Dead Horsemeat, by
Dominique Manotti
pbk out May 06
(Arcadia Books)
at £10.99
1989: a bloodless coup, at the Annual General Meeting of a slow-moving Paris-based conglomerate, deposes the crusty old guard. Soon the confident, sexy communications director is briefing the press on a change in direction: “share values are at a peak, the property market is booming, and there’s a great future ahead for the new generation of managers.” Meanwhile in the racing stables in Chantilly, north of Paris, a horse killer and arsonist is at work. A few weeks later, a member of Superintendent Theo Daquin’s drugs squad is called to Longchamp, the major Parisian racecourse, and finds a key informer dead in the loos. And Rudi, Daquin’s German lover, has word of changes afoot in his native Germany, east side of the Wall.
As in Rough Trade, the first in what became a trio of books featuring Daquin and his team (this is the second), the events in Manotti’s book are rooted in a precise period of recent French history. Manotti is an academic, an expert in 19th century history who likes to bring both immediacy and authenticity to her novels about her country’s recent past. But this time the basic thrust of the story, the greed generated by the economic boom of the late 80s, is perhaps less of a revelation to the British reader than Rough Trade’s detailed world of immigrants, prostitution, bent government officials and the complications of an increasingly international drugs trade. But, as Manotti said at the London stop on the recent Bloody Foreigners tour, “this is a novel, not an essay on corruption”. And it is as a novel, particularly as a swiftly moving thriller, that the book is most successful.
Written in Manotti’s trademark documentary style, economical, present tense (and ably translated by Amanda Hopkinson and Ros Schwartz), this is a cleverly plotted novel that will keep you on your toes throughout. And as Daquin makes the connections beyond the incestuous world of horse-racing, an added bonus is a clearer (and more sympathetic) picture of not only Daquin’s team as it comes together as a unit but of Daquin himself, intelligent, incisive, basically homosexual, but not above seducing a woman if it suits. Meanwhile through it all runs Manotti’s unequivocal depiction of a society where principles rooted in the fierce debates of 1968 have given way to profit. Highly recommended.
Perhaps now Arcadia will invest in Kop, number three in the series and/or in Nos Fantastiques Années Fric, Manotti’s non-Daquin prize-winner from 2001?
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Dead Horsemeat, by
Dominique Manotti
