Rooftoppers

Charles, Sophie’s guardian and companion throughout the novel, raises her singlehandedly from the age of one, when he finds her floating in a cello case after their ship goes down in the English Channel. Living by himself in an untidy, book-filled house in London, the eccentric Charles takes full charge of the parentless Sophie, ostensibly passing on to her some of his own traits: generosity, bookishness, awkwardness, and a fondness for things original, unconventional, and imaginative. The warm-hearted Charles, who is 36 years old when he rescues Sophie, has no clear strategy for raising her, telling the child welfare agents that his only plan is to “love her.” His schooling of her is piecemeal and sporadic (a little math, lots of poetry and William Shakespeare), as are their daily meals, housekeeping, and social outings. Absent-minded and heedlessly impractical, Charles pays scant attention to social norms, e.g., formal etiquette, time schedules, dress codes, and other rituals that enforce Victorian normalcy. As a result, the National Childcare Agency deems him an “absolutely unsuitable” guardian for 12-year-old Sophie, introducing the novel’s first crisis.

Charles certainly does not fit the mold of a Victorian parent, sharing none of the era’s strict, patronizing attitudes toward children and girls and women in general. Charles never condescends to Sophie and treats her as an equal, even encouraging her to keep secrets from him: “I am happy for you to have secrets. […] Secrets make you tough, and wily” (181). Though openhearted and slightly scatterbrained, Charles can also be resolute, even intimidating, when the moment calls for it. His six-foot-three stature alone commands respect (particularly in the book’s Victorian setting, when tall people are thought to be more trustworthy), as do his refined, “aristocratic” features: His “hooked eyebrows,” when lifted in quizzical disdain, can speedily “quell” a difficult clerk. His slender body also possesses remarkable physical strength, as when he throws Sophie and Matteo across a rooftop gap.

Though (confessedly) better versed in books than in people, Charles has charm in abundance, as when he quickly wheedles some information out of a police bureau secretary that proves useful in blackmailing her superior. His guile, stubbornness, and ability to reason make him not only an ideal protector of Sophie but also a crucial ally in her search for her mother. Not least, his offbeat openness to the improbable—manifested in his refrain, “Never ignore a possible” (124)—turns out to be essential to Sophie’s byzantine quest. However, the book implies that Sophie also needs other, fleeter allies if she hopes to uncover her origins. However childlike at heart, Charles is still an adult and therefore earthbound: He lacks the lithe, physical freedom to explore the city from above, not to mention the rooftoppers’ youthful ears and granular knowledge of Paris. Charles would be first to admit that the sky-treaders’ genius at ferreting out the city’s secrets are, so to speak, over his head.

The humorless Miss Eliot, the primary antagonist, threatens the idyllic bond between Charles and Sophie through the power invested in her by the National Childcare Agency. A child welfare agent more concerned with surfaces and appearances—skirts, buttons, cross-stitch, and “neatness”—than a parent’s love or a child’s happiness, Miss Eliot represents the dour pressures of Victorian conformity that threaten to break up Charles and Sophie’s eccentric but loving household. The “sort of woman who [speaks] in italics” (6), Miss Eliot oozes a strident self-righteousness, trumpeting her prim disapproval of Charles’s dusty, book-crammed abode and Sophie’s unladylike attire, among many other things. Her stolid, bureaucratic indifference to Sophie as a person shows itself in the boilerplate letter from the National Childcare Agency that she represents, which spells Sophie’s name wrong.

A pinched, straitlaced foil for Charles’s exuberant quirkiness and liberality, Miss Eliot embodies the polar opposite of his dictum to “never ignore a possible” (16). Scoffing at Sophie’s infant memory of her mother playing the cello, Miss Eliot insists that she’s being dishonest because all cello players are male. Her ironclad notions of gender roles, femininity, and social propriety are coldhearted and shallow; inspecting Sophie’s attire before an outing, she blurts, “I would be embarrassed to be seen with her” (22). Ironically, her “italicized” rudeness itself violates an ideal of Victorian femininity, i.e., demureness, which Sophie has picked up from the ever-polite Charles. It alone keeps her from berating Miss Eliot as a “potato-faced old hag” (14).

An unhoused French boy who befriends Sophie in Paris, Matteo becomes her closest ally in the search for her mother. He is a year or two older than Sophie and has lived for years on the rooftops of Paris, making his “home” on the vast slate roof of the city’s law court. Limber and strong, with an uncanny sense of balance, Matteo crosses easily from one rooftop to another, whether by jumping, by swinging on trees or drainpipes, or by tightrope. Consequently, he knows every cornice, bird’s nest, foothold, and slippery spot in Paris. Peering down from the heights on the glittering expanse of the city, he says, makes him feel like a “king.” For food, he has learned to hunt birds and to sometimes take vegetables from windowsills or mushrooms from the buildings’ gutters. Always cagey and alert, with a face “made up of sharp angles and eyes” (112), he refuses to leave the roofs or enter buildings or other enclosed spaces, saying that “you can’t get trapped on a rooftop” (139).

Matteo is slow to trust others and initially threatens to “hurt” Sophie if she doesn’t stay off the rooftops, which he regards as his domain. Eventually, he softens toward her when she explains that rooftops are a “clue” to finding her long-lost mother. Matteo himself is an orphan, whose only “family” is a small community of sky-treaders (Anastasia, Safi, and the sharp-eared Gérard) who also live above the streets of Paris. Only once has Matteo spent time in an orphanage, when he developed sepsis after a fight and had to seek treatment to save his life. The orphanage, with its barred windows and claustrophobic tedium, was “like hell” for him, and after escaping, he has labored to keep his very existence a secret, never venturing near street level. He also avoids the rooftops of the train stations, the home turf of the gariers, a violent gang of sky-treaders who try to keep others from living on the rooftops. Matteo lost the tip of his right forefinger in a knife fight with the gariers, a skirmish that also gave him the stomach wound that landed him in the orphanage. Guarded and wary as a result, he is nonetheless won over by Sophie’s fierce determination to find her mother by mastering the treacherous art of rooftopping. Eventually, he risks his life to escort her through the most dangerous span of rooftops—the realm of the gariers—so that she can complete her quest.