April 9, 2020 29
No One Gets Out Alive
John Banville
C’est la Vie
by Pascal Garnier, translated
from the French by Jane Aitken.
London: Gallic, 128 pp., $14.95 (paper)
The Italian literary critic Pietro Citati,
author of superb studies of Goethe,
Kafka, and Proust, published a novel
in 1989 called Storia prima felice, poi
dolentissima e funesta (Happy at First,
But Very Sad and Tragic at the End).
It is a daring title, since it sums up so
succinctly and comprehensively the
human condition that the novel itself
might seem superfluous.
Citati’s title could be usefully ap-
plied, in generic form, to all of the nov-
els of the late Pascal Garnier, one of the
most remarkable and, in the English-
speaking world at least, one of the most
inexplicably under appreciated French
writers of the twentieth century. He
left behind a dozen or so extraordinary,
unclassifiable novels that, if they were
to be described as dark, would require
a new definition of that word as applied
to literature. Garnier’s darkness is of
the kind that only astronauts get to see,
gleaming, depthless, yet dotted through-
out with mysterious points of light at
once ice-cold and curiously consoling.
Looked at from a certain angle, Gar-
nier’s books are reminiscent of what
Georges Simenon called his romans
durs, his “hard novels,” so as to distin-
guish them from the relatively more
benign series of policiers featuring In-
spector Jules Maigret. Maigret’s task,
his creator wrote, is to “understand and
judge not,” while in the romans durs,
the characters understand next to noth-
ing, judge everything with extreme prej-
udice, and proceed to take appropriate
and frequently devastating action.
Many of Simenon’s protagonists are
psychotic, and not a few are plain mad,
even though they are portrayed, or por-
tray themselves, as perfectly ordinary.
Similarly, the general run of Garnier’s
people consider themselves to be—
well, the general run. They get on as
best they can with their quotidian lives,
hardly conscious of the anarchic and,
more often than not, murderous urges
boiling away behind their unremark-
able exteriors. Even the most eccentric
among them would insist that it is not
they who are the problem—the world is.
For instance, in How’s the Pain?,
surely Garnier’s masterpiece, a mor-
tally ill professional hit man, a master
of his trade, is traveling south to carry
out what he knows will be his final as-
signment. Along his ever more dolor-
ous via dolorosa he manages, through
inattention, to accumulate a young and
untarnishably good-hearted factory
worker, Bernard Ferrand, along with
Bernard’s mother, fleetingly. There is
also a young woman on the run from an
abusive partner with her unstaunchably
leaky baby girl in tow—this must be the
most vividly portrayed and memorably
single-minded infant in all literature,
not excluding the New Testament.
She may not be able to talk yet, but
she punctuates the text with perfectly
timed, wonderfully expressive and fre-
quent evacuations, while in her baby
mind she transcendently dreams of
being a big shot one day. How Garnier
brings this mute mite so convincingly
to life is one of the mysteries and the
masteries of the book. As the story un-
winds, like a bale of razor wire dropped
inadvertently down the side of a hill,
shots are fired, bucketfuls of blood are
shed, and people die like marionettes
whose strings have been slashed, until,
in the end, a kind of quietus is attained.
The forces that rule in Garnier’s uni-
verse are not consciously malign; it is
just that, as in a Buster Keaton movie,things will insist on going wrong, with
awful, comical inevitability. Nor is
the mayhem relentless—there are in-
terludes of gentle reverie and even
warmth. In How’s the Pain?, Simon,
the hitman, who gives his profession as
that of pest controller—“Getting rid of
rats, mice, pigeons, fleas, cockroaches,
that sort of thing”—takes his young
friend Bernard to dinner on a whim.Asked about his travels, Simon pro-
fesses to have been all over the place,
“anywhere that’s had a war.” Bernard
responds:“Ah, I see. Being in the army takes
you places. I was in Germany
once.... Apart from the language
it’s the same as here. I went to
Switzerland with school once too.
It was really nice, just like the post-
cards. Have you been?”
“Yes. It’s very pretty. It makes
you want to die.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, because it’s so quiet...
and full of flowers.”
“You’re right actually. They
know a whole lot about geraniums.”Needless to say, idylls such as this
are rare and fleeting; at the end, kindly
Bernard will help the dying Simon on
his way out of this world by kicking a
chair from under him and leaving him
dangling from the ceiling at the end of
a jump rope. The jump rope is a wholly
characteristic touch of grotesque, Garni-
eresque whimsy. What is most remark-
able about the book is that it is at once
extremely violent, irresistibly funny,
and inexplicably moving, in the subtle
way that only genuine art can manage to
be. Disturbing, of course, is the insou-
ciance with which Garnier compels us
to overlook the moral outrages he com-
mits, and commits us to. In Garnierland
not only is God dead, but the Demiurge
lords it malignantly in His stead.Garnier was born in Paris in 1949 and
died in 2010. In a short autobiographi-
cal sketch, dashed off at the behest of
his French publishers, he confessed to
having been born in the solidly petit-
bourgeois 14th arrondissement and of
having hada normal childhood in what you’d
call the average French family—
which felt more and more average
the more it dawned on me that I’d
been sold a world with no user’s
manual, lured in by false advertising.He liked the notion of our being born
without a handbook on how things
work, and thought the formula so good
he used it again in his fiction. It is an
insight many of us must share.
When he was fifteen, “the state
education system and I agreed to go
our separate ways,” and thereafter he
wandered for a decade through North
Africa and the Middle and Far East.
He returned to France, married, had a
child, tried to get into rock and roll as
a songwriter—“and landed with a re-
sounding thud.” He divorced, married
again, worked as a designer for wom-
en’s magazines, and “got up to the oc-
casional bit of mischief”—about which
it would be good to know more, for it’s
clear that he was self-destructively fa-
miliar with the world of drink, drugs,
sex, rocking, and robbing. With these
early adventures behind him, he began
to write fiction, as an extension of his
song lyrics. He published a collection
of short stories, A Year’s Sabbatical,
after which “another sixty-odd books
were brought out... books for childrenPascal Garnier, Saint-Malo, France, 2009Gallic Noir: Volume 1:
The A26, How’s the Pain?,
The Panda Theory
translated from the French
by Melanie Florence,
Emily Boyce, and Gallic Books.
London: Gallic,
367 pp., $16.95 (paper)Gallic Noir: Volume 2 :
Boxes, The Front Seat Passenger,
The Islanders, Moon in a Dead Eye
translated from the French
by Melanie Florence,
Jane Aitken, and Emily Boyce.
London: Gallic,
502 pp., $16.95 (paper)OTHER BOOKS BY PASCAL GARNIER
DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLEGallic Noir: Volume 3 :
The Eskimo Solution, Low
Heights, Too Close to the Edge
translated from the French
by Emily Boyce
and Melanie Florence.
London: Gallic,
392 pp., $16.95 (paper)Raphael^ Gaillarde/GettyImages