Books
They are dying in Paris, Rio, Ireland and Provence
by Christine Cole Catley
HAVE MERCY ON US ALL, by Fred Vargas (The Harvill Press, $34.95); THE SILENCE OF THE RAIN, by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza (Macmillan, $27.95); FOLLOWING THE WAKE, by Gemma O‘Connor (Random House, $22.95); THE MURDERED HOUSE, by Pierre Magnan (Vintage, $26.95).
To look at these titles, mostly literary thrillers in translation, is to see and hear the hubbub that is the annual Frankfurt Book Fair. Here – if they haven’t done the deals already – are UK and US publishers battling for the rights of foreign-language titles that have captured the literati as well as the general reading public in their home countries. How will they go in English?
The answer as far as these books are concerned: spectacularly well.
Have Mercy on Us All is about as good as they get. The author, Fred Vargas, is a woman, Paris-born and a professional historian and archaeologist. Unlike those women crime writers who use their professional expertise to concentrate on pathology or the speciality, say, of bones past and present, Vargas convinces with a sweep of history that’s both broad and deep, underpinned by specific literary and archival detail. Pepys’s 1665 diary entries about the appearance of the black plague in London are a key element in a story that is very much of the present while rooted most satisfyingly and believably in the past.
When a strange new form of graffiti begins to appear on apartment doors in the 14th arrondissement of Paris – something like the figure 4 written backwards – it certainly doesn’t sound like something that would interest the new commander of the murder squad, Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg. Vargas’s protagonist is a scruffy, dreamy fellow with thoughts usually carefully removed from police routines, which, in this case, is just as well. Adamsberg has a fragile memory, particularly for names, but this is something else he doesn’t much bother about, although he does jot down in his memory-jogger descriptions of individuals in his squad, the name and, say, “tired-out, touchy, and maybe tough”.
Corpses with plague-like symptoms begin to turn up. The media will soon have the whole city, the whole country, in a frenzy. Adamsberg goes for help to a medieval scholar who also runs an unusual rooming-house, thereby encountering a group of characters quite remarkably fascinating and individual.
Have Mercy on Us was chosen by the booksellers of France and by readers of Elle magazine as their book of the year for 2001. The plot is prescient. As the publishers point out, Vargas wrote it the previous year, before anyone had dreamt that a deadly disease might be mailed to its victims through the US post. Absorbing though the storyline is, however, it’s secondary to the people who carry it along.
The Silence of the Rain, by Brazilian writer Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, features another detective who is certainly an original. Inspector Espinosa’s parish is Rio de Janeiro, with its interlocking worlds of wealth and squalor. Espinosa has the agreeable habit of being drawn to bookshops. In fact, he mostly sits and reads, with Conrad a favourite, unless interrupted by police business.
In this instance the business concerns the body of a businessman who appears to have been murdered, although the novel’s readers have already learnt that it is suicide. The plot, as they say, thickens, except that interest centres on what motivates the characters, and why when faced with a sudden extraordinary event they behave as they do.
Another of Espinosa’s endearing characteristics, besides reading, is his habit of thinking kind thoughts about almost everyone, even when he has few shreds of idealism left to live by. Thus he can think charitably but realistically about the effect of a sudden million dollars on the incorruptability, or otherwise, of his fellow cops.
The author is a university professor with a background in philosophy and psychology. Someone has said that if Gabriel Garcia Marquez were to write crime fiction, he, too, might have created a detective like Espinosa. Praise indeed. The Silence of the Rain has won Brazil’s two major literary prizes.
Gemma O’Connor’s Following the Wake is set in Ireland. The niggling pressure of unfinished business is beautifully conveyed: what really happened, the young man Gil Sweeney wonders, when he was a boy of eight?
The plot is convoluted, the emotions raw and believable. The anguish and cruel speculations that an unscrupulous journalist in search of a story can bring about are what stay in memory from this book. Perhaps it’s enough to say that the word “wake” has more than one meaning. This is another superior thriller, and one which takes up the story, 10 years on, of Walking on Water, although each is self-contained.
The Murdered House, by Pierre Magnan, is perhaps as much about places as about people. It spans some 25 years from 1896, a creepy tale of a French family murdered in a remote village in Provence. Only the baby has survived. After World War I he returns, an emotional cripple, to lay his ghosts by razing his old family home, stone by stone. That is unnerving enough, but it is when he decides he knows who the murderers must have been that the real suspense begins. Readers may like to seek out the sequel, Beyond the Grave.
