A serial killer in the family … a remarkably enjoyable French novel

Times

7 days ago

Jean Pelletier has not enjoyed conjugal relations with his wife, Geneviève, for five years, 'since the third week of their marriage' in fact, so not surprisingly he wonders how they have a three-year-old daughter and another baby on the way. His lazy, selfish, bullying wife is so magnificently monstrous that you cannot help but feel sorry for the cowardly Jean, despite his being a serial killer of young women.
Pierre Lemaitre excels in portraying such moral monsters but also in tugging away the rug of certainty when you least expect it. Here we have the cunning Inspector Palmari destroying lives in his obsessive campaign against abortion and the charmless engineer Destouches forcing people out of their homes to make way for a reservoir. Set against them are the good Dr Marelle and the local workers' champion Buzier. What you think about them by the book's close will surprise you.
Lemaitre, a former literature teacher, in 2013 won the CWA International Dagger crime writers' award for his second novel, Alex, and France's leading literary award, the Prix Goncourt, for his first non-crime novel, The Great Swindle. The latter, the first in a trilogy, is brilliant: a savaging of French society in the interwar years.
The Silence and the Rage is his 13th novel and the second in a projected tetralogy set during Les Trentes Glorieuses, the 30 years of French economic growth between 1945 and 1975. Lemaitre began with The Wide World, set in 1948, dealing with the Pelletier children leaving the family home and business in Beirut. Etienne is murdered in Indochina, while the other three establish themselves in Paris — Jean running a haberdashery, François and Hélène working for a newspaper.
In the new novel it is 1952. Jean is gambling on expanding his business into a cut-price department store, taking on a workforce of desperate women and, to slap them into shape, a pitiless manager, Guénot, admired by Geneviève for cheating Jewish shopkeepers out of their stock during the German occupation. François becomes head of news at the paper and pushes the investigation into the unsolved murder of an actress, not knowing his brother is responsible. He is also romantically pursuing Nine, who is a deaf, alcoholic bookbinder with a mysterious past.
Meanwhile, Hélène, now a photojournalist, is covering a dam building project in the Yonne region of central France where the last inhabitants of a village set to be drowned by the reservoir are refusing to leave. She is also sleeping with the paper's editor and has just discovered she is pregnant.
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There are no plot spoilers here. These details are Lemaitre's starting points in this extravagantly multistranded work (and I could also have mentioned the boxing championship plot, real father of Geneviève's baby plot, village idiot plot … ) The novel reads perfectly well without reference to its predecessor yet there's a still richer pleasure in recognising how storylines are carried across from the earlier work: the trail of murders, the blossoming of Geneviève's unpleasantness, the strangeness of Nine.
Lemaitre is brilliant at marshalling his material, all the narrative strands and multiple vivid characters, into snappy, suspenseful episodes so you never lose a thread and always have the urge to press on. This is probably why you don't immediately notice that for all its strengths Lemaitre's writing lacks any sense of period. There is little description, no living details peculiar to the time. We could be in any point between 1902 and 1992, even though the central concerns are historically accurate: in the early 1950s dams were being built across France and there was a postwar clampdown on the 'social scourge' of abortion.
Not all the themes are this serious. The newspaper also runs a series of articles asking, 'Are French women dirty?' It turns out that not all English prejudices about the French are wrong. Pleasingly, this series is based on an investigation that ran in Elle magazine in October, 1951 (reproduced in an appendix).
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With this new sequence building on the earlier trilogy, Lemaitre seems determined to give us his take on France in the 20th century, from the outrageous treatment of First World War veterans and the complacency that led to catastrophe in the next conflict, to the collapse of its institutions and colonies. It is monumentally ambitious stuff and remarkably enjoyable.
The Silence and the Rage by Pierre Lemaitre, translated by Frank Wynne (Tinder £25 pp503). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members