The Blue Room by Georges Simenon

 


The Blue Room - Classic Georges Simenon, a tale of passion and obsession told in seven short, gripping chapters, each chapter shaped into dramatic intensity by maestro Simenon as if a movement within an orchestral suite. If any novel can be judged as perfect, The Blue Room is that novel.

I'm hardly alone in my praise. In his review for The Irish Times, John Banville wrote: "The Blue Room is a wondrous achievement, brief, inexorable, pared to, and agonizingly close to the bone, and utterly compelling; in short, a true and luminous work of art."

A primary key for any novelist is how to structure time, things like the inclusion of a character's backstory to provide depth, when and how to maximize dramatic tension and suspense by alluding to future events via the art of foreshadowing. It is precisely his handling past and future in The Blue Room where Simenon proves himself an exquisite master of the craft. There's ample reason André Gide described Georges Simenon as "the greatest of all, the most genuine novelist we have had in literature."

The first several pages not only set the stage but, as we come to learn, every single exchange between main character Tony and his lover Andrée prove pivotal in the drama unfolding step by step right up until Andrée's fiery words explode in the last line of the last chapter.

Ah, that first scene. Hot late afternoon on August 2nd. We're at the Hôtel des Voyageurs in Triant, in a country village outside Paris, in a hotel room painted blue. Tony and Andrée have just concluded a round of furious lovemaking when Andrée begins asking Tony a series of question about his love for her and their future. "Could you really spend the rest of your life with me?" Tony answers: "Of course . . . " Oh, Tony, if you only knew the weight of those two words and how they would resonate through every hour of your waking life from that point forward.

Looking out the window in the Blue Room, Tony spots Nicolas, Andrée's husband, making his way toward the hotel. Quick exchange of words and directions from the maid and Tony hustles out the hotel's back door. Then there's an abrupt shift -Professor Bigot, the psychiatrist appointed by Monsieur Diem, the Examining Magistrate, is grilling Tony over the words and events that took place in the Blue Room months ago back on that fateful afternoon of August 2nd.

Thus, by way of a series of interrogations of prisoner Anthony Falcone, we become acquainted with a more detail account of the lives of both Tony and Andrée. For Tony, he's a successful salesman of tractors and other agricultural equipment; his brother Vincent is the owner of Hôtel des Voyageurs, he's married to pale, passive Gisèle and has little daughter Marianne, his father and mother immigrated from Italy. For Andrée, she's from a respectable village family and grew up in a château, although she married Nicolas, the son of a grocer, even as a tall, somewhat aloof schoolgirl at the village elementary school, she secretly fell in love with her fellow village schoolmate Tony.

And, most importantly, we come to known more about Tony's relationship with Andrée stretching back eleven months prior to their August 2nd Blue Room tryst to the very first time they had sex in a wooded grove not far from a roadway. Simenon leans on his years writing all those many dozen Inspector Maigret novels in rendering vivid, telling details in every encounter Tony has with officials conducting their examination, as in the author's words here:

"Would you care for a short break, Monsieur Falcone?"
"May I open the window?"
He had to have air. From the start of this session, ostensibly much like the others, he had felt stifled. These statements of fact had sinister, nightmarish, overtones, because of their bearing on the tragic events of which he had known nothing as he went about his business that day.

The above quote is from Chapter 6. Even late in the novel, we as readers are still held in suspense regarding why Tony is in jail, the whereabouts of Andrée, the nature of the crime, the details revolving around the victim or victims. What we do know is the newspapers and local townspeople are in an uproar and demand Tony's blood.

Such hatred and vengeance brings to mind another tale of another small French village - Guy de Maupassant's 1883 The Piece of String where an outsider comes to town and is wrongly accused of stealing a wallet. Although the wallet is turned in by another party, no matter, the villagers will not reverse their verdict - outsider Maitre Hauchecome is guilty as charged. Although he grew up in the village, Tony is not French; he is Italian ergo not only an outsider, even worse, Tony is a foreigner.

What really injects juice into the tale is Tony's relationship with Andrée. Although Tony has had brief affairs with women during his married life, at age 33 he has never experienced anything close to Andrée's sizzling, sweaty passion. Whoa, luscious honey! And who would have thought? Even going back to his schoolboy days, Tony viewed Andrée as a statue, a tall, discrete, standoffish girl that would never show the slightest interest in someone like him. Who would have guessed her infatuation and unflinching love all these years and her willingness to take on the much more active roll as wild Dionysian sex goddess goading him to swirls of new highs of emotional intensity during their lovemaking?

Such a tall naked female body with a man's naked body she has always found beautiful. Here are Simenon's words from the Blue Room on the hot August 2nd: "A short while ago, during their ferocious love-making, these sounds have flowed in to them and become one with their bodies, their saliva, their sweat, the whiteness of Andrée 'belly, the darker tones of his skin . . . "

The power of love and passion creating a world unto itself. Well, almost - there are those other family members to consider. And the power of love can be rivaled by an equally powerful emotion - hatred. Read all about it in The Blue Room.


Georges Simenon, 1903-1989