Violette has the unusual role of caretaker for the cemetery in the small French town of Brancion-en Chalon. With a tied house on site, the post was meant to be shared with her husband, but this idle philanderer, inaptly named Philippe Toussaint, rode out of her life on his motor cycle without warning nearly two decades previously.

In continual flashbacks, we learn how, born “Sous X” to an anonymous mother and brought up in children’s homes, the pretty but illiterate and unloved teenage Violette was an easy prey for control and exploitation by Toussaint. The birth of her daughter Leonine brings Violette great joy and a sense of purpose, but ties her more firmly to Philippe, until a tragic event which may also be a crime occurs.

Despite all this, the middle-aged Violette finds unexpected solace in the way of life which the cemetery provides: the ceremonies; the visitors; the incidents and anecdotes; the company of a team of undertakers, gravediggers and the Catholic priest with hearts of gold, if somewhat caricatured, and not least by the skill she has learned in planting her garden.

This novel has a filmic quality, no doubt due to Valerie Perrin’s work as a screenwriter, and her connection to the Director Claude Lelouch (of “Un Homme et Une Femme” fame). I wonder to what it extent it may have been inspired by John Irving’s “The Cider House Rules”, a book to which Violette appears to have become addicted.

A prize-winning bestseller in France, translated into many languages, “Changer l’Eau des Fleurs” (Fresh Water for Flowers) was the choice of my French reading group. I found the constant switches back and forth in time, including sub-plots to chart three often fraught love affairs over more than three decades, and clearly designed to build suspense, made it quite hard to keep track of the chronology – but by the end, this did not really matter. Also assuming different points of view, these flashbacks led to constant repetition, perhaps also intended to help the reader. A tendency to reel off a string of examples, when or two would do, and the inclusion of lengthy extracts from the lyrics of popular songs, contributed to the padding out of this book to 660 pages for a somewhat misnamed “Livre de Poche”. Admittedly, by checking out some of the singers on YouTube, I learned a little more about French popular culture.

Similarly, the novel is packed with colloquial idioms, but the desire to improve one’s French was stretched to the limit by the sense of being bombarded with melodrama, and some beyond ludicrous scenes, as when Violette, having somehow learned to ride a monocycle, scares the wits out of some noisy teenagers holding a midnight party in the cemetery, by careering down the alleys between the graves, draped in a shroud decorated with phosphorescent paint, a flashlight whistle between her lips. This was one of the points where I nearly abandoned reading, yet others have singled it out as hilarious. On the other hand, I appreciated a whole chapter devoted to random snatches of conversation heard by Violette as she gardened.

So, if one is not a reader who seeks to escape into a lengthy, sentimental soap opera, where flawed individuals sometimes redeem themselves, where events are often the result of tragic ironies, but the human spirit can survive with remarkable resilience despite it all, you can always choose a novel at the other end of the scale, like one of Claire Keegan’s, instead.