Book Review: The Girl Who Wasn't There (2013) by Ferdinand von Schirach

Crime fiction is often divided into two opposing camps: the noir and the cosy. The noir world is filled with vicious criminals, unspeakable crimes, gritty environments, forensic horrors, and detectives who are often only slightly less unpleasant than the criminals they're pursuing. The cosy universe has bloodless murders, charming and/or amusingly eccentric sleuths, leafy and pleasant locales, and killers who are often almost as nice as their pursuers. I'm coming to believe, however, that noir crime fiction is, in fact, as cosy as the crime novels featuring cats and spinsters and dead vicars. The dictionary defines "cosy" as something that provides a feeling of comfort, and comfort can be used to describe a pleasant routine.

A lot of noir fiction provides a comfortable routine for the reader. The crimes and criminals and settings of these novels may be harrowing, raw, and described in the most explicit terms, but there's a reliable routine to them: the detectives (private or official) will have their usual vices to contend with (booze, pills), they'll still be brooding over that great tragedy in their life (death of spouse/child), they'll have a brief affair with one or two attractive members of the opposite sex, and they'll spend some time name-checking their favourite musicians/books/films/single malt whiskies. And of course there will always be a sense of closure to each novel. The bad guy will be caught or killed, although the cost may be high and there'll probably be a sense that justice hasn't been completely served. Really, any crime fiction series with a recurring central character ends up becoming a "cosy."

There are, however, a few authors I'd describe as truly noir, and to separate them from the rest of the herd I'll call them writers of Brutalist noir. Like the architectural style I've poached the name from, writers such as Massimo Carlotto, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Dominique Manotti, and Pascal Garnier write novels that make no concessions to comfort. These writers specialize in characters and stories that are raw, blunt, and unsubtle in their purpose. Like your local unloved architectural landmark from the 1970s, the Brutalist noir novel stands out by being the literary equivalent of an eyesore. These writers get in your face, step on your toes, knee you in the groin, and they absolutely love to kick cats.

Toronto's ultra-Brutalist Robarts Library, also known as Fort Book

Ferdinand von Schirach has joined the Brutalist club. The Girl Who Wasn't There has some of the flavour of an Italian giallo film thanks to its main character, Sebastian, the slightly odd son of an upper class German family who becomes a famous photographer/installation artist and the only suspect in the apparent murder of a young woman. The heart of the novel is its depiction of Sebastian's upbringing by an unloving mother and a father obsessed with hunting. Schirach is ruthless in showing the flaws and peculiarities of this trio. It's typical of Brutalist writers that their attention to detail in characterization makes their characters almost wholly unlikable. Schirach & Co. seem to have discovered a truth, or at least believe, that all people, no matter how innocuous or benign on the surface, are in essence an aggregation of prejudices, fears, petty hatreds, and unsavoury habits.

Most of this short novel (slimness being another feature of Brutalist noir) is a character study of Sebastian and his parents. Once the focus shifts to the mystery element of the story, the novel suffers a bit from the introduction of Konrad Biegler, a defence lawyr who's brought in to represent Sebastian at his murder trial. Biegler is a rather conventional character (grumpy but brilliant lawyer) and his presence combined with a story resolution that's flat and confusing, left me a bit disappointed. The ending wasn't a deal breaker for me, but it keeps Schirach out of the top echelon of Brutalist noir writers.

Book Review: The Islanders (1998) by Pascal Garnier

This is the fourth Garnier novel for me, and I've come to the conclusion that he's the poltergeist of French literature. Garnier's novels are studies of individuals whose inner demons are kept in check (barely) by the routines, beliefs and ceremonies of middle-class life. Garnier, in his role as a poltergeist, tears apart the delicate web of social respectability and responsibility that keeps his characters on the straight and narrow, and then records what happens to these people when they get off the leash and start barking and biting and killing.

In this novel we have Olivier, a recovering alcoholic, Rodolphe, the world's nastiest blind man, and Jeanne, Olivier's long-ago girlfriend, with whom he shares a murderous secret from their teenage years. Olivier returns to the Paris suburb of Versailles to make funeral arrangements for his deceased mother. Versailles is where he grew up, and it's a place he wholeheartedly detests. Olivier's shocked to find that Jeanne and her brother Rodolphe are living across the hall from his mother's apartment. Olivier and Jeanne haven't seen each other in twenty or so years, but they're almost instantly drawn back to each other. The folie a deux crime for which they were never caught as teenagers was the kidnap and murder of a two-year-old boy. Olivier decides to hit the bottle again, and the bodies start to pile up.

