Goat Song by
Chantal Pelletier
pbk out July 04
(Bitter Lemon Press)
at £8.99
Chantal Pelletier’s intriguing French prizewinner (for best ‘noir’ novel at the annual Cognac crime festival) features one of crime fiction’s more bizarre investigative pairings. Inspector Maurice Laice is probably the most brooding, melancholy cop since Mankell’s Kurt Wallander. Emotionally constipated, his appearance on a case is wont to provoke the cry of ‘More is Less’ or its Miesian reverse (in English in the original presumably, or the pun would not work). Not least by his highly intuitive and lesbian boss Aline Lefèvre, a believer in ‘health by orgasm’. Between them in scenes often farcical, they create a curiously complimentary framework for the dual investigation of a double murder, the scene a dressing room in Montmartre’s famous Moulin Rouge.
With few clues, there is no option but to closely examine the respective backgrounds of the two victims ; Manfred, the lead dancer at the theatre, and the virginal Lisa (‘a Michelangelo angel’), a young trainee dresser of Corsican origin, their bodies bloodily entwined. Do the answers lie, for instance, in the ancient enmities of Corsica or the more recent enmities found within an increasingly multi-racial (and pungently evoked) Montmartre?
Characterisation too is sharp and strong throughout, not least that of Laice himself. Here Pelletier rather overdoes the gloom, remorselessly dwelling on his imperfections: his (one) varicose vein, possible rheumatism, lack of sex life and diminishing virility (‘the main occupant of his Y-fronts had stayed as limp as cotton’). Fair enough, but how old, do you imagine, is this ‘old goat, whose violent stench no longer got the nannies going.’? As he’s a serving policeman, fifty-five perhaps ? No. He’s forty and three months, that three months clearly indicating his immediate future in an old people’s home!
Elsewhere Pelletier’s story is an intense one, often brilliantly told, of relentless pace, veering sharply in mood, often from paragraph to paragraph. But, like the frequently name-checked Pierrot Le Fou, a key film in the career of the peerless Jean-Luc Godard, the mixture of farce and tragedy does not quite gel, leaving this reader at least, unmoved. Nevertheless a highly individual approach to the crime novel is indicated. And it will be interesting to see how the curious partnership of Laice and Lefèvre develops.
Goat Song by
Chantal Pelletier
