Tangled Web UK Review April 2008
Lorraine Connection by
Dominique Manotti
pbk out April 08
(Eurocrime)
at £8.99
Winner of last year’s Trophée 813, the top award of the French equivalent of the CWA, Dominique Manotti’s superb new novel comes with a warning: "This is a novel. Everything is true and everything is false."
It is true for instance that in 1999, Daewoo, Korea’s second largest multi-national conglomerate with interests in 100 countries including the UK, went bankrupt with debts of over $70bn. Its chief executive Kim Woo-jung fled to France where previously he had become a French citizen. Some years later, back in Korea, he was convicted of fraud and embezzlement (the numbers ran into billions) and was sentenced to just ten years in prison. Manotti’s novel presents a fictionalised version of earlier events in France as Thomson, its failing electronics giant, is about to be privatised.
The setting is fictional Pondange, once a key steel town in Lorraine, its multi-racial workforce now reliant on EU-subsidised light industry such as Daewoo’s factory assembling cathode ray tubes. Writing in her trademark present tense, Manotti brings us shockingly close to a near fatal accident on the assembly line as it brings to a head employee long-simmering discontent over pay (delayed) and conditions (hazardous). It's a striking opening (pun unintended) that also introduces some of the key players at this stage of the drama, their characters briefly illuminated in italicised interior monologue, a humanising technique used to great effect throughout the novel. They include Rolande Lepetit, respected single mum and line supervisor, the bullied Aisha Saidani, Maréchal the foreman, Ali Amrouche the shop steward, Etiénne Neveu, the factory rake who claims to have seen the arsonists who bring the ensuing factory occupation to its conclusion, not to mention Maurice Quignard, local power broker and unpaid advisor to Daewoo.
Manotti is equally at home in the corridors of power as the police investigation of the factory fire gets under way, and as the French government unexpectedly awards Thomson to the Matra-Daewoo consortium. Meanwhile Daewoo rival Alcatel, through intermediaries, employs the elegant ex-cop Charles Montoya, haunted by his Pondange childhood, to rake over the coals of the Lorraine connection. Between these three strands, Manotti constructs an urgent, compact and nail-biting narrative, a masterclass in combining tough no-nonsense writing with insights into the murky world of international business and its often devastating consequences for the people who are its unwitting victims. Translators Amanda Hopkinson and Ros Schwartz are equal to every twist and turn.
Manotti teaches 19th century economic history. This book demonstrates conclusively that she is no slouch with its 20th century equivalent. Would that a few 21st century British crime novelists could follow suit.
(
Bob Cornwell
)
Thousands of New and used Books at your Fingertips...
Support Tangled Web - Buy Your Books Online
