To be taken seriously, a littéraire novel must have a plain white cover with no decoration except for the title and the author’s name in tiny lettering. Pale yellow is just about permissible, so long as it is a joyless hue, the dull shade of the wallpaper in a run-down old people’s home. Anything more flamboyant would devalue the words inside, which are of such profound import that it is almost sacrilege to print them on such a lowly, opaque substance as paper. They should be etched on glass so that the reader can see them in all their blinding clarity.
That, at least, is the theory. In practice, a lot of this grande littérature is pure merde. Either it’s by a grand auteur who wrote one good book forty years ago and has been churning out the same old tripe ever since, or it’s new, daring and experimental, i.e. totally unreadable. There will be large doses of ‘oh mon dieu, it’s tough to be a writer’ angst, microscopic examinations of human relationships that seem to be designed to put you off falling in love ever again, and attempts at innovative style that make the act of reading as pleasurable as pulling a truck through drying cement. With your eyelids. It’s like France’s worst films, but without the pictures.
This criticism may sound extreme, but if you’ve ever heard a snooty French literary novelist saying with mind-searing hypocrisy that (s)he doesn’t care whether anyone actually buys his/her novel at all because the important thing is that (s)he has enriched the world with his/her art, then you would understand where I’m coming from.
On the other hand, French books with picture covers can be very good. They’re great at historical novels and biographies, for example. Let no one accuse me of being totally negative.
‘Sold’, the sign says. What this British family don't know is that
they've just agreed to pay two hundred thousand euros for a parasol.
THE
7TH
COMMANDMENT
Tu Ne Sauras Pas
THOU SHALT NOT KNOW
THOU SHALT NOT KNOW
IN FRANCE, THINGS ARE DONE ON A ‘DON’T NEED TO KNOW’ basis. Unless forced to do otherwise, no one will tell you anything.
There have been cases of people left sitting for hours on a motionless train in the middle of France, staring out at the fields of sweetcorn and wondering why they weren’t using the rest of the railway line. Had the locomotive broken down? Was there a bomb or a cow on the line? Had the driver stopped off at a friend’s house to watch the Tour de France? Nobody would say.
I once arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport to find that there were no immigration officials on duty. Two planeloads of jetlagged travellers crowded into the arrivals area, jostling for position in front of the unmanned booths, wishing they’d gone for a pee before getting off the plane, and waited for forty-five minutes. There were no announcements, and no one to complain to. In the end a woman found out that there was a bomb scare at the airport by phoning a friend who worked in a café in the departure lounge. The officials finally turned up, everyone pushed forward with their passports, and no more was said about the wait.
The worst case I ever experienced was coming home to my apartment one afternoon to find a masked, body-armoured, machine-gun-toting policeman on my landing. At least I hoped he was a policeman.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked, rather bravely, I thought.
‘You don’t need to know,’ he said.
I didn’t feel like arguing.
Sometimes, the French complain about this ambient secrecy, but there are lots of things they actually prefer to keep quiet. They hate being spied upon – mainly because they have so many guilty secrets.
There are very few CCTV cameras in France, and the French are very smug about this. They know that they would only get caught driving badly, walking furtively into a hotel with their lover, letting their dog poo on the pavement, dumping their leaky car battery on a street corner, or doing a whole variety of other antisocial things. So what if a few muggings and car thefts go unsolved?
The funniest example of strategic secrecy is a French itemized phone bill, which never gives the complete numbers called. It gives the first six digits, but not the rest, so that jealous spouses cannot call numbers they don’t recognize and get through to a lover.
This is why secrecy is tolerated. You keep your secret, I’ll keep mine. Au revoir.
Danger? What Danger?
On the north-west tip of Normandy, just fifteen miles from the Channel Islands, is a typical French secret. It’s a place whose existence is not denied at all – the area’s official website provides a link to ‘un autre site’ about the region, which has a very informative page on the subject.
But when you click on the link, you think, holy merde, why does no one talk about this?
This place is Cap de la Hague, a nuclear reprocessing plant much like the one at Sellafield in the north-west of England, which is so notorious that its name keeps getting changed to try and throw the public off the scent (people with long memories may recall that in the past it’s also been called Seascale and Windscale). But Cap de la Hague has always been Cap de la Hague. And unlike Sellafield, which regularly has the whole of Britain and Ireland up in arms about pollution, Cap de la Hague is ignored. Even though there is also a massive conventional nuclear power station right next to it.
This silence is all the more surprising (or, cynics would say, less surprising) because the site is right in the middle of a summer tourist area. Practically every coastal town within a hundred miles is a seaside resort where people happily swim, paddle and fish for shrimps. The bay to the west is a big oyster-producing region, and Le Mont
