radical comrade she has married. “We did make a new world,” says Claire. “Just not exactly the one we intended. It's a bigger job than we realized, to make things good and fair. It won't be us who finish it. But we gave it a pretty good start before we lost our way.” And Pauline agrees. “I remember and I make sure my daughters know, it was old biddies like we are now and young women who brought the King down. We are the Revolution, ladies, and we carry it in our blood to the future.”

Having come to the end of the narrative, the reader is struck by a methodological, or perhaps ethical, problem. Piercy has constructed out of the stuff of eighteenth-century history a story which is meant to say something about our own time—something which may or may not be true. Is hers a fair reading of the French Revolution? Unlike her other historical fictions—Gone to Soldiers comes to mind immediately—this book portrays real people, not fictional constructs. What are the sources for Piercy's ambitious, perhaps presumptuous, reconstructions of so many events and ideas and motivations, experienced by so many historical personages? Whose reading of the period is she drawing upon? Where are the footnotes?

As a reviewer who is in no sense an expert on the French Revolution, I confess to feeling somewhat uncomfortable about this. City of Darkness, City of Light presents a version of history that reads and feels— intentionally—like a reading of our own 1960s history as told by a militant Left feminist, which of course Piercy was. Is it good history? Is Piercy justified in giving radical feminism so early and clearly articulated a life? Are the various factions and leaders of the time really as similar to those of our own recent past as she portrays them? I admit that I don't know.

But putting those thorny issues aside, one may still ask if Piercy has written a good novel. I think for the most part she has. If it is fair to use a past age, and the lives of those who created it, to make a statement about the politics of the present, then Piercy has done well by her material. She has illuminated and dramatized the failure of our own radical history, even as she has reminded us—at a time when it is difficult to recall such realities—of the truly idealistic and visionary impulses that fueled our activism, and especially of the centrality of feminism to that vision.