Illuminated by a golden age - The Jewish Chronicle

Many novelists who delve into the past are drawn time and again to particular historical moments. There's something in them they want to elaborate or chase down, though the exact reason isn't altogether clear: I think of Sarah Dunant's Italian Renaissance or Hilary Mantel in the court of Henry VIII. But the times and their conflicts fascinate and also shed a light on the present.

My period is the one known as the Belle Époque (from 1871–1914) and it has fascinated me ever since I wrote a dissertation, partly on Proust, but also on Henry James and Robert Musil, in my postgraduate years. The epoch's name came retrospectively - after the horror of the Second World War made the prior period of some 40 years of relative peace seem exceptionally golden throughout Europe.

The arts, sciences, literature, popular entertainment, and architecture had time to flourish. As for technology, the period gave us everything from the railway and the underground to the electric light (and sewing machine), telegraphy and the telephone, not to mention those huge steam liners that brought the new world closer to the old.

But it's not only for its bustling creative energies and beauties that I'm fascinated by the Belle Époque, though these are undeniably attractive. To me, the period seems to be the crucible of the modern, the very moment when the forces of our own modernity were brought into distinctive play.

France had become a Republic, like the United States, and how citizens could be educated into the duties of democratic citizenship was a burning question for both countries. So, too, as in the UK and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was the question of women's role, rights and sexuality, and the attendant matter of the stability of the family.

The period introduced us to mass migration

The secular was winning ground from the power of the Church. The control of religion over education, conscience, as well as the body, was first slowly and then more quickly being eroded. Class was inevitably in dispute and the question of economic and social justice - as well as extensions to democracy - was fought out in local trade unions as well as socialist internationals.

There's more. The period gave us a first insight into what the mass migration of peoples might look like. Jews, fleeing the pogroms in the Pale of Settlement, ended up in burgeoning European capitals and in America. Starved farm workers moved to cities and many Germans, Italians, Poles, and Irish steamed across the Atlantic to the land of the free. What does it mean to live side by side with strangers?

In France, the question of the Jewish Captain Dreyfus's guilt or innocence over a charge of treason split the nation and had reverberations throughout the West. It was the moment when a scientific discourse of race came into being. "Otherness" took on a new and not always friendly interest. This informed the nascent mind sciences, which took on increasing importance in the 20th century and our present.

While Vienna's Freud explored our unruly unconscious, murky desires, taboos, projections on to the other, and the potentially toxic brew that family life can sometimes be, psychiatrists in France and elsewhere were hypothesising that neurasthenia and hysteria, conceived as hereditary ills, might have particular links to those wandering Jews. Designations of mental health and disorder ever reflect the time's idea of order.

I've explored all this in my cultural histories, such as Mad, Bad and Sad and Trials of Passion. When it came to writing my thrillerish trilogy - first Paris Requiem, then Sacred Ends and the book I'm now in the midst of Manhattan Noir -- all this became the wider world in which my characters move.

What came into disturbing focus was the way they moved and why: what does it mean to inhabit a world where, for example, women's movement is restricted by the very clothes they wear; where prohibitions about body and sex abound; where duty is an injunction - rather than pleasure as in our own day? Where, despite a newly rampant democratic and tabloid press, the dividing line between what was public, what private, is so very different.

The limits on behaviour and formalities of the past throw our own relative lack of them into relief and shine a light on contemporary cultures where these are still in place. But story and character are ever primary in the canvas of the novel, whatever its setting. For those, though, you need to read the fictions.