Trapped! Trapped! I'm trapped and my life is a living death!
Is this sense of being trapped your current predicament? It certainly is the plight of Dr. Mahé, the protagonist in George Simenon's The Mahé Circle.
Below are the good doctor's reflections in the wake of a particularly memorable encounter he had while vacationing on the island of Porquerolles in the south of France:
"He found that at thirty-five, here he was, too big, too fat, too full of rather vulgar life, with a wife and two children and an existence all laid out for him, a fixed schedule worked out for every day of the week."
Dr. Mahé fumes to the boiling point again and again but his wife and others know little of the existence or cause of his intense frustration. Like many other good family men with set career and comfortable lifestyle, our fat physician protagonist keeps his resentment and dissatisfaction to himself. I say "men" here since Georges Simenon published his novel back in 1946, a time when the head of the household and breadwinner in European society was traditionally a man.
Dr. Mahé's living hell brings to mind the above illustration on the cover of a book devoted to existential philosophy I came across back in college - the naked human at the core representing the authentic Self covered over by layer after layer, circle after circle of social roles and identities.
Curiously, like the circles surrounding the man in the illustration, during one of his especially powerful dreams, Dr. Mahé is surrounded by a circle of men and women, familiar faces to him, aunts, uncles, cousins, all members of the Mahé family. He tries to push through but the circle is impenetrable, all those surrounding him having turned into tombstones, a series of huge rocks retaining recognizable faces. Alas, there's good reason Georges Simenon gave his novel the title: The Mahé Circle.
In the first chapter of this Simenon romans durs, we are introduced to Dr. François Mahé vacationing on Porquerolles Island, at the moment fishing on a small boat along with Géne, one of the island's seasoned fishermen. As per usual, Géne is the one who catches the fish and he, fat Mahé , tourist doctor, catches zero. Damn it all, Mahé broods, the islanders must know some secret trick to catching fish, especially the illusive péquois.
Mahé's fishing expedition is interrupted abruptly - a violently ill mother in the island's poor district requires immediate help. Since the island's one doctor is away, Dr. Mahé must come. He does. However, by the time he arrives at the small, dark hut, the woman is dead. A few villagers hover over the dead woman and Mahé joins their group. Then it happens when Mahé looks around the dirty room. "The doctor glimpsed a red patch: a young girl in a dress as scarlet as a flag, her thin legs bare, crouching in a corner, against the wall, and staring at them."
The teenage girl in the red dress becomes Dr. Mahé's obsession. Ah, obsession, a key psychological hot button for author Georges Simenon.
In his romans durs novel In Case of Emergency, Simenon chronicles the obsession of a middle-aged lawyer for a similar young girl pulling up her dress for him to display her similar thin legs. With the lawyer, his obsession is direct, propelling him to arrange a string of rendezvous so they can have sex.
For Mahé, his obsession is anything but direct; quite the contrary, Mahé can barely articulate what he wants from the young girl with the red dress. He doesn't love her; he doesn't lust after her; he doesn't even necessarily find her all that attractive. So, what is it he's after? Perplexing, perplexing, but one thing is certain: the girl in the red dress prompts Mahé to return to the island for vacation with his family that very next summer.
For fans of Georges Simenon's hard, psychological novels, this tale is not to be missed. The author draws each and every character with his signature laser precision. In his review of The Mahé Circle for The New York Review of Books, Irish author John Banville wrote, "True, Simenon wrote fast, and revised little. Yet his artistry is supreme. The account in this book of old Madame Mahé’s descent into illness and death is a sublime piece of writing, as good, in its unforced and unemphatic way, as anything in Proust or even Flaubert."
The Mahé Circle - a searing existential tale of a man obsessed, a man given great clarity and insight into his quandary through a series of powerful dreams, a man lead ever onward to a final showdown. Could this mean death for someone on the island? Hint: we're talking Georges Simenon here.
Georges Simenon, 1903-1989
“Later they asked me why my novels are all so black. I told them that I don’t think of them as black. I am not, I said, an ecrivain noir. On the contrary I am an idealist. If I write so often of morbid people and things, it is to shake my fist in anger at all the evils they have to suffer. I was born in the dark and the rain, and I got away. The crimes I write about—sometimes I think they are the crimes I would have committed if I had not got away. I am one of the lucky ones. What is there to say about the lucky ones except that they got away?” -- Georges Simenon in an interview
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