Syndrome E. By Franck
Thilliez. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. Penguin. $16.
Bred to Kill. By Franck
Thilliez. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. Viking. $27.95.
If you already think real
life is frightening, you do not want to make the acquaintance of Franck
Thilliez. A French thriller writer with more than two dozen books to his
credit, Thilliez is now becoming known in English translation through Syndrome E and Bred to Kill (published in French as Gataca), two novels in a series featuring a fairly typical duo of
dogged-but-damaged detectives becoming involved in some decidedly atypical
cases. Syndrome E, which dates to
2010 in French and 2012 in Mark Polizzotti’s translation, and which is now
available in paperback, is the earlier of the two chronologically, although
there are even earlier Thilliez books – one series about one of the detectives
and one about the other – to which Syndrome
E sometimes makes reference (confusingly for those who, as English
speakers, do not have access to them). The investigators, who meet in Syndrome E for the first time, are Lucie
Henebelle, a single mother of twins – one of whom is hospitalized when Syndrome E begins – and Inspector Franck
Sharko, who goes even beyond being one of those darkly brooding antiheroic types
familiar from the worlds of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The plot
mover of Syndrome E involves, or
seems to involve, an occurrence right out of Kôji Suzuki’s novel Ring, the book that inspired both a
Japanese horror film (1998) and the American The Ring (2002). That is, there exists in Syndrome E a film that does terrible things. Its opening scene is
virtually identical to that of Un Chien
Andalou – a fact that, curiously, no one in the book recognizes until a
character who appeared in the fictional movie actually draws attention to the
famous and notorious film by Luis Buñuel
and Salvador Dalí. What
characters do find out is that the fictional film causes horrific effects in some
of those who view it – such as a man named Ludovic
Sénéchal, who sees the movie and goes blind. Panicked, he calls a speed-dial
number at random and connects with Lucie, his ex – who still has some friendly
memories of their time together. And soon she is investigating, without knowing
it, the same thing that Franck is: he is focused on five bodies found buried at
a construction site, their hands cut off, eyes removed, and tops of their
skulls gone. The autopsy reveals some very strange details that soon have
Franck – and Lucie, who has contacted him about Ludovic – working on a
world-spanning investigation that involves France, Belgium, Egypt and Canada.
They are searching for the person or people who made the bizarre film and for
the film’s connection to the mutilated bodies – and, not surprisingly in the
thriller genre, they soon find themselves on the trail of some extremely dangerous
people in very high places.
Although the basics of the plot make Syndrome
E seem like just another noir
thriller with chemistry eventually developing between its protagonists,
Thilliez resolutely refuses to let the book slip fully into cliché, and as a
result turns it into something more thought-provoking and considerably scarier
than most works in the genre – whose conventions it nevertheless upholds. For
example, Franck is not just a burned-out officer of the law who is still
mourning his wife and child: he has symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia – this
is why he now has a desk job as a profiler – and he keeps seeing, and speaking
to, a hallucinated little girl named Eugenie, who critiques him at every turn
and may remind some readers of the hallucinations of mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. as detailed in the biography and film A Beautiful Mind. Franck’s boss tells him, “Your illness does some funny things
to your head, a kind of stew that lets you grasp things nobody else can sense.”
Nevertheless, Franck may simply be too strange for some tastes – in which case
the developing chemistry between him and Lucie, a more-conventional character who
nevertheless attains depth in Thilliez’ hands, may be hard to accept. What is not difficult to believe is the eventual
discovery of what the film and the construction-site bodies have in common: something
that is not supernatural, as in Ring,
but is all too plausible – and backed by considerable scientific research
(which Thilliez dribbles out throughout the book). Incidents of collective
hysteria and subliminal messaging, references to real historical events, and an
appearance of the conventional, convenient and typical-for-the-genre bugaboo of
the nefarious CIA, are mixed together skillfully to produce an ending that in
some ways seems a little flat (it is a touch didactic) but that certainly ties up
the many loose ends of the plot neatly. Polizzotti’s translation is only so-so: it keeps things moving well but
contains some oddities, such as multiple references to “neon” rather than “fluorescent”
lights and repeated use of the obsolete term “pedal pushers” to refer to Capri
pants; and there are some odd word choices, such as a statement that bullets
were “recuperated” after victims were shot (rather than “recovered” or “removed”).
