Oxford Lit Fest - 3rd April: Bernard Minier
Crime fans, get out your diaries!
The Oxford Literary Festival is opening next week-end, and French writer Bernard Minier will make the journey on the 6th of April to present his latest work. Tickets >> this way!
If you're into crime fiction, you must have heard of Minier. If not, here's a quick catch-up session for you: Bernard Minier is one of the best authors of crime fiction in France. He grew up in the foothills of the Pyrennees, where his newly published murder mystery, A Song for Drowned Souls, takes place. Marsac, a seemingly quiet university town imagined by the author, provides perfect décor for the most thrilling story. (And the creepiest doll)
Translated by Alison Anderson and published by Hodder
A professor is murdered, and the chief suspect happens to be the son of protagonist Commandant Servaz's university sweetheart. The latter begs him to investigate, and "to close the case, Servaz must delve into his own past and re-open old and terrible wounds. It will be his most dangerous - and his most personal - investigation yet", as Hodder puts it.
If you have the chance to understand French, or wish to practise your deciphering skills, watch this video of Bernard Minier talking about the book himself:
No ? Okay, okay... here's for your pretty eyes the transcription in English:
"Le Cercle (French title for A Song for Drowned Souls) is my second novel that came out (in France) in October 2012. It’s not really a sequel to my first book, Glacé (French title for The Frozen Dead), but more like a series in which the principal characters of Glacé reappear in Le Cercle (Servaz, Espérandieu, Samira Cheung and Irène Ziegler) but the two books are entirely independent. You can read the two in whichever order you want – as many readers have done. What they have in common is they are set in similar universes, in the southwest of France. Glacé was set in the Pyrenees in winter with lots of snow, in a valley with a sense of entrapment or enclosure; I have made it a very oppressive environment. Le Cercle is set in a small university town – a kind of Cambridge in the southwest of France – an hour or so by car from Toulouse. Neither place exists; each is a synthesis of existing urban elements.
When I was a boy I was drawn to books that had a map at the beginning (Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Verne’s L’île Mystérieuse, Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings). That map was for me a promise of escape and I have kept this childish geographic enjoyment in my own books even if they are dark and dreadful events happen; they are not exactly children’s literature. In Le Cercle I made up this little town of Marsac with a population of 20,000, with its élite staff and students. It also has a charm of the English town with paved roads, fog, lots of rain (it’s summer) and storms.
What I set out to describe in Le Cercle is the loss of innocence, the nature of illusions, renunciation, memory, bereavement, forgetting and forgiveness – without pathos but with emotion. To get there I chose to focus the plot around Servaz (which wasn’t the case in Glacé). Servaz is at the heart of the novel, its central figure, so I gave him lots of space and a bit less to the secondary characters who nevertheless have important cameo roles. These secondary characters derive directly from Glacé, but they are, if you like, broken off from it and arranged in the background.
The plot is driven by Servaz who delves like a diver into his past, a journey that becomes a terrible experience because of the challenges he has to face. It is indeed a loss of innocence in the sense that he dreams his past – there is a love story that resurfaces – and as we all have a tendency to do he re-writes his memories until he crashes into the wall of reality, in this case a horrible crime that is central to the plot. I have also focused on Servaz’ private life. His daughter appeared in Glacé and she is here too with a more important role, as one of the key figures in the book (she is a student at the university). Servaz’ private life in Glacé was a bit like a Tartar desert: we wait for something to happen but nothing does. Well, there’s a lot that happens but not in his private life. I wanted to give him in Le Cercle more depth so he develops as a character. Between the beginning and the end of the novel there is a change in him that his involvement in the events brings about. I think it’s important in a book like this – in any novel in fact – that characters change during the story. If the characters are the same at the end as they are at the beginning, something has failed for that is the fundamental role of a story, to relate the evolution of that change.
I love characters – I think it probably shows – characters who are sufficiently true, whom I know well enough and have lived with long enough that I can place them in a given situation and watch them react. I am not interested in imagining a plot that is calibrated with the accuracy of fine clockwork, giving it a twist at the end and abandoning the characters to their fate. I prefer to construct a plot around the characters, to develop them until I feel they are alive enough that I can place them in a given situation and watch them react. It is they who then direct the plot and decide in which direction to go. I remember a quote from Elizabeth George who said that the reason to read a book through to the end is to find out what happens with the characters. I believe she is absolutely right."