Laurent Tremblay, a seductive, rebellious, smug, fearless and blameless young journalist, enters the backstage of the National Assembly as a correspondent for the newspaper The star. Behind these closed doors, he discovers the “great game of power and domination” which is being played out just before the referendum, solidly shaking the foundations of power and deconstructing the nationalist dream and any hope of a possible country.
With his fifth and new novel, The great stampede (Québec Amérique), journalist and ex-ombudsman at Radio-Canada Pierre Tourangeau rushes into the mythical parliamentary building without getting stuck in any flowers. Shenanigans, corruption, sexuality in all its forms, the story plunges us into a twisted universe in which the characters are driven by an insatiable thirst for power. Judges, ministers, president of the room are tracked by Tremblay, obsessive and compulsive worker, who is ready to do anything to bring down the masks.
In this story that flirts with the detective novel, the narrator plunges back into his past, his fiery twenties, carried and driven by his testosterone. Not only does this hormone take part in this crossing, but it becomes a central character, because man, starting with Laurent Tremblay, is here on the perpetual hunt. And among the horde of women who gravitate around him, there is Claudine, the shy waitress, Normande, the “mature” woman who has “more than one trick in her fuck-in-town”, the pretty and too young Isabelle and her not least Julie Corneau, her “nirvana, [s]we lighthouse, [s]a fanfare”, his “unicorn”, with whom he is totally and sincerely in love. His attitude towards women makes him both endearing and poetic, like a Gérald Godin could be towards Pauline Julien, but as shabby and small as Jean-Paul Belleau – cult character from the soap opera ladies of hearts written by Lise Payette — was written for her “doe” Julie and other women. Laurent Tremblay is a tender and disarming character, cynical and assumed that we follow in his entrenchments until the very end.
Everything except the language of wood
In a strong and uninhibited language, Pierre Tourangeau shakes up received ideas and other politically correct formulas to better expose this twisted era. Navigating skilfully between raw and frank dialogues, which do not go overboard, and poetic turns, Tourangeau delivers a text that is both moving and despairing, lucid and uncompromising on politics and its gurus. Power being constantly dissected by the narrator who quotes Nietzsche – leaving him in the end “to his handjobs and delusions of power” –, Machiavelli and Spinoza, their “bastard descendant”.
Although it is advised at the beginning of the story that everything is fiction and fabulation, the reader cannot help but recognize some protagonists and facts that marked this pivotal moment in the history of Quebec. At the head, the character Sylvain Méthé, parliamentary leader, homosexual minister is the victim, just like Claude Charron was at the time, of a set up. The dubious use of certain words, such as “Pénéquistes” or “Pénistan” – a small brothel run by the fictitious deputy Jules Beaupré – remains for its part dubious and very unrewarding, although very evocative of these “little leaders” in the “little destiny” directed by Tourangeau. A story that flays and from which you come out with your tail between your legs.