5 posts tagged “france”
Translated by Sian Reynolds.
So I come to the last book I have to read that is on the shortlist for the 2009 International Dagger award. It’s French, and the first in the Adamsberg series that has already won Fred Vargas this award for two years in succession (2006 and 2007).
Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg has been, until the start of this novel, a provincial police inspector of great unconventionality but with an unusually high success rate in solving cases. Therefore, as the novel opens, he’s recently promoted to commissioner in the Parisian force, and we see his eccentricities through the eyes of his close colleague, Inspector Danglard – himself a single parent of two sets of twins and additionally looking after a fifth child belonging to but abandoned by his ex-wife and her lover. Adamsberg has an instinctive, bordering on supernatural, style, as is shown by an initial vignette in which he correctly identifies the criminal in a case long before any evidence is found to force a confession from the suspect.
Despite the internal and external strangenesses of the sensual Adamsberg and the lugubrious Danglard, the story told in The Chalk Circle Man is at its heart a straightforward police procedural. Someone is drawing chalk circles on the Parisian streets at night, leaving strange objects in their centres. Adamsberg’s forebodings about the person behind this activity are soon borne out when a murdered body is found inside one of the circles. Despite intensive police activity, other murders follow, at different parts of the city.
An eccentric range of suspects is assembled even before the first body is found. An academic whose research speciality is deep-sea fish, Mathilde, has a hobby of following people round the city. One of these characters, a beautiful blind man called Paul Reyer, has disappeared and Mathilde, professing to be worried, reports him as missing to the police. She is ignored by all but Adamsberg, who rapidly finds the “missing” man (not missing at all). Soon, Reyer and another wanderer on the streets, an elderly woman called Clemence, are lodging with Mathilde in her fish-obsessed house. Clemence is addicted to answering lonely-hearts adverts, but is perpetually disappointed because each time she arranges to meet someone, he immediately abandons the old woman on sight.
How these three oddballs are going to become involved in the chalk circle story is not clear – but involved they are, not only with the mystery but also, in Mathilde’s case, with Adamsberg in a much more personal sense. As events reach their climax, the author plays fair with her readers and provides a satisfying, if sad, solution to the bizarre conundrum. At the same time, the author has piqued the reader's interest in the affectionate relationship (mainly unspoken) between Adamserg and Danglard, two men of very different outlook, to be explored further in future novels.
Much has been written about Vargas's alternative universe. I see her characters as acting like children in adult’s bodies. This novel is a fable, in which people live out their impulses, creative or destructive, without thought of consequence. Nobody plans for the future, living in the existential present. Yet the motivation of the murderer is cold and logically carried out – and would pass muster in a novel firmly rooted in pedestrian reality.
The book is peppered with acute social observations; cynical yet funny barbs at the media and modern society (the excerpts from the newspaper reports of the chalk circles are hilarious); and myriad tiny delights – Mathilde’s plan to spend a day following a man who is interested in the mythical rotation of sunflower stems, Clemence’s pointed teeth for which Mathilde likes to provide zoological comparisons, or little exchanges between Adamsberg and Danglard about Byzantium and the emperor Justinian (actually highly relevant to the mystery). If the reader is prepared to take this world as it is, then the book is very satisfying. Its eccentricities are charming (though the author is ruthless within her creation, which is no fairy tale) – they are bound up in the pace and focus of the novel, rather than distracting the reader from these essentials.
Thanks to Karen Meek of Euro Crime for my proof copy of the book.
I didn't think I was going to like this book before I started it - I imagined a cross between a "cosy" mystery and a Peter Mayle-style expat's view of France - neither being quite my cup of tea. I couldn't have been more wrong. BRUNO, CHIEF OF POLICE may be a gentle book, but at the same time it does not pull its punches. It is well written, introducing a charming, likeable main character; a satisfying detective story; and conveying a strong love and understanding of the Dordogne region of France - its traditions, people, history and the forces that threaten them - by an author who, although English, has lived in the region part-time for some years and clearly identifies strongly with it.
