Memoirs of Hadrian - Marguerite Yourcenar

Published in 1951 and translated into English three years later, this is the novel that made Marguerite Yourcenar (born de Crayencour - it's an anagram, geddit?) internationally celebrated. I say celebrated rather than famous because I doubt very much it was ever a bestseller. It's far too recondite, academic and, dare I say it, dull. Her success thereafter was measured in the usual terms for French litterateurs - Ivy League professorship and admission to Academie Francaise. To be fair, Yourcenar was the first woman academician. Shame it wasn't on the basis of a better book.

To be objective, there can be no doubt of her literary skill. The text convinces on the level it professes, a vast letter of advice from a not terribly distinguished emperor to the teenage next-heir-but-one, who isn't his grandson or even a relative. Where it fails is in revealing the soul of the man. Hadrian is famous for his wall. Other achievements, such as the Pantheon in Rome, are generally less known, and his military record was confined to places no one but a classicist could point to on a map. His reign was the result of a good deal of sucking-up (to his predecessor Trajan and, more significantly, Trajan's wife Plotina), a generous slice of being in the right place at the right time. and ostensibly not much else. He was a consolidator, not a conqueror, a Hellenist, a man of culture - and a man of terrific ego, apparently, given the number of settlements he founded in his own honour. He was a nasty piece of work to women other than Plotina, and hopelessly in thrall to the Bythian youth (no, no idea where Bythia might be) Antinous.

Antinous is Yourcenar's biggest failure here. She cannot give him any character because it is Hadrian's version of events we hear and Hadrian - here at any rate - sees Antinous only as living work of art. We are left in no doubt that their relationship is sexual, but get none of the action. Antinous's suicide, around the age of twenty, must surely have been the turning point of Hadrian's emotional life, yet we learn next to nothing. He simply founds a city in the lost boy's honour. Perhaps Yourcenar hoped to go further - I could not be bothered finishing her pretentious Reflections on the Composition of the Memoirs of Hadrian appended to this volume - but found herself trapped in her narrative device. After all, Hadrian is writing to another teenage boy, the future Marcus Aurelius.

I don't begrudge the time spent persevering with Hadrian. It is scrupulously researched, finely written (although I'm not convinced by Grace Frick's translation). It's an achievement. Sadly, it's not at all entertaining.
By the way, Penguin Classics, that's a horrible cover.

Fatale - Jean-Patrick Manchette

Manchette was only in his early fifties when he died and wrote less than a dozen crime novels, yet he founded a sub-genre (neo-polar, or new crime fiction) that is still hugely influential. David Peace writes the introduction to this edition and the echoes of Manchette in his work soon becomes clear.

Manchette is big news in France but only three of his neo-polars seem to have been published in English translations.  In this instance I'm not sure about the translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith. On the one hand it seems awkward and stilted; on the other, what are you supposed to do with sentences like this, describing two local newspapers: "One of them championed a left-capitalist ideology; the other championed a left-capitalist ideology"? In fact, I really must brush up on my French and have a go at the original. Overall, I suspect the Nicholson-Smith has got it right.

Manchette's twist on the traditional crime novel is that he is clear throughout that he writes, unlike his fictional provincial newspapers, from the Hard Left.  The aristocracy is debased and the bourgeoisie is contemptible. His is a world of Marxist black and white, good and bad.  Actually, just bad.  His femme fatale, Aimee - which we are told straight-off his not her real name nor even the name she will be known by tomorrow - is the ultimate of her kind, sexy and utterly amoral.  She kills for a living. The mystery of the novel is who will she kill in this little town, and how will she profit from the kill.

Like all the best noir, Fatale is brutally short, just 90 pages. I'm not keen on padding the physical book out with forewords and afterwords and this edition has both, the former by Peace, the latter by Jean Echonoz, who I have not heard of before but who I will keep an eye out for now. I have to admit that they add to the experience. Indeed, without them it might have been difficult to engage with Manchette's text.  Engage I certainly did. I loved it. I want more.

The Night Watch - Patrick Modiano

Our hero is unnamed, although he sometimes claims a name, or a father.  He is known by two codenames, Swing Troubadour and the Princesse de Lamballe, because he is a double or triple agent for opposite factions in occupied Paris - the Khedive and his collaborationist gangsters, and the Lieutenant and his Knights of the Shadow, ex-army men dedicated to resistance.  Our hero, only twenty, is an accomplished hotel thief, and theft of any kind is child's play in a Paris abandoned by anyone with anything worth stealing.  He had built himself a small fortune, commandeered a fine townhouse, and taken in a pseudo family, the blind giant Coco Lacour and the wizened child or girlish old woman Esmerelda.  They might not exist, though.  None of this may be true.  Our hero is a criminal, the putative son of the pre-war fraudster Stavisky.  Lying is his stock in trade.

He has been recruited by the Khedive and Philibert to infiltrate the Knights.  The Lieutenant orders him to infiltrate the Khedive's operation.  The Khedive orders him to lure the Lieutenant into a trap and betray him.  Our hero is torn.  He plays for time.  He tells the Khedive there is someone higher than the Lieutenant, a prize really worth taking.  His name?  The Princesse de Lamballe.

So the circles widen and become enmeshed.  And our hero continues an endless looping tour of nighttime Paris, listing the names of streets and squares and the other bizarre denizens of the demi monde like an incantation.  The colours and sounds and meaningless chatter become hallucinatory.  Perhaps he betrays the Lieutenant, perhaps he doesn't.  In the end...  Well, in the end he tries to break out of the labyrinth he has buried himself in, a final desperate bid for normality.  Does he make it?  Modiano, even in his early twenties, was far too fine a writer to offer us the security of resolution.

Certainly there were creatures like our hero in Occupied France.  He mentions some of them among the flamboyant fabrications.  The criminally-inclined who played both ends against the middle.  But what else was a young man without family or prospects supposed to do in the bizarre situation of a city that looks the same as ever but which is regularly bombed by its allies to Brits?  Life was short, the opportunities varied.

This is the essentially the question that Modiano asks.  His hero might lack a name but he doesn't lack character or, despite his best efforts, common humanity.  A superb book by the 2014 Nobel Prize winner.  Essential reading for anyone interested in modern French fiction.