In XXe century, Montreal undergoes a profound metamorphosis. The island becomes a city, buildings rise from the earth to reach the sky, buses descend underground, factories dream of the future by spitting out their venom, highways and bridges arise, intertwine and make promises of a new world.
The multiplication of these pharaonic projects is not without consequence. In the shadow of the towers, neighborhoods are destroyed, businesses razed to the ground, families expropriated. In the maze of alleys, between concrete structures and rusting debris, communities try to hang on, to flourish despite poverty and the lack of choice.
Every day, workers risk their lives and their health to allow the city access to modernity. “A city does not allow itself to be disfigured without claiming some of its torturers, and it tries to pluck them in all kinds of ways”, writes Maxime Raymond Bock in Morel.
Ordinary stories
In this first novel, the Montreal writer recounts the transformation of the metropolis through the life of an ordinary man, Jean-Claude Morel, an anonymous worker who, in addition to suffering the decline of the body inexorable in his profession, sees the works that he participates in building, destroying his living environment, moving his family and unraveling, brick by brick, the links that unite him to his family.
“The major construction sites to which I am referring, these larger-than-life urban engineering projects, form a romantic material worthy of the epic, underlines the author. I preferred to tell the story from below, and try to understand how the people who went through these historic moments experienced them on a human scale, without anyone interested in their fate. “
Fresco teeming with life, Morel is at the same time a family, social, historical and political novel, which comes to life through the many banalities, the stories usually which form the existence of a man. “It’s a novel about ‘nothing’ after all,” he laughs.
Nothing that sums up, neither more nor less, all the correctness of life. “It’s not just the great heroes who are storytelling. Each individual has a life of unparalleled complexity. Love, death, moving, pain… Everyone goes through these experiences, but it is in the detail of each moment and each emotion that all the riches of existence are revealed. I wanted to emphasize this simultaneity between the big and the little story. “
The major construction sites I am referring to, these larger urban engineering projects
than nature, form a romantic material worthy of the epic. I tried to understand how the people who went through these historic moments experienced them on a human scale, without anyone interested in their fate.
An allegory of memory
This adequacy is evidenced by the non-linear composition and the extremely elaborate form of the novel. The first sentences of each chapter seem to exist in the space-time of the one that precedes it, followed by an element of rupture which acts as a narrative pivot and which transports the story from one era to another. Each detail fits together and is revealed in a prodigious mechanism, like a true allegory of the world of construction, and of the movements that command memories.
” Morel is a novel of memory: that of a man and that of a city. Memory does not work chronologically. The episodes arise randomly in our mind, ”argues the novelist.
The writer thus revolves his story around common and significant places for the protagonist, such as churches, cemeteries, alleys, and construction sites which have punctuated his life and served as engines of social cohesion. “We lead mundane and repetitive lives. We live at the same address for years, and our activities are circular. We take the same streets, we visit the same shops. Any detail, an impromptu meeting, a smell, a song, can act as a trigger, and bring us back to these places that inhabit us and the memories to which they are attached. “
This circular structure, which confuses the past and the present, highlights the redundancy of injustices and inequalities inherent in capitalist society. A victim of industrialization, then of gentrification, Morel was in turn expropriated, then “renovated”, constantly at the mercy of the profits of those who lead the world.
“I am the first to be surprised to see how much my historical novel is in fact anchored in the news. In the coherence of its impetus and its subject, it was however obvious that the character was going to be condemned to undergo the consequences of his social class until the end of his life. “
The novel also reminds us that even today, the most essential workers are often those who get the least recognition. “As was the case with these workers who were killed at work, both literally and figuratively, the pandemic has highlighted the invisibility of those who maintain the social safety net, to the detriment of their health and safety. “