A very strange book to have won the Goncourt Prize – it’s more superficially engaging than you might expect from French literary fiction (the author is better known as a writer of thrillers), but also much more shallow. In fact it doesn’t really seem to be about anything, except for a string of vaguely related incidents involving two survivors of the First World War – and at more than six hundred pages, that’s really not enough. This book is just far too long. In fact by the time you finally rea
A very strange book to have won the Goncourt Prize – it’s more superficially engaging than you might expect from French literary fiction (the author is better known as a writer of thrillers), but also much more shallow. In fact it doesn’t really seem to be about anything, except for a string of vaguely related incidents involving two survivors of the First World War – and at more than six hundred pages, that’s really not enough. This book is just far too long. In fact by the time you finally reach the end, you’ve already long since metaphorically put the chairs on the tables and started switching lights off.

We do get off to quite an exciting start: a battlefield in the closing days of the war, November 1918, and two French privates whose lives come together in a moment of near-death melodrama. The soldiers’ subsequent attempts to make a go of it in post-war Paris are inwoven with the country’s capitalist rush to finance war memorials: while the concept of the French solider is fêted and glorified, actual surviving soldiers, many of whom are grotesquely injured, are ostracised and shunned.

La guerre avait été une terrible épreuve de solitude, mais ce n’était rien comparé à cette période de démobilisation qui prenait des allures de descente aux enfers….

Thematically this should be pretty interesting, but unfortunately it’s mostly used as the pretext for a lot of dramatic set-pieces whose narrative tension is sometimes engineered rather cheaply. I think it’s cheating, for instance, to say that a character has died, only to reveal later that he’s still alive after all, and similar tricks are played at several points herein. The main characters become involved in perpetrating a huge countrywide scam, and this is squeezed for every drop of manufactured tension it can provide. Which personally, I hated – you know those scenes in films or TV shows where someone’s snuck into someone’s office, and they have to get a file out of a drawer, or download something on to a USB stick or something?—and at the same time you can see the owner pulling up outside and walking up the stairs, turning the handle – argh! I can’t stand these scenes, I actually sometimes have to switch over because they stress me out so much. Well this book is kind of like that, only strung out for five hundred pages.

(That title, by the way. It means ‘See you in heaven’ or something along those lines, but for Anglophone readers – well, for me anyway – it can’t help bringing to mind echoes of Robert Graves’s famous First World War memoir, Goodbye to All That. The English translation of this one appears to be called The Great Swindle, which is…fine, if kind of giving up.)

The writing style is not bad – it’s very easy to read, few long words, a feeling of wit and intelligence there, but certainly nothing that makes you want to underline phrases in delight; and while the two main characters are well done, the same can’t be said for some of the supporting cast: the perky-parlourmaid love interest and the evil-aristo baddie seem to have been ordered straight from central casting. Because of its length and its episodic nature, some people have compared this to the big nineteenth-century novels, but that’s a strange connection to want to make with a story like this, which takes its narrative inspiration much more from Barbusse, Genevoix and Chevallier (as the afterword explicitly says). Problem is I’m not sure Pierre Lemaitre really comes out of this comparison well, which is a polite way of saying that he definitely doesn’t – many parts of his book are good fun, but you’d do a lot better to read Barbusse, Genevoix and Chevallier instead.
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