“What wonder if the prison looks like factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, all of which look like prisons?” »Wrote the philosopher Michel Foucault in Keep an eye on and punish (1975), his essential essay on prison and discipline. In order to respond to the consequences caused by a pandemic (!), The Citizen Party is introducing a reform decentralizing the care of inmates, who no longer live in a traditional prison building, but in a cell located on the land of a citizen. , chosen by lot. Code of Conduct: It is strictly forbidden to fraternize with the prisoner in your care, and it is also strictly forbidden to mistreat him.
A reform which offers salutary results, until prisoners start to take the loose and it is found that they are, in all likelihood, helped by their openers, who have, them, the power to lock and unlock all individual prison units in a given territory. Estelle, an employee of the Penitentiary Inspection Office, is responsible for shedding light on these escapes, which are increasing at the same rate as they are causing panic.
After The value of the unknown(2019), her psychoanalitico-mathematical novel, Cassie Bérard follows in the footsteps of those for whom dystopia does not serve to project themselves into a spectacularly science-fictional universe, but to just amplify some of the most disturbing features of our present. In other words: apart from this reform of the prison system, the world that the writer describes in this fourth book is almost identical to ours. The writers of Black mirror would have enjoyed such an idea.
Portrait of the excesses of an overly heavy bureaucracy, examination of the genesis of the most eccentric theories, reflection on the meaning to be given to work when everything goes wrong (the wife of the investigator Estelle suffers from a serious cancer) … The balance concentrates in dense and sometimes didactic prose many of the anxieties of a time when believing in the good intentions of our governments seems to be pure naivety.
And if she magnifies the worst muses of a society whose whistleblower reflexes only wait for the first opportunity to manifest themselves, Cassie Bérard refuses to stop believing in the strength of the human bond, especially when she describes the ravages loneliness.
“From the moment she infiltrated the cells, there was nothing a jailer, even with the best intention, could do to drive her away. You should have seen this loneliness as the most persevering of life partners, the one that guides you and undermines you and is constantly making a nest in your head. It lodges in you; you become loneliness. “
A novel of abundant erudition, which fascinates less thanks to its characters or its story than thanks to the consistency of the reflection that it carries in the hollow, The balance speaks of freedom as something whose protection it would be unwise to entirely abdicate from our leaders, and of which we all owe it to ourselves to be guardians.