I am reading Philippe Djian’s “Criminels” and I can feel an ugliness of being emanating from the pages of the book. There is no physical description of the main characters, as far as I can remember, but I can almost smell their fetid breath, feel their flabby bellies, see their empty eyes. Not that they are peculiar people. The main character, Francis is a laid off harbour worker, there is also a sort of male –hysterical character called Victor, a policeman called Ralph, his nymphomaniac wife Nicole and a woman called Sonia who all the time talks in terms of aura and vibrations, but, oddly enough, seems to be sanest, healthiest person in the story. I say “seem” because it is rather difficult to make up what exactly is happening as the story unfolds, because it is a blur of vapid conversations between the characters, which comes to the reader as through a haze, as if he is sitting dead drunk in their midst. It feels as if you had gone on a month-long group tour of some incredibly boring country – the Kerguelen islands, maybe ? I am maybe insulting the place out of ignorance - and the people you are with are an incredibly bland, boring, suspicious lot, and on the evening of the last day of that trip, the whole group sits together by a camp fire on a bleak shore, under a grey sky, and for some reason, maybe because you want to remember the vacuous horror of this moment, or because you are so drunk that you decide you’d better do this or else you’ll be doing something sillier such as picking up a fight, you have decided to film the whole scene with your camcorder. So there you go, doing close ups of all those faces you want so much to forget, tomorrow morning, picking up snatches of conversations, having long takes of someone’s feet, patiently recording how, as the evening progresses, your “friends” – who, during that one month, have been cheating on each other like it was getting out of fashio – fall, one after the other, flat forward in a puddle of mumbled accusations, laments, wisecracks and flashes of anger. From time to time, the camera shifts to filming the steely, implacable sea and the cruel looking clouds, to allow the viewer some relief. But the analogy is misplaced – because, someone who takes the camera and films these people is , in a way, proclaiming his distance from them. But the reader is emotionally plunged in the story – it is well written enough for this to happen – so there is no escape : one feels at one with the characters, and the terrible thing is that they are not even wholly evil : Francis tries to take care of his insane father, Elizabeth tries to bring together Francis and his son, Francis really cares for Elizabeth. But for some reason , love is not enough, things go awry. The Police (the rock group) said, in one of their songs: “There’s got to be an Invisible Sun, that gives it heat when the whole day’s gone”. It is as if this invisible sun had died out, and nothing good can ever come out of people, however hard they try.
Why is that so ? In the case of Francis, I have the impression that there is a hardened shell of cynicism about him, which makes him say unpleasant things one time too many. He is a Bogart too far gone into being Bogart, and who can only play the tough gangsters , the Lefties and Tigers of his earlier career, and will never graduate to being a Rick or even a Marlowe of his later years. One can only admire the courage of existentialist writers like Philippe Djian, to create such sordid, yet believable worlds as they do. It takes a lot of moral strength to do this without collapsing into madness.