Dark and deeply disturbing.
The A26 - a short Pascal Garnier novel laced with gallows humor so dark you can't even see the gallows.
The French author frames his tale thusly: The construction for the new A26 highway is chomping up mile after mile of terrain in Northern France. Nearby a small house is all shuttered up. Yolande, the main occupant, peers out at the world through a drilled hole in one of the shutters. "Depending on her mood, she called it the 'bellybutton'' or 'the world's arsehole'."
As far as Yolande is concerned, it's still 1945 not 1980, and she's still 20 not 55. For, you see, Yolande was traumatized back at the end of the war, her head shaven for going to bed with a German soldier. Additionally, Yolande was the victim of emotional and physical abuse as a child and teenager at the hands of her sadistic father. The consequence: Yolande is completely mad (or, if you prefer language more politically correct, she's mentally deranged) and Yolande hasn't stepped foot outside her house in over 30 years.
Just think what it means to live year after sour, sooty year in a house pilled high with papers and garbage. "A network of narrow passages, tunnelled through the heaped-up jumble of furniture, books, clothing, all kinds of things, made it possible to get from one room to another provided you walked like an Egyptian." And Yolande has been living under this particular creaking roof with her younger brother Bernard all those years.
Brother Bernard has his own problems. Hovering around age fifty, railroad employee in his SNCF uniform, Bernard has recently been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Knowing his days are numbered, ever doleful Bernard turns . . . gulp . . . serial killer. A snatch of murder number one: "But the grip of Bernard's hand on the back of her neck had finally proved too much for Maryse's 'nearly' eighteen years. 'Strong as death! I'm as strong as death!'" Way to go, Bernard! Proving your strength against a petite teenage girl, you twisted fuck.
In spots The A26 is nearly as creepy as a Thomas Ligotti tale - say Dream of a Manikin (dolls and manikins begin to manipulate humans) or The Last Feast of Harlequin (nighttime street festival with drab clowns of the gaunt, vacant starring variety).
Bleak in the extreme, in this Pascal Garnier novel even the great outdoors dotted with brick houses doesn't escape. "The countryside, accustomed to low skies and drizzle, looked ill at east in its Sunday best in the sunlight. The bricks were to red, the sky too blue, the grass too green. It was as if Nature felt embarrassed at being so extravagantly made up."
The A26 is all about the gouging and violation of boundaries, from a massive construction project taking over homes to individuals debasing, humiliating or committing violence against others.
How warped and perverted are Yolande and Bernard? Flashbacks include Yolande and Bernard, older sister and younger brother - incest.
Recall I mentioned horror. Well, The A26 features horror intertwined with the grotesque. "The face which appeared in his wound-down window left him open-mouthed: the McDonald's clown, with far too much rouge, false eyelashes and a layer of cracking plaster all over the cheeks."
What makes The A26 a particularly compelling read is the author's crisp, clear, hard-edged language dripping with vivid metaphors and similes. Sentences like this one are found on nearly every page. "It was a drop of water falling on her newly shaven head which had hurt her the most, a deafening sound like the stroke of a gong which had stayed with her ever since."
If you are interested in Pascal Garnier crime noir, I would recommend you not begin with The A26. Much wiser to start with a number of his other novels translated into English. When you get to A26, you will then see how the author shifted his signature dark humor several shades to the black.
What a haunting novel. What an author.
I attempted to locate a quote from a lighter moment in the novel. Alas, there are none. So here's Bernard along the road. "For the past hour, Bernard had been driving around aimlessly, turning left here and right there, as luck or misfortune would have it. He had no idea where he was going but one thing he was sure about, he had no desire to go home, not straight away. Like a fly trapped under a glass he was looking for a way out while knowing only too well that none existed."
French novelist Pascal Garnier, 1949-2010
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