Will earthworms save the world? The health of these silent artisans of fertility with hermaphroditic sexuality, who swarm under our feet, digging, burrowing, absorbing and spitting out dead organic matter, is perhaps the key to our survival.
In any case, this is what Arthur and Kevin believe, two friends who met on the benches of the agronomy faculty in Paris, both passionate about geodrilology – the science of earthworms – and dreaming of saving the world by saving themselves.
Humus, finalist for the Goncourt Prize, sixth novel by Gaspard Koenig, essayist, novelist, liberal philosopher and French politician born in 1982, recounts their divergent trajectories in parallel. In this novel which moves forward at a gallop, the writer seems to draw as much from Balzac as from Houellebecq – knowing well everything that the second owes to the first.
Arthur, who grew up in the beautiful neighborhoods of Paris, the son of a lawyer specializing in human rights, is an idealist. Coming from the deep countryside, the only child of agricultural workers, Kevin is more pragmatic, including in his sexuality as an “easy man” – he is a sail and a steamer.
By settling with his girlfriend on a small plot of land lent by his father in the Normandy countryside, a reduced vestige of his grandfather’s farm, Arthur intends to carry out his experiments and regenerate the soil weakened by earthworms using earthworms. decades of pesticides and chemical fertilizers. A bit like Thoreau, whom he admires, he intends to create his own Walden there and not depend on anything or anyone.
Kevin has more ambition. Remaining in Paris, he intends to climb the social ladder rather than go back down. After other studies in management, this pretty face will join forces with a classmate at HEC to create a large-scale vermicomposting company with a view to recycling tons of industrial waste. After a spectacular fundraising campaign, a laudatory portrait of this Rastignac of vermicomposting published in the press suggests that he would have “avenged his first name and all those who bear it”.
In Arthur’s eyes, unsurprisingly, Kevin sold himself to the system “to make money from the worms.”
Pushed from one failure to another – earthworm and lover – into the last corners of his idealism, Arthur will withdraw and “cultivate his garden”, in the sense that Voltaire understood it, before getting closer to social ecology of a Murray Bookchin and to end up giving in to the sirens of the Extinction Rebellion movement.
But nothing flows naturally in this gripping coming-of-age novel which doubles as a social satire, neither for one nor the other of the heroes, both absorbed and just as quickly spit out by the system they understood generally contest.
This is the fertile soil on which Gaspard Koenig plants Humus. An effective novel which carries a sometimes fierce social critique, delivered with great aptness, targeting, among other things, business circles where we thrive on greenwashing and “green tartuffery”.