ÂMES GRISES (LES) [Paperback]

"I don't really know where to start. It is rather difficult. So much time has passed, that the words can never be recaptured, nor can the faces, the smiles, the wounds." Still, he needs to try, to say what has been burdening his heart for twenty years. Philippe Claudel opens his hauntingly beautiful, dramatic novel with these confessions of his first person narrator. Later on, he explains that words are difficult for him. "During my lifetime, I hardly spoke. Now I write as if I had died since then. And, deep down, that is true. That's the real, true truth. For a long time now, I feel dead. I pretend that I still live a bit. I am on borrowed time. That's all."

The events that continue to disturb the nameless narrator of LES AMES GRISES take place in a small town in northern France during World War I, in a region so close to the frontline, that the sounds of war provide a constant rumbling background. In the early days in 1914, town life follows its usual course and the war, assumed to be short lived, does not seem to concern the townspeople too much. The passing soldiers add good business for some and brings much needed work for others. As the narration touches on events later in time, Claudel convincingly evokes the impact on the town of the steadily growing viciousness of war: the hospital fills with wounded and near-dead and starving, exhausted, brutalized soldiers roam the countryside.

However, it is the murder in 1917 of a beautiful ten-year-old girl, Belle de jour, that disrupts the still prevailing attitude of complacency among the important "gentlemen". The "Case", as it is introduced early on by the narrator, raises questions that dig much deeper into the society's fabric than a simple police procedural would be able to explore. In his recounting of the events surrounding Belle's death, the protagonist appears to hold his own - belated(?) - investigation by introducing, one by one, many of the ghosts, whose long shadows still haunt him into the present. What may have been his role at the time? Through a "parade" of richly drawn characters, who had been either directly, indirectly or possibly involved with the young girl's life or the Case, Claudel weaves a captivating, subtly structured web of evidence, rumours, suspicions, interrogations and deliberate disregard of clues. From the judge, the prosecutor, the father of the victim, to police officers and military, to other important persons in the town and even in the protagonist's own life, all the brilliantly brought to life as individuals with their strengths and weaknesses.

The report, being put together by the narrator, is seemingly written in separate memory blocks (chapters), thus justifying the non-linear structure of his account. The reader's attention is constantly required to pick up clues and connections that will eventually reveal much more than the reader would expect at any one time. The conclusion is dramatic and comes with more than one unexpected punch. It also epitomizes the meaning of the title "âmes grises - grey souls" in a way that will keep the reader's mind ponder its deeper truth: "Nothing is either totally black or totally white, it is the grey that wins. For human beings and their souls, it's the same... You are a grey soul, really grey like all of us". Having read the novel in its original French, all translations are mine. Claudel's exquisite language, that is full of nuance, rich in local colour and often complex structures, will provide a major challenge for any translator. It succeeds beautifully to capture those bleak and worrying times. [Friederike Knabe]

"Il est reparti dans ses regrets, et m'a laissé dans les miens. Je savais, comme lui sans doute, qu'on peut vivre dans les regrets comme dans un pays." Sadness clings to this novel like an autumn mist, but it is a sadness tempered by charity, and the understanding that most people are neither wholly good nor bad. As one of the characters tells the narrator, "Rien n'est ni tout noir, ni tout blanc, c'est le gris qui gagne. Les hommes et leurs âmes, c'est pareil... T'es une âme grise, joliment grise, comme nous tous...". Grey souls in a land of regrets may not sound very attractive, but one of Claudel's great achievements is to make the speaker's point that there is humanity and beauty in the middle ground.

I read this because I was blown away by Claudel's most recent novel, LE RAPPORT DE BRODECK. Indeed the two books are superficially similar. Both take place in wartime (BRODECK around WW2, ÂMES GRISES in WW1). Both are set in isolated villages in Northern France, whose petty local hierarchies are mercilessly laid bare. Both are first-person accounts by lonely men suffering a personal loss. But this is a much more difficult novel for a non-native reader, being full of colloquialisms, non-standard syntax, and unusual vocabulary. It is Claudel's intention, I think, to immerse the reader in the small Lorraine community and the flawed souls of its people. Unlike BRODECK, which turned outward, using the village to cast light on the mentality of the Holocaust, LES ÂMES GRISES turns its back on the war to probe the innermost recesses of the soul. Not that the front is far off; the fighting is visible from a ridge near the town, and the dead and wounded from the trenches are brought to its hospital and morgue. But among so many killed on both sides, the death that most closely affects the townsfolk is the murder of a 10-year-old girl, Belle de Jour, the pretty daughter of a neighboring innkeeper. What begins as a straightforward policier turns instead into a penetrating examination of the shadowy moral territory in which most of us lead our lives.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to say more in a review. For Claudel is a master at the slow release of information. The identity of the narrator -- his profession that is, since we never learn his real name -- is not revealed until 130 pages into the book, and it will take that long again for us to know the full extent of his own emotional investments, losses, and inevitable regrets. Belle de Jour may be the only murder victim, but there are at least three other female deaths that play a major part in the story. We find out about these later, much later, when they have room to resonate as feelings rather than facts, as people who have been loved and whose loss changes those who loved them. The book that began as a police procedural will certainly continue with the process of justice, some might say the miscarriage of justice. But what the novelist lays bare is much more than solving the murder of Belle de Jour. It poses the question of why this one death, or four, should matter among the slaughter of so many. The answers come only at the end, not as a simple whodunnit (there are at least two plausible solutions), but as a matter of understanding and even sympathy. But with those answers come other questions -- moral questions, and deeply disturbing. Neither black nor white, but grey -- a color that turns out not to be colorless at all, but complex and surprisingly satisfying.

Très bon livre. Philippe Claudel est un conteur hors pair.