Garnier's plots are spare but smart; he gives his characters a bit of a push in one direction and then, in keeping with the poltergeist metaphor, commences to pinch them, throw things at them, occasionally push them down a long flight of stairs. and otherwise torment them until the worst and truest part of their character is fully revealed. And so it is here. Olivier goes off the wagon for one night and so begins a parade of murders and a trip into madness for the only two characters left standing at the end of the book.

Garnier's artistic inspiration would seem to come from Jean-Paul Sartre's observation in No Exit that "hell is other people." In this novel, as in others by Garnier that I've read, the characters find humanity to be a sorry spectacle, and an excruciating one when having deal one on one with people. A typical Garnier character looks around and describes what he sees and feels using a palette filled with venom-based paints. At times Garnier can go overboard with seeing the world through dystopia-tinted glasses, almost to the point of parody, but his misanthropy is always delivered with a poetic zeal that keeps his novels palatable and energetic rather than dreary and pretentious.

Book Review: How's the Pain? (2006) and Moon in a Dead Eye (2009) by Pascal Garnier

In my experience French crime writers can be divided between the relentlessly quirky (Fred Vargas, Alex Lemaitre, Pierre Magnan) and the relentlessly ferocious (Dominique Manotti, Sebastian Japrisot, Jean Patrick Manchette, Georges Simenon). The first group specializes in oddball characters and wildly improbable plots. Team number two can also craft some truly Byzantine plots, but what really makes them special is their merciless examination of the fears, beliefs and motivations of their characters. A writer who favours quirky characters is usually also a sentimentalist at heart. Sentimentality isn't in the vocabulary of the second group. They have ice in their hearts and take a vivisectionist's approach to the human psyche, showing no mercy when it comes to throwing their characters into harrowing situations and horrible fates. Pascal Garnier is the definitive ferocious writer.

How's the Pain? is about an elderly hitman, Simon, who's dying of cancer and has one last job to finish. He meets a simple-minded young man, Bernard, in a town in southern France andd hires him as a driver. Bernard is a Labrador retriever in human form: loyal, friendly, ready for anything, and eternally optimistic. Simon is a shark. He kills without remorse and for any reason. This sounds like a humorous, odd couple pairing, but it's anything but. Bernard immediately complicates what's left of Simon's life by befriending a slatternly single mother and bringing her along for the ride. The story takes a succession of left turns, usually involving death, and the ending is as bleak and sudden as a car accident. Moon in a Dead Eye strays out of the crime genre into surrealism. The setting is a newly-built trailer park in the south of France that caters to retirees. Two retired couples, a caretaker, and two single women are the only occupants of the park. What happens to them is best described as a series of psychological breakdowns of a surrealist nature that ends with multiple deaths and a forest fire. The novel's title is probably a nod to a famous scene in the film Un Chien Andalou, the surrealist classic by Luis Bunuel.

Both novels take a cold, pitiless look at aging and mortality. The elderly characters in these stories are chased to their graves by dementia, illness, sadness, and regret for things they did or didn't do in their lives. Garnier seems determined to remind his readers that not only is Death waiting for us all, but he's also in a bad mood and wants to take it out on us. As is usual in French crime fiction, the middle classes take a thorough kicking. This is particularly so in Moon in a Dead Eye, which charts the fragile, tenuous nature of bougeois dreams and respectability. In this way it's an interesting companion piece to two other Bunuel films, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty. The inhabitants of the Les Conviviales trailer park descend into different kinds of madness, all laced with the blackest of humor. It's this quality that makes Moon in a Dead Eye more of a surrealist novel than a piece of crime fiction, although major crimes do take place.

Garnier's novels are so short they almost qualify as novellas, but his writing is so psychologically acute, his observations so sharp, he seems to pack more intellectual content into his novels than most "serious" writers manage in novels five times as long. Garnier's far from being your average crime fiction author, but if you like Jean Patrick Manchette, or you're just a fan of scorched-earth prose, then Garnier's your man.