What would we have become if the English had lost the battle on the Plains of Abraham on September 13, 1759? If Napoleon had emerged victorious from the Battle of Waterloo or if the Nazis had triumphed in the Second World War? How would the world be transformed? It remains to imagine utopian universes, pushing the cap of all possibilities until our today, colored in other shades, necessarily.
Thus are born the uchronies, where historical events lead to reinvented tomorrows. These literary or cinematographic exercises reveal in passing the temperament of their authors, pessimists or optimists. With, as a bonus, social irritants brought to light. As a general rule, the uchronia remains a way of testifying to the excesses of our contemporary world, an allegory served with two fingers of melancholy and a camouflaged warning signal at the bend. Like, “Get out of that way! It leads you to the abyss. »
So it is in Parallel Lives by Benoît Côté, published by Boréal. The Quebec writer has fun imagining the victory of Yes in the referendum of October 30, 1995. After all, the hypothesis was a hair’s breadth from materializing. No, Jacques Parizeau would not have made the speech that we know. As for tomorrow, would they sing as loudly as we predicted?
In this fast-paced humorous novel, the author, who definitely falls into the pessimistic category, did not portray the Republic of Quebec as a rose garden. Like a tax haven, rather, and a flagship destination for luxury tourism where business people abound. One of them commutes between Saint-Petersburg and Montreal to handle the big money. The Web is a completely mined ground for espionage. The ideals of youth nourish the mythologies of a bygone commitment without screwing up the comfort of the present.
The title refers to Parallel Lives of Plutarch, quoted by the erudite narrator, whom the oligarchs are surprised to find less ignorant than his compatriots. The reputation for illiteracy precedes Quebecers abroad in what is here only a fable, of course…
Let us judge: Dédé Fortin dies of cancer at the age of 56, after having launched albums in English, served as a coach for The Voice and made in the cinemaMishima to Chicoutimi. The president-elect shuns his state funeral, having already described as unpatriotic the presence of African musicians in his former group Les Colocs. Ah! Ah! People still alive are presented under their names, their destinies transformed. Hope they have a sense of humor.
We follow the narrator Benoît, half-French-speaking, half-English speaking, Russian speaking, banker always up and down hill, entangled in his lies and his past as an activist which goes back to his face. Elastic morality, but a training as a historian which earned him the unusual proposal to write an uchronia: “Imagine, Benoît, imagine, on the evening of October 30, 1995, that it is the no that wins. Imagine what happens next. Imagine as far as you want. Imagine until today. What would we have been, what would Quebec have been? At this stage of reading, we enter a large spiral, as in the Vertigo of Hitchcock.
Strange discomfort, at a time when Putin’s country is so infrequent, to discover the close economic ties imagined by Benoît Côté between independent Quebec and Russia!
Yet, on the whole, this social landscape seems familiar. These lofty ethical aspirations left at half mast, these casinos strewn across the territory, this busy, connected and disenchanted world is not so exotic, after all. In a satirical tone, the writer examines his society. Whether she lost or won the Yes battle doesn’t change much in the story, ultimately. We can sigh in front of the cynical bias of Benoît Côté in the face of the sensitive issues of sovereignty, not in front of his anxieties of the present time.
After closing the novel, I went to see norbourg by Maxime Giroux, from a screenplay by Simon Lavoie (in theaters April 22). On screen, businessman Vincent Lacroix and his damned soul, hood-turner Éric Asselin, happily cheated a crowd of investors, who were soon out of business.
That’s good to say! This financial scandal, the magnitude of which stunned us in the mid-2000s, could have taken place in Benoît Côté’s Republic of Quebec. Its uchronia sheds light on the same loss of bearings as Giroux’s film tracing the course of a real scam. These two works implicitly advise rediscovering a tottering humanity, otherwise beware! And in our mercantile era, I wanted their alarm signals to ring out together, making a lot of noise.