Immaculate Conception [Paperback]

Nothing had prepared me for the novel The Immaculate Conception by French Quebec author, Gaétan Soucy-nothing, that is, other than the works of de Sade, Poe, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Kafka, and a host of other writers; tormented by the nearly impossible promises of God (or Good), they make elaborate work of the Devil (or Evil), and in the process, bring into the world the very suffering they would quarrel with. I found this novel a mixed blessing: shot through with extraordinary scenes, unforgettable characters, and astonishing metaphors, yet also possessed of a truly revolting misanthropy, and a story unbearably cruel to contemplate for long. It is, I think, that curious thing, a truly malevolent work of art, touched with genius and smeared with madness-not the charming madness of a bohemian cartoon, but the brand of insanity that devises new ways for children to suffer and die.
Not that I am holding Soucy personally responsible for this horrifying work; far be it for me to be so gauche as to think that authors are morally identical to the worlds they unleash. In fact, the final moments of the novel, which offer an image of innocence under annihilating threat, pose the alternative argument that goodness is already in the world, and was there prior to the forces ranged against it, so that the work as a whole can be interpreted as a banshee wail of despair against the fallen world, rather than a celebration of depravity. And yet, and yet, so calculated, so orchestrated, and literary is the manner in which the full horror of events is slowly presented, up to the final, stabbing last line (merely a place, a date, and yet so much more!), that Soucy seems caught in his own elaborate device, like one of those madmen in Poe’s stories, whose own lunatic perfectionism leads to to their ultimate doom (and the antagonist, Wilson, is of course one of Poe’s doppelganger men). I see the gears turning, the blades closing in . . .
I should spell out my reservations more clearly here, since I have wandered a little over several paragraphs. This book circles around the sexual and physical abuse of small children, and the sexual humiliation of helpless women. It features several depictions of male sexual predators that seemed-even in an age literally drowned in such portraits, from Blue Velvet to the latest slasher film-like direct blows to the head: sudden, unprovoked, and as real as violence when it touches the body. This novel contains metaphors and similes that made me shudder, and that I don’t think most readers are used to: a grown woman is described as lying “like a little girl who has just been raped”; later on, clouds in the sky of a fierce Quebec winter storm are described as lying on the earth “like the body of a man on that of a child”; earlier in the chapter, the startling coruscations of the night sky are presented as “swollen and glittering, shot with green and blue; the belly of a fly about to lay its eggs.”
I have rarely encountered such a feverish intensity, such misanthropy placed at the service of a “metaphysical detective story”, as this sub-genre has somewhat glibly come to be known by blurb-writers. Soucy, or at least, his capable translator, Lazer Lederhendler, or both of them (as Baudelaire doubled the power of Poe in translation), have achieved the intensity, the hallucinatory, evocative power of certain scenes in Crime and Punishment and The Idiot. I’m circling around comparisons to canonical masterworks, for I fear that this may be a minor masterpiece, the missing Quebecois novel of genius the province has promised for so long, and yet never delivered. And, given that failed promise is the sour milk fed to the children who grow up to be sour adults in this novel, I would not be surprised if the subtext of this work is that Soucy himself knows this.
Let us briefly state the facts of the case. In most places-such as Russia, Ireland, even the American Deep South-where Catholicism or some form of fervent Christianity has long held sway over a populace, a series of great novels was produced, which examine the relationship between blasphemy and the desire for purity, and which challenge the existence of God on the basis of the observed unbearable suffering of little children. Genius-that quaint old-fashioned device that, like opera glasses, sometimes still does the trick-came from such places, and we have, along with the names mentioned above, Tolstoy, Swift, Capote, and many more. Quebec, it seems to me, has never achieved a novel of the theological weight, moral bravado, and searing rage of The Immaculate Conception. This may be overstating the case, but only slightly. This novel, had it been written by an American, or someone, say, from Europe, would have already been made into a major film by Martin Scorsese (indeed, it is tailored for his small, intense form-the perfect fit of murder, nihilism, and Catholic ritual); or else it would have had some equally banal transmogrification into popular culture, and thus, an imprimatur.
Such misanthropic thoughts seep from Soucy’s book as from a fetid wound, for it presents the reader with a world (in fact, a French, working-class part of Montreal in the 1920s) peopled with monsters-or is that a world monstered with people? The mortician is a necrophiliac; even worse, he is an egomaniacal artist who practises his desire for control on the ruined bodies of the dead; the bank manager is a closet paedophile; the fireman is a nasty bully; the pretty school teacher is clubfooted with a half-sister who is really just her mirror image; the doctor saves his worst medical interventions for his son; the two main priests in the novel are-in a refreshing and no doubt ironic inversion-ineffectual (and often half-drunk or incapable of saving anyone), but loving and hopeful. I have saved the hero, Remouald Tremblay, for last because he is not very promising at first: a thirty-three-year-old carpenter’s son obsessed with religion, he is entrusted with caring for a lively little girl, who is mute and vulnerable.
This is not as tragically symbolic as it first appears. In fact, much as Nathanael West’s several darkly rancid but superb novellas present situations and characters that invoke undeniable “Christ Figures” almost designed to arouse the exegete in all of us, yet wriggle free of cliché due to astonishingly uncanny and often hilarious writing, so too is this book redeemed by the sheer virtuosity of its writing. The last three pages of this novel strongly echo the end of West’s The Day of the Locust, that other portrait of an entirely rotten, false community. In Remouald, Soucy has described, to use Eliot’s phrase, “an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.”
Of the plot I hesitate to say more, since it, in the way of all parables, is entirely plausible, unfolds with great twists and turns, and is truly frightening in several places. It is frightening for those who have souls, or want to think they do, because the unfolding story threatens this sense of possession. As such, it is more a horror story, than a story of horror. It begins with an arsonist’s fire that kills many-and from then on almost every page taunts us with metaphorical references to fire and light-and ends with fire that purifies as much as it harrows.
I return, finally, to the image of kindly Brother Gandon, who, while walking beside the school teacher (they are in love with each other, yet society and their own roles in it divide them tragically from this realisation), on page 150 (the exact middle of the book), springs into ecstatic, athletic life: “Snatching the stick from a dumbfounded youngster, Gandon grabbed the puck, elbowed his way ahead, dribbled nicely, slipped between two defencemen, and finally burst out in front of the net, cassock billowing in the wind, to let go his shot . . . ” Given the horrors to come, the small benevolence of this scene is immeasurably moving, not least because the simple act of street hockey has never before figured in such a haunting piece of fiction.
Todd Swift (Books in Canada)

"It takes a short time to read and a long time to forget. It has the power of a Grimm fairy tale . . . Nothing is what it first seems." --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.