Blind passion
Virginia Llewellyn Smith
The Children Henri Troyat, trans. Anthea Bell (Alden Ellis £7.95)
Henri Troyat, biographer of Tolstoy land other Russian writers, is little known as a novelist this side of the Chan- nell, except perhaps for La Neige en Deuil, a well-told tale of totally expected heroism in high places, chiefly memorable for the dim melancholy of its title. Anthea Bell, who knows her stuff (as one would expect from the co-translator of Asterbc) has sen- sibly supplied Troyat's latest novel, Le Pain de L'Etranger with an English title that is less evocative but also less pretentious.
Pierre is a middle-aged, childless widower and a successful dentist. In Paris he has a well-preserved, 'leonine' mistress of in- dependent mien, and outside Paris a large house with a Portuguese couple to run it. Miguel tends the swimming pool, and Maria serves Pierre his cheese omelette while he reads La Rochefoucauld.
His days, refulgent with the gloire of private practice are interrupted by Maria's being run over and killed; then, one after- noon when 'time dragged by from one pat- ient's jaw to another', Pierre comes face to face with the cavity in his own life, and sets about plugging it with her motherless children, Amalia and Frederic. He is drawn into a close relationship with them, not — as he thinks — on account of their personal qualities, but because almost by accident — through their acquiring a stray dog, through Frearic's visible need, after a severe illness, of 'a good rare steak' — they become for Pierre the building-blocks of a foyer, a substitute for something reassur- ingly comfortable that he lost when his wife died. We sense, and not for the first time in Troyat's fiction, a pervasive nostalgia for the cosier aspects of childhood, a vague visceral longing to be well fed and tucked up, head beneath the blankets. It is not an apotheosis of childhood: on the contrary, as Miguel constructs a heavily symbolic wall round Pierre's domain, Pierre himself displays increasingly a childish narrow- mindedness and self-absorption, and is clearly headed for trouble.
What follows is a tragedie — according to the blurb on the French edition. I am not convinced. There are a lot of deaths for a short book; I cannot suppose that Troyat deliberately intends the reader to be as un- moved by each and every one of them as a small child would be, but his probe is simp- ly too delicate. Pain and blood seem out of place in a treatment carried out with such professional competence, and the novel fails to hit any nerve on the raw.
The same is true of La Neige en Deuil; but that does have an atmosphere, supplied by the mountain, and 'it adds so much', as an American lady observed on discovering the Alps in Switzerland. Pierre's drame lacks the grandiose backdrop. Theoretically he is the victim of a blind, misguided pas- sion, but he will stick, 1 fear, in the minds
of English readers as one remarkable for daring to say to his (replacement) house- keeper, `Mme Cousinet, you are an ex- cellent woman, but in future I must ask you to hold your tongue' — and they will think, how foreign, and how quaint.
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