Also, a few passages in Syndrome E that
are not up to the narrative level of the rest of it appear to originate with
Thilliez himself, such as some condescending remarks about Egyptians and their
predilections. But if Syndrome E has
a number of flaws, it has many more strengths, if by “strengths” one means
story elements that are significantly more plausible and thus significantly
more frightening than those in many other contemporary thrillers – in whatever
language they are written.
Franck
and Lucie work together again in Bred to
Kill, which has considerable similarities to Syndrome E despite significant differences in plot specifics. Here
the science comes from the fields of paleontology and genetics, the travel
takes readers from Paris to the Alps to the Amazon jungle, and the mystery
spans not decades but thousands of years, all the way back to the days of
Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals. Here Thilliez interweaves speculation about the
reasons for the survival of left-handedness in a right-handed world with a
denouement that depends heavily on scientific explanations – indeed, there is a
touch too much science near the book’s end, which some readers may find
distracts them from Thilliez’ otherwise well-done focus on Franck and Lucie as
evolving characters. Also here as in the previous novel, the book starts rather
slowly, but the pace soon picks up and even becomes frenetic at times. And here
as well as in Syndrome E, there is
some awkwardness in the translation, or even out-and-out errors, as in having a
scientist use “moths” and “butterflies” as synonyms.
All these
matters, good and bad, are parts of what will quickly become, for readers, a
recognizable Thilliez (or at least Thilliez-in-English) style – all at the
service of another story that begins with a gruesome death that is not at all
what it seems to be. This one is the killing of a graduate student named Eva
Louts at a primate research center – clearly a tragic animal attack and no more,
except that the chimpanzee that supposedly killed Louts knows sign language and
uses it to give her own version of the story – one that checks out. This is
quite a twist, and like so much in Thilliez’ books, it is one that at once seems
bizarre and outlandish – yet lies clearly within the realm of possibility. It
is Franck who investigates what he realizes is murder, reluctantly bringing in Lucie
– now bereaved and even more deeply damaged than before – for assistance. It is
Lucie who finds, in a glacier in the Alps, evidence of a long-long-ago crime –
and proof that someone else has gotten to that evidence first. All this is tied
together in some entirely logical ways (Louts was visiting left-handed
prisoners who had been convicted of horrible crimes) and in some that stretch
the bounds of coincidence but nevertheless fit the plot and characterizations
very well (one of those prisoners was the man responsible for the death of
Lucie’s daughter). Thilliez is scrupulously fair to readers here, more so here
than in Syndrome E, whose title is
never explained: in Bred to Kill, the
original French title, coupled with the revelation of the full name of the
killer of Lucie’s child, will immediately ring alarm bells in anyone with a
modicum of familiarity with genetics and DNA – although it takes Lucie and
Sharko longer to figure things out.
Bred to Kill will not provide readers
with much respect for human nature, either in the present or in the dim past,
and will surely leave some wondering whether brutality and extreme violence are
deeply embedded in the human genetic code – a question that in fact has been
raised recently by real-world scientists studying chimpanzees and finding that aggressive
violence appears to be innate among chimps and not caused by their interactions
with humans. That troubling determination, the result of a 54-year study,
occurred only in 2014, long after Born to
Kill was published in France in 2011. But the recent discovery only makes
the fictional search and findings of Franck and Lucie all the more chilling and
all the more resonant with real-world events – which is very far from a
comforting thought. Indeed, there is precious little that is comforting in
these very dark novels (whose lack of more than the slightest touch of levity
may cause some readers to find them somewhat difficult to get through). Everyday
life can be scary on its own. Just beyond its bounds, in Thilliez’ fiction and
perhaps in fact in the very near
future, matters may be considerably more terrifying.
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