Continuing my reposts of my reviews from the late lamented website The Life Sentence (now offline), here's an overview of Pierre Lemaitre's first 3 twisty thrillers.
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In
his Commandant Verhoeven Trilogy, Pierre Lemaitre has set out to investigate
the history and the possibilities of crime fiction, and noir in particular. In Irène
(2014), the narrator offers an analysis of the career of James Ellroy that
could serve as a description of noir writing in general: as his “style evolved,
it became more savage, more visceral as Ellroy began to trade in inhumanity at
its most elemental. The seediest districts of the city became a metaphor for a
desperate, disillusioned humanity. Love took on the acrid taste of urban
tragedy.” Yet Lemaitre refreshes these tropes of noir by turning them inside
out. Irène takes crime fiction not only as the genre of the story but
also the subject and the structural principle of the novel. In Alex (2014),
the author twists and re-twists an abducted woman’s relationship to both the
perpetrator and the police until the story reaches a final clarity. In Camille,
all the principal characters are lying, to each other, to themselves, and even
to the reader: Lemaitre is making clear the importance of prevarication (as
well as unreliable narrators) in crime writing.
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But
in no way are these books a dry exercise in crime fiction writing or a farcical
metafictional jest. Each of the novels, and all three as a group, are among the
very best French crime novels to be translated into English so far (and there
is some very strong competition). The first installment in the series, Irène,
begins with the case of a battered woman but moves on very quickly to the
principal plot, the case of a horrific murder and dismemberment of two women in
an apartment on the periphery of Paris. As the gruesome details of the murders
accumulate and Commandant Camille Verhoeven of the brigade criminelle
pursues the few leads in the case, a reader with a heavy heart may come to the
same conclusion as the Commandant, who early on in the story “feels immensely
weary, because this whole thing is predictable, banal.” The violence against
women, the murder of prostitutes, the pursuit of suspects among the pimps,
property developers, and petit bourgeoisie seems all too typical of the genre,
a run-of-the-mill serial killer story distinguished mostly by the Parisian
setting and the quirky team of detectives. Verhoeven himself is a tiny man,
whose growth was stunted by his artist mother’s tobacco habit, but the
quirkiness of the detective and his colleagues is itself typical of the genre
(think of Fred Vargas’s Adamsberg, another eccentric French detective of small
stature). However, Lemaitre’s book is more than the simple depiction of the
“universe of carnage, peopled by impulsive psychopaths, shady deals, and old
scores settled,” as the detective himself announces. Lemaitre is less concerned
with displaying all the sadistic, misogynist carnage and more interested in
pursuing the essential nature of crime fiction and of the relationship of the
storyteller to the reader, but a subtext of the whole trilogy is the dependence
of crime fiction on violence against women.
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After
the double murder becomes linked to an earlier murder by the “rather American
exoticism” of the crimes as well as a fingerprint match in both cases, another
connection between the crimes comes gradually into focus: both crime scenes
seem patterned on literary precedents, well-known novels by James Ellroy and
Bret Easton Ellis. Thus the press dubs the killer “the Novelist.” From that
point on, the brigade criminelle relies on information provided by
sources such as one character’s “authoritative introduction to crime fiction,”
and another’s survey of the novels published in Gallimard’s famous Série
Noire.
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After
other crimes, present and past, prove to be based on Scottish, French, and
Swedish crime classics, the narrative itself turns inside out: the team of
detectives discovers that the killer has been keeping a journal of his murders,
and Lemaitre refers to a detail of his own life that the killer gets wrong, a
detail that makes us suddenly question who has been telling the story we’ve
been reading up to that point. Lemaitre upends the book in a logical and
devastating way, while ultimately remaining true to the pact between the author
and the reader, not in the same way but in the same spirit perhaps as Agatha
Christie’s notorious ending of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, when the
narrator turned out to be spectacularly unreliable. The writer in both cases
reminds us of the narrativity of the text — that we’re only seeing what the
narrator wants us to see — while maintaining the credibility and the emotional
truth of the story.