As the book opens, we are introduced to Bruno, the chief and, in fact, only policeman in the small town of St Denis. He owes his position to the mayor, with whose son Bruno served in the army in Bosnia. The mayor's son is an academic and lives away from the region where he grew up, but Bruno, an orphan, is treated by the mayor as a kind of surrogate son. The affection between the two men is one of the many understated but rewarding aspects of this book.
Before getting stuck into the crime plot, Martin Walker introduces us in a leisurely style to the main concerns of the local people: to defeat the bureaucrats from Brussels in order to carry on their age-old traditions of making, and selling, duck pate, local vintages of various alcoholic types, cheeses and other produce now contrary to EU diktats. We are introduced to the market, the tennis and rugby clubs, the school and other local high spots such as a camp site, a cave with ancient paintings, and a cast of characters including a mad Englishwoman (who isn't mad), a baron and a doctor. Although portrayed with affection, we don't delve too far into sentiment: some of the locals are not above scraping the date stamps off supermarket eggs, smearing them with straw and chicken shit, and selling them individually at exorbitant rates to the tourists.
Bruno's job is to know every nuance of town life, stopping the farmers and traders from resorting to too many illegal activities while outsmarting the regulators and gendarmes in a range of smile-inducing ways. Because he is involved in many aspects of town life (for example he coaches all the young children in tennis, so knows everyone's character), this act isn't too challenging for Bruno, who carries off his daily tasks with aplomb while cultivating his garden and cooking mouth-watering meals.
The a brutal crime occurs, very different from the usual level of rescuing cats or redirecting traffic on market day: an old man is killed and a swastika carved on his torso. The victim is part of the local North African Arab community: his son is the maths teacher at the school and his grandson a local rugby star, himself about to become a father. The immediate assumption is that the crime is racially motivated, so reinforcements are called in from the regional crime squad and, less happily, from the Paris judiciary. Two suspects are rapidly identified, but although they are clearly guilty of some crimes, the police cannot tie them to the murder. In the meantime, temperatures between the Arab and French communities are rising, so Bruno and the mayor have their work cut out to make everyone understand that they are all French and that little is gained, and much lost, by mob rule.
The spectre of the war hangs over this book, set in a part of France once ruled by the Vichy government and where memories are long. In addition, there are newer political factions intent on gaining their own ends. Bruno, however, is only interested in learning the truth, not in convenient solutions. Although he is patronised by some of the more "modern" police and judiciary officially in charge of the investigation, Bruno's determination to solve the crime by finding evidence, combined with his strong local knowledge and interests, eventually pays off - though his deductive feat presents him with a moral dilemma that he brushes aside rather too lightly, in my opinion.
With his successful solution to the case, would Bruno, who lives a simple, even at times Spartan life, trade it in for ambition as well as love? He says "I think there are two kinds of people in this world. There are those who do their work for eight hours a day and they don't enjoy it and don't respect themselves very much for what they do. And then there are those who don't see much difference between their work and the rest of their lives because the two fit happily together. What they do to earn their living doesn't seem like drudgery to them. Around here there are a lot of people like that."
Although in many respects this is a "feel-good" book, providing an idyllic and partisan depiction of the French country way of life which exists still despite the efforts of the relentless modern world to homogenize it, the author is not afraid to address difficult issues head-on, personal and political. The stories of the French resistance in the Nazi regime and the fate of the French North Africans during the DeGaulle years are sombre, told with authority and style, as one might expect from an author who has written distinguished histories (as well as a previous novel about the famous prehistoric art in the caves of the region) and covered many international conflicts during his journalistic career. I am glad that BRUNO, CHIEF OF POLICE is the first in a series, as I look forward to reading more about this charmingly self-deprecating man, his past (plenty of angles are hinted at) and his neighbours - not forgetting, of course, his next criminal case.
The eccentric Commissaire Adamsberg and his team, with varying degrees of reluctance, are going to Canada to learn about DNA fingerprinting techniques from none other than the famed Mounties. Before leaving, however, Adamsberg learns of a death that strikes him with dread, for the victim has been killed by what appears to be a home-made trident, a method identical to that used by Adamsberg's bete noir, a serial killer called Judge Fulgence, who has been dead for more than ten years. How can a ghost have committed a murder? If you can't live with a trident as a murder weapon, you probably shouldn't read on, as there is much to follow that is even more bizarre.
