Tuesday 19 March 2013

Pierre Lemaitre's Alex: A panic attack on every page




If you've watched any Spiral you'll already have a grounding in the French legal system, and you'll know all about investigating magistrates and just how they can complicate a police procedural. You'll also be aware that the French appear to specialise in combinations of straight policier with grim and gory horror, mixed with mordant wit.

But that won't prepare you for Alex by Pierre Lemaitre.

It's been kind of touted as a French Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but that's very unfair. It's vastly superior and satisfyingly shorter. It's properly written. And it has a plot so twisted and yet so inexorably logical that you can only sit back when it's finished, wrung out and totally, horribly impressed. Oh, and Frank Wynne, translator, has done a wonderful job, I think.

It is full of horror and violence. And there's an already infamous section involving rats. Nine of them. But the real briliance of the book is the way characters are drawn to ensnare your sympathies, only for that to be well and truly undermined. Perhaps.The rats sequence recalls both 1984 and Derek Raymond's jaw-droppingly disturbing I Was Dora Suarez. A book which caused its publisher's reader to vomit at his desk and an appalled Secker and Warburg to dump the author. The French, though, loved it.

The plot? A girl called Alex is kidnapped from a Parisian street, imprisoned and tortured. But why? The police, led by tiny (four foot eleven) and irascible detective Camille Verhoeven investigate. And frankly I don't want to say any more. Except that all is not necessarily as it seems. This is a great deal more than the sadistic kidnap/chase it might at first appear.

This is the first Lemaitre book to be translated into English, I think, and Maclehose promise 'more Verhoeven in spring 2014' at the end of the paperback edition. But when you go to www.pierrelemaitre.com as ordered, there's nothing but a rather tawdry piece of puffery for Alex (you're redirected to whoisalex.co.uk .  Oddly, Alex is the middle book in the Verhoeven trilogy, so it'll be interesting to see what emerges. I'm hoping it's the first volume, which may explain what the hell happened with Camille's wife Irene...

Wikipedia indicated William McIlvanney as an influence, and there are some similarities with Jean-Christophe Grange (referenced with tip-of-the-hat minor character names twice) although the lurid over-egging of plot you find in things like Flight of the Storks is exchanged here for something much, much better engineered. Excellent stuff.




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