The Red Necklace cover art

The Red Necklace

The French Revolution, Book 1

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The Red Necklace

By: Sally Gardner
Narrated by: Janet Suzman
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About this listen

 France 1789: a time of terror; a charismatic boy, Yann, who must find out who he is; the daring rescue of Sido, an aristocrat's daughter - these are the elements in this tremendous adventure by a consummate storyteller, a marvellous tale of the first days of the French Revolution.©2008 Sally Gardner (P)2009 Orion Publishing Group Ltd Fiction Historical Fiction Literature & Fiction Science Fiction & Fantasy Fantasy French Revolution

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If you can cope with your lead character (a fourteen year old gypsy boy, brought up by a polyglot, romany dwarf) reading peoples' minds, seeing the future and talking to animals so that they do his bidding, this books is for you. Three hours into it, I realise I should write off one audible credit and stop wasting my life. I'm afraid that Salmon Rushdie made magic and clairvoyance respectable in adult literature, but I can't take it, and this author can't do it.

For kids

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Once again, Sally Gardner returns to the French Revolution — this time not as a historical rupture but as a backdrop for a romanticised, moralised fantasy aimed squarely at a niche of older women haunted by the proximity of death and drawn to narratives of moral redemption. Though well written and neatly structured around the enigmatic Count Calliovsky, the novel exudes a fundamentally conservative worldview. The French Revolution is condemned for its bloodshed, with no real understanding of the material stakes of an uprising — or of the structural, systemic necropolitics it tried to undo.

The stupidity of the nobility is paradoxically redeemed through the wit and so-called purity of women, whose moral clarity is meant to shine through the fog of masculine decay. Men, in Gardner’s world, are either useless or adrift in their own privilege — but this critique never fully lands, because masculinity itself becomes a source of fascination. It’s not men she despises, but the wrong kind of men. Violence, officially condemned, is quietly eroticised: transformed into bullying, perversion, and the intoxicating energy that Gardner can’t help but be drawn to.

This is the central contradiction of the book: it moralises what it fetishizes. The very dynamics it wants to critique — domination, bloodlines, hereditary power — are precisely what fuel its narrative pleasure. Then there is the romanticised figure of the Gypsy, the peripheral outsider who becomes a vessel of ancient wisdom and alternative knowledge. But this gesture, too, raises questions: is there room in Gardner’s moral universe for true transformation from within, or must all change come from mystified alterity — the exotic, the impure, the displaced?

Sally Gardner and Her Peculiar French Revolution

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