Prize-winning novels from France
Anita Brookner
With an extraordinary effect of unanimity several of this autumn's novels deal with the troubled period of the Occupation and the Vichy government: Francois Thibault's Notre Dame des Ombres (Le Cherche-Midi), Marc Lambron's 1941 (Grasset), Lydie Salveyre's La Compagnie des Spectres (Seuil), and, indirectly, Jacques-Pierre Amett's Les Deux Leopards (Seuil). A far cry from the new wave of compassion urged on us by Messrs Blair, Hague and Portillo, this crise de culpabilite is a bitter adult affair which has left everyone with an uneasy conscience. The Sartrean concept of bad faith was in fact less an ethical invention than a malady that afflicted the whole nation, now reflected in honourable attempts by novelists (more honourable than Sartre's attempts) to come to terms with a phenomenon which they could not have known at first hand.
Possibly the most representative, though the gentlest, is Jacques-Pierre Amette's Les Deux Leopards, in which a woman graphic artist is given a retrospective in her native town of Caen. She finds that the man who denounced her during the war is now an eminent citizen, responsible for the reconstruction of the city after the bombardments, worldly, affable, and well regarded. The point of the novel, or what I take to be the point, is that she does not know what to do about this, and therefore says nothing. Each is aware of what the other is thinking, but, after all, denuncia- tions are a thing of the past. This dilemma, carried off beautifully by innate good man- ners, must have been experienced so widely as to be a commonplace. French friends shrug and defend themselves against it; writers of fiction, to their credit, do not. Les Deux Leopards is not a particularly memorable novel but it is an interesting one, and the interesting thing about it is the degree of civilisation needed to bring it off. This is both the grain of sand in the oyster and the pearl it might become. The tone throughout is thoughtful and moder- ate. Similar accommodations exist in Marc Lambron's 1941, which teaches the value, the duty even, of being on both sides at once. Pierre Bordeaux (the name is surely not without significance) is a young diplo- mat in the year in question. His depart- ment is evacuated to Vichy, where he is in a prime position to observe the physical and moral goings-on in comparatively elite company. A love affair with a half-Italian, half-Hungarian psychoanalyst enables him to be of value to the Resistance without blowing his cover. This love affair is the only fictitious element in a narrative which is mainly documentary; excessive name- dropping (le name-dropping') makes it a tedious read, as does the device of the narrator being given access to his girl- friend's diplomat father's secret memoirs. Again, civilised values are observed throughout. One longs for a little whole- some vulgarity to break through.
Break through it does in Lydie Salveyre's wonderful La Compagnie des Spectres, which is altogether more original. A bailiff enters a flat in a Paris suburb in order to make an inventory of the contents with a view to repossession. He is interrupted in this task by a madwoman in a dirty night- dress who erupts from the bedroom to accuse him of being a snooper from the Milice or even a delegate from Marshal P6tain (`Putaire) himself. Picking his way impassively through the obsolete toaster, old shoes, and broken photograph frames which constitute a good part of the owner's possessions, and deaf to the embarrassed excuses of the madwoman's daughter, Louisiane, he is subjected to a magnificent diatribe against the erstwhile forces of order. At the heart of this there is the mur- der of a brother, the abusive treatment of a mother, and ample proof that in the Vichy years there were many home-grown agents who did the Milice's work, delighted to find their gangsterism given legitimacy by what was understood to be a patriotic duty. The beauty of this novel lies in its uninhibited flow of furious language, and a sense that a kind of justice is being tardily done. The bailiff, who has listened to all this without a word of protest, is finally manhandled out of the flat, leaving mother and daughter breathless and triumphant. An invigorating novel, in which primordial feelings (the author is a psychiatrist) are awarded their just deserts.
More immediately attractive is Pascal Bruckner's Les Voleurs de Beaute (Grasset) which won the Prix Renaudot. This is a Gothic novel based on an interesting idea: the resentment felt by the old and dilapidated towards the young and beautiful. Simply and persuasively written, it is basically a Grimm fairytale, strikingly old-fashioned and appealing in a politically correct age. A young doctor on night duty at the Hotel-Dieu is confronted by an agitated patient wearing a mask. He has of course a story to tell, which at first she refuses to take seriously: lost travellers, a strangely welcoming house on the Franco- Swiss border, a kidnap, a very didactic justification on the part of the kidnappers, a deformed manservant, a partial escape, and eventually back to reality and the Hotel-Dieu.
But the story does not end there. I enjoyed it enormously. This is a novel for the credulous and the landlocked, but one would be unwise to overlook the charm of an unsentimental and agreeably straight- forward style. A message here, perhaps, for the over-ambitious: novels still convince on the strength of the story-teller's voice.
The Prix Medici was won by Philippe Le Guillou for Les Sept Noms du Peintre (Gallimard) and the Femina by Dominique Noguez for L'Amour Noir (Gallimard). Finally, the Prix Goncourt went to Patrick Rambaud, who also won the Prix de l'Academie Francaise: a double first. La Bataille (Grasset) was a subject first moot- ed by Balzac and never undertaken. The battle of Essling, near Vienna, was one of Napoleon's spectaculars (40,000 dead) in 1809; history has judged it to be his first defeat. Meticulous research — no detail is left unexamined — has invested this account with the allure of an epic, and an epic enlivened by real people: Marshals Berthier, Lanne and Massena, Stendhal, the painter Lejeune, and of course Napoleon himself. The traditional tone of this novel — high, but perhaps not quite high enough — seems to have star- tled the jury into a show of respect, a Tol- stoyan take on the past being rather rare these days. Rambaud is now said to be preparing a novel on the retreat from Russia, which should take him the rest of his life. More prizes, no doubt, will be expected.
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