Adamsberg had grown up in the same village as the judge. When he was a teenager, a young girl was killed, her death blamed on her boyfriend, Adamsberg's younger brother Raphael. Accused of the crime, Raphael managed to disappear before being convicted (partly helped by his brother), but Adamsberg became convinced that the judge was to blame and has (we are now told) spent a large part of his subsequent career trying and failing to convict the evil judge. The judge's network of contacts not only kept him safe from the law but, Adamsberg is convinced, framed other people for the crimes and, through blackmail, kept those people silent about the truth.
The new murder brings all this history to light. Adamsberg manages to alienate the local police investigating the crime by his insistence that the evil but dead judge is to blame. At this point, he and his team leave for Montreal and Adamsberg has to put his doubts on hold. The Montreal sequence of the novel is full of nice observational touches of culture clashes and character sketches, with an academic twist. Here is Adamsberg trying to distract his colleague Danglard from his terror of flying by persuading him to watch the plane's TV channel:
"There's a documentary about the precursors of the Italian Renaissance. That's for you, isn't it? The Italian Renaissance?"
"Already know all that stuff”, muttered Danglard, his expression fixed, his fingers still gripping the armrests.
"Even the precursors?"
"Know all that too."
In Canada, on one of his regular walks by the river, Adamsberg meets the Frenchwoman Noella, a rather unhinged person who has taken to hanging about there while she works to pay for her flight home after being abandoned by her lover. She drags a reluctant Adamsberg into an affair: even though Adamsberg doesn't seem to like or be attracted to Noella, he acts out of jealousy after jumping to conclusions when glimpsing Camille, a previous lover - who in one of rather too many coincidences that pepper this book, happens to be in the country playing in a string quintet.
When the course is over, the team returns to Paris, where Adamsberg becomes increasingly alienated because of his conviction that the judge is still alive and is continuing his killing spree. Then he is told to return to Canada with an unlikeable colleague, Lieutenant Retancourt, to help the Mounties with an investigation. When Adamsberg arrives, he finds himself accused of murder - of someone who has been killed in just the same way as one of the judge's victims. This is the part of the book in which Adamsberg is least sympathetic as a character, as all his efforts and thoughts are focused on himself and of his escape, and none at all for the victim, who he treats very callously. The character of Retancourt provides some welcome thrills and offbeat humour, but for me this whole episode is tainted by this coldness in which the victim is ignored and unmourned, it seems by everyone. In another unlikely coincidence, Adamsberg discovers that his long-lost brother Raphael is living in North America.
Adamsberg spends most of the rest of the book as a fugitive hiding out at the flat of old, loyal Clementine (a character from the previous book), with plenty of time to think. It isn't too hard for the reader to work out the basic outline of how and why Adamsberg has been put in this predicament: the pleasures of this book are not the rather weak mystery elements, rather they are the many charmingly eccentric aspects of a story which eventually unfold into Adamsberg's full realisation of how the crimes had been committed, and a final vindication.
There are far too many convenient coincidences: the reappearance of Raphael, Retancourt's ubiquitously helpful friend who can fake passports, the brilliant hacking talents of Clementine's ancient lodger who mysteriously manages to find out the answer to any question asked of her by a few hours on the internet, and other assorted conveniences. Look too close and the whole construct - a judge who can "die" and who over many years forces various doctors, lawyers and others to abet his crimes - is frankly risible. However, Vargas is such a charming writer that one can suspend belief and be carried along by her alternative universe, her telling observations of character and culture, and admire the house of mirrors she creates in this amusing and absorbing, yet cold, tale.
In the south east of France is a mountainous region of villages and sheep farms, where life is still lived the way it has been for centuries, and attitudes have barely changed. The invasion of wolves across the Alps from Italy is a source of fascination to the wildlife service and biologists, who observe their behaviour and track their movements with almost obsessive interest. One such biologist is a Canadian, Johnstone, who identifies totally with the wolves, giving them names and ascribing a personality to each, feeding rabbits to the one that is too old and toothless to kill his own prey.
