Anthropology PhD candidate David Mazon leaves his Parisian home to set up house in La Pierre Saint-Christophe, a tiny village in the marshlands of western France, not far from La Rochelle: he’s planning a dissertation on contemporary rural life, and is off to interview the villagers. His girlfriend is irate, his thesis supervisor unconvinced, and the villagers themselves look upon David with a mix of justifiable condescension and suspicion: he’s a scholarly dilettante, a French academic counterpart to Withnail, both fascinated and repulsed by life outside the metropolis. The first and final sections of the book reproduce David’s diary, which introduces a riotous cast that includes Lucie, the anti-capitalist activist and organic vegetable farmer; her simple-minded cousin, Arnaud, who can recite the events of any date you care to name; the blow-in English immigrants who insist upon the ‘English’ nature of the land around; Martial, the local mayor, who’s also the village’s undertaker and, this year, the host of the infamous Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guild, a yearly three-day gathering of funerary workers from around the country, during which all death ceases while the workers enjoy a spot of debauchery.
Between David’s diary entries, and a lusciously detailed account of the Bacchanal that is the Banquet, the novel soars off into a dizzying account of intersecting lives and timelines. The central conceit here is that of karmic rebirth: farmers become noblemen become horses becomes trees become warriors become dogs become kings become murderers become worms, and so on, back and forth in time, as the great Wheel never ceases to turn, and Enard gallops in its wake. The second section opens with the reincarnation of the local priest in La Pierre as a wild boar; later, we see a pervy innkeeper reborn as a bedbug that gnaws on, and is killed by, Napoleon himself. Enard swoops from one life-story to another in a mode that allows him to slip in a huge quantity of French social history under the guise of rather anarchic storytelling; as well as the ‘present day’ account of current lives, we get flashes of centuries and Empires past, wartime occupation, executions and love affairs, poet-soldiers, and more.
The word encyclopaedic is being trotted out to describe the comprehensiveness of Enard’s understanding and portrayal of his country’s genesis, but rather, the novel suggests the impossibility of any encyclopaedic reading of culture: life here is so teeming, so diverse and unpredictable, so complex and interwoven, that it cannot be neatly summarized. His evocation of life’s irrevocable entanglement, though, is an extraordinarily convincing work of ecopoetics: in this world (as in our world) human life cannot be extricated from the non-human life that extends, sustains, and surpasses it. Like Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency or Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport, it uses a local starting point to illustrate the intricacy and density of life on Earth, and hence the short-sightedness of resource extraction and feuding, and the pointlessness of violence: nothing is without consequence, in this life or the next, and the next might be any life at all, so be careful. Its mashup of religious traditions underlines this: we’re all connected, so be respectful and behave yourself.
Any Cop?: Leave your preconceptions at the door. This is nature and history and comedy; it’s sad and brutal and ridiculous all at once; it’ll tire you out but you won’t want it to end.
Valerie O’Riordan
Bookmunch 