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In
Alex, which takes place four years after the events of Irène,
Commandant Verhoeven is a wreck, devastated by the loss of his wife and
unwilling to take on anything with living victims, accepting only, “Cases where
the deaths are behind you, not in front. No kidnappings. Camille wants his dead
well and truly dead, corpses with no comeback.” But the brutal kidnapping of a
young woman (Alex), which opens the book, occurs when Verhoeven’s replacement
as head of the brigade criminelle is out of town, and the diminutive Commandant
is tricked by his boss and friend, Divisionnaire Le Guen, into taking the case
temporarily, with the inevitable result that it becomes his case. For the first
third of the novel, the narrative alternates between the frenzied pace of
police procedure, in the effort to save the kidnapped woman, and the portrayal
of the brutal conditions of her captivity. As in the beginning of the previous
novel, we are on standard plot territory here, a woman severely confined and
tortured by a thuggish man who repeatedly says, “I’m going to watch you die,
you filthy whore.” But as her torment and the investigation proceed, both Alex,
the victim, and Camille, the investigator, realize that there is a link between
the kidnapper and his captive. Their pursuit of this link provokes disastrous
action by the police, but also a prefiguring of the sudden shift in the middle
portion of the book that turns the story on its head: a shift that overturns
both the woman-as-victim narrative and the entire genre of the serial killer (all
the while remaining full of terror and torture).
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In
the third section of Alex, Verhoeven is following her not in the present
but in her past, seeking the roots of her actions and personality, in large
part through a long series of interviews with her brother (perhaps a reference
to the extended interrogation in Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s Roseanna, also
referred to in Irène). The awful truth that Camille discovers will
explain all of the book’s twists, and lead to yet another twist in the story.
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Camille,
which has the most straightforward plot of the three novels, takes the
Commandant back to the beginning of the trilogy: “His first wife was murdered,
a tragedy from which he took years to recover. When you have faced such an
ordeal, you assume that nothing more can happen to you. This is the trap.”
Again, the ordeal happens not directly to him, but to the new woman in his
life, Anne Forestier, who walks in on a jewelry store robbery and is beaten
nearly to death. No one in the police knows about his new relationship,
allowing Camille to step in as lead investigator, a lapse in personal and
professional judgment that will leave his life in tatters.
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The
story of Camille is a three-day race against time, as the jewelry store
robber seems determined to return to kill the witness and Camille pushes toward
preventing him from doing so. The narrative focus is divided among an
increasingly irrational Commandant, the surviving but terribly hurt Anne, and
the man who attacked her (who gives us his story in his own voice). All three
narratives explore the extreme violence that Anne suffers and its echoes in the
story of Irène, and the lies that all of them are telling each other (as well
as the truths they are all withholding from the reader) create overlapping
dramatic ironies as well as contributing to the tension driving the story
forward.
But
even when we see the story from the points of view of Anne and her attacker,
the overlapping of Camille’s past and present draws us back to Camille as the
center of everything. There is a brutal honesty in the Commandant’s focus on
himself: he feels responsible for Anne, but what he feels is not really
sympathy but regret for what he has himself lost: “The woman who lies swollen
and bandaged before him now has nothing of the magic, all that remains is the
outer shell, and ugly, terribly prosaic body.” Even her own betrayal is
ultimately less important to him than his loss of the “magic” of their affair.
For all the violence against women in the trilogy (as in much crime fiction),
it is Camille’s self-absorption that leads the narrative down into disaster and
a final resolution. Having wrecked his career by lying to everyone in order to
maintain control of the pursuit of the attacker, and having used the attacker’s
own strategy to finally turn the tables on him, Camille reaches an abject state
of loss that makes it possible for him to confront his own history, in
particular the parts played by his mother and his wife. In Camille’s story
there is a horrible assertion of male ego. This man of boy-like stature, having
hidden his damaged lover in his mother’s studio in the forest (also the site of
his wife’s murder) achieves a catharsis at the cost of several women’s misery.
But that is a truth that the Commandant does not face. Lemaitre’s trilogy takes
apart the structure of noir fiction and puts it back together in a new way but
remains, like Camille (in his professional capacity), dependent on the genre’s
reliance on violence against women. Lemaitre has continued to write about
Commandant Verhoeven, extending the trilogy into a series.
As new novels appear in English, it will be fascinating to see how far Lemaitre
can extend his reimagining of the roman policier, as well as how he will
develop his central character after the apotheosis at the end of the trilogy.
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