Everything changes, however, when sheep are brutally killed, in what seems from the toothmarks to be an attack from a giant beast. A local woman believes that the perpetrator is a werewolf, but is herself killed the day after making the accusation. A hermit, Massat, vanishes - leaving behind in his hut a map that traces a twisting route through the region, including places where sheep have been killed.
Watchee is an old shepherd who worked for the dead woman, and Soliman is her adopted son, abandoned by a presumed African woman and a source of great strangeness to the locals. Watchee decides that Massat must be the werewolf: he and Soliman resolve to follow his trail to exact revenge. But they can't drive, so they persuade Camille, a musician, plumber and girlfriend of Johnstone, to go with them.
Most of the book describes the pilgrimage made by this odd trio up and down the rough, almost vertical tracks and hairpin bends of southern France in an old sheep truck, in which they live, sleep and eat. These idiosyncratic characters - never sentimental but nonetheless very appealing - share ideas about the crime, philosophise about their lives, and squabble about the best way to find their quarry - and what they will do when they find him.
The plot is completed by Commissaire Adamsberg, a policeman as idiosyncratic in his own way as the three "musketeers" wending their way towards a showdown with the person killing sheep and people. Adamsberg is himself on the run from a female putative assassin, but part-way through the book hooks up with his old flame Camille to help solve the mystery of the wolf-murderer. All four of these people contribute in their own ways to the final realisation of who is behind the crimes.
I've never read a book quite like this one. It is individual, charming and absorbing, yet certainly not "cosy" or twee - to the contrary, it is more often ruthless and unflinching. There is a dash of romance, wry humour, philosophy, plenty of detective work, strong characterisation and a satisfyingly original story, all wrapped up in about 250 small-format pages. A reader could want no more.
Originally published in French in 1995, translated into English (by Margaret Crosland and Elfreda Powell) in 2001, set in 1980, ROUGH TRADE is a blistering police-procedural novel set in the Sentier district of Paris, home to the rag trade. The Turkish community of illegal immigrant workers is mobilising to demand proper status and rights, led by Solieman, a handsome young political refugee. The book is written as a series of calendar entries over the period of a month: quick-fire, upfront, brutal, even crude - yet not salacious or gratuitous.
At the outset, a very young Thai girl is brutally murdered. When drugs seem to be involved, Inspector Daquin is called in to investigate. In a breathtaking series of set-pieces, each following on before the reader can draw breath from the last, Daquin and his team uncover a vast network of drug running, murder, Islamic militancy, prostitution, American CIA spying, police corruption, fraud and smuggling. At the same time, the Turks are threatening to disrupt the city in a series of demonstrations and militant actions to force the slow pace of their integration into French society. Daquin begins an affair with Solieman, at first so that he can infiltrate and control the Turks, but soon out of genuine affection and even love. The men's relationship is passionate yet touching - and ultimately useful to both parties.
The story is told in a completely unsentimental way. There are no straight heroes in this book, the police are just as capable of raping a woman as the villains, and beating up female witnesses is par for the course. The interplay between the police is so vivid: everyone is prey to their impulses, whether drinking, eating, or stronger pursuits. Yet Daquin and his team have their own integrity: when they begin to suspect some of their own colleagues of being involved in some of the crimes that surround them, they don't hesitate to act. I don't think there is a sober, boring character in the book - even the accountant called in at an early stage by Daquin to go through everyone's accounts has an amused tolerance, even admiration, for the unconventional methods and events played out around him.
As well as the zesty plot, it is fascinating to read the political background of the drug trade in the middle east and the plight of the Turkish economic migrants, combined with the growing threat of religious fanatical terrorism, particularly with the hindsight of the 12 years that have passed since the book was originally written.
ROUGH TRADE is an excellent crime novel. It is written in an unfalteringly assured style (it is hard to believe it is a first novel), the overlapping mysteries are realistically conveyed and the outcomes believable, the characterisation is strong, and there is real emotion in some of the stories, moving and tragic, that are played out in the pages.
