A formidable storyteller, stemming from the noir novel, Pierre Lemaitre moved on to “white literature” at the age of 62 with goodbye up therewinning the Prix Goncourt 2013 at the same time. One million copies sold, translations into 42 languages, a film adaptation by Albert Dupontel which won him a César in 2018. He has since been considered one of the best popular novelists of our time, in the noblest sense.
Dividing between Paris, Beirut and Saigon, Pierre Lemaitre continues his fine and committed reading of the XXand century with The big world, the first novel in a series of four titled “The Glorious Years”. It invites us once again to a complex game of snakes and ladders, mixing behind the scenes of history, war and post-war zones, endearing or repulsive characters, adventures and secret impulses.
We catch him on the phone while he is on vacation in Provence, he who now lives near Bordeaux. “I decided to leaf through a century which nevertheless includes two world wars and a tetrachium of colonial conflicts. We can’t leaf through this century without taking care of the war, because the war takes care of us, huh”, says the 70-year-old writer. He denies, moreover, having a particular taste for wars, but likes to take things sideways.
He did this by looking at the First World War in the rear view mirror and “stepping over” the Second by talking about the exodus. “This time, I spanned the Trente Glorieuses by avoiding the war in Algeria and talking instead about the war in Indochina. It’s kind of my method. »
The Thirty Glorious
The novelist tackles this time the “Trente Glorieuses”, as the years 1945 to 1975 were nicknamed. A period marked by strong economic growth, full employment, an explosion of purchasing power and mass consumption . He does so at a time when the French colonial empire is beginning to crumble, particularly in French Indochina (which will roughly become Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos).
But there is no question for the novelist of debunking myths. “It would be to have ambitions, either pedagogical or revolutionary, and I don’t have any. I have no lessons to give to anyone. I leaf through History and on that occasion, I give my opinion. I want to try to take a unique look at this century. It’s not original, but unique simply because it’s mine. Nothing more. »
The plot that feeds Great world unfolds around a family of French industrialists who are at the head of a small soap empire in Beirut, Lebanon. Jean (known as Bouboule), the eldest, had a presentiment of taking the helm of the company — as well as his upstart wife. François, gone to study in Paris, journalist who will be at the forefront of the murder of a famous actress. Hélène, their teenage sister kicking around on stretchers.
Finally, Étienne will do everything to get closer to his lover, a soldier stationed in Indochina. Having found a job at the Saigon Currency Agency, he will be both an agent and a witness to a massive fraud linked to transfers of funds to France – a true political and financial scandal known as “the affair of the dollars”.
Speaking of French Indochina as a “great swamp”, Pierre Lemaitre feels that this war has been somewhat erased from memory. “It was a purely capitalist war. We were there for capitalist reasons, solely to defend the industrial and commercial interests of the people who have settled there, and we are going to maintain this conflict at arm’s length with money. A purely financial war in every sense of the word. Except that it caused thousands of deaths in the Indochinese camp. But capitalism never looks at the human cost, what interests it is the cost of dividends. »
Art and shenanigans
Readers will recall that there was also talk of a scam in goodbye up there. Where does this interest in shenanigans come from, whether economic or political? “The scheming, it has a very pleasant side, admits Pierre Lemaitre. A scam, when done well, anyone who isn’t the victim can’t help but applaud it. It’s very jubilant. It’s like a conjuring trick. You are in front of him, you know he will lie, bluff, cheat. »
“The novel is exactly the same thing,” he continues. When I write a novel, I say to an imaginary reader: I’m going to tell you a story and in a few pages, if I’ve done my job well, you’ll believe it’s true. In fact, when he closes the book, he knows he’s been had. The characters are fictitious, the story is fictitious, but he closes the book by saying: congratulations to the artist. »
Author of several thrillers (from Neat work at Three days and a life), and even a Polar lovers dictionary (Plon, 2020), what, according to him, separates his first books from those that came after goodbye up there ? ” Nothing. Nothing separates them, answers Pierre Lemaitre, categorical. Obviously, I no longer write detective novels, but nothing separates them insofar as all the factual or structural elements that were in my detective novels continue to be my food. My narrative tools continue to be the same. I continue to tell stories with suspense, twists, false leads. In short, it is an evolution, there is no break. »
However, he recognizes that there was a kind of leap, a change of genre. “But at the same time, I take with me, like a snail, my barracks with everything in it. All my tools, my skills, my fantasies, my neuroses. And any attentive reader of all his work, he thinks, could see the continuity. “I hope there aren’t any, because they would be great neurotics too,” he says with his tongue-in-cheek humor.
A structural neurotic
With his vivacity and his talent as a fresco-maker, his chiseled sentences and his faithful cartoonish tone, the writer describes himself as a “neurotic of structure”. “I think a lot about the question of structure,” he admits. I believe that a well-structured book has a chance of becoming a good book and that a poorly structured book has no chance of becoming a good book. »
In his eyes, there must be an internal logic between the subject and the characters, a coherence between the time of the novel and the time of reading. “As long as I am not reassured on these structural questions, I do not start the novel”, he adds.
While it seems The big world, the second part of the tetralogy is already completed, he assures. “The serial writer’s great anxiety is to have written something in a previous episode that he can no longer modify, which binds him and deprives him of a good idea that he would have had. This means that throughout the writing of volume three, he will be able to correct volume two. And so on.
“It’s the technique of the serial novelist who tries to get a little head start so as not to be trapped by his own story. This is the way he found to bring together in peace, and in front of the page, the player, the “great neurotic” and the fine strategist.