René Fallet: L'Angevine (1982)

At one point in René Fallet’s L’Angevine the main character, the playwright Régis Ferrier (same initials) says that his friend’s wine tastes of raspberries, and this can’t be coincidental because the singer Boby Lapointe’s name is mentioned at least twice in this novel (once as the only footnote in the book), although his forename is misspelt as ‘Bobby’. ‘Framboise’ (meaning ‘raspberry’) is the name of Boby Lapointe’s most famous song, the one he sang in Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste, and the song is appropriate to the novel in several ways.

The title of the novel, L’Angevine, refers to the main female character in the book, Christine Labé, who lives in Angers, which is in the département Maine-et-Loire, and both Angers and the Maine-et-Loire are mentioned in the song. Framboise’s name is really Françoise, although customers in the bar she serves in call her Framboise, and Boby Lapointe harps on her big breasts: Christine’s breasts are mentioned a number of times, and Régis Ferrier likes to fondle them, although unlike Framboise’s they are very small. Régis Ferrier will ponder on all these things, including the fact that Framboise refuses to have sex, when he drowns his lost love in several whiskies towards the end of the novel, just after Christine has told him she’ll never again have sex with him.

Boby Lapointe’s song is one of many references to singers and novels in the book, but the most quoted. One novel that’s obliquely referred to more than once is Zola’s La Faute de l’abbé Mouret, and although it’s not Jean-Luc Labé's ‘sin’ but his wife’s, these are opportunities for Fallet to indulge in a Lapointe-style pun in wishing Labé dead: ‘Labé mourait’.

Régis doesn't first think of Christine with love, though: he is married, although it’s a dead marriage, and he has several much younger female sex objects at the same time: Christine, no matter what her confessions of love for him, and the fact that he’s sexually opened her blinkered eyes, initially has little effect on Régis from a romantic angle, although Christine (who has three children) gets to see him in his Paris appartment as often as she can.

The novel is in three sections: ‘Avant’, ‘Pendant’ and ‘Après’ to describe the three parts of the relationship. In the first, then, Christine doesn’t much impact on Régis, although in the second he rather quickly comes to love her and they can’t see each other too much, escaping to Belgium and London (where the restaurant food is unspeakable), etc. It even comes to a point where Règis begins to live with Christine in a ZAC (Zone d’aménagement concerté), or urban development area: although he gets on with the children very well, and although it’s obvious that he’s like a fish out of water, it’s Christine who very soon abruptly sends him packing because she has realised that there’s a difference between having a lover and having that lover live with you.

So, end of story and time to return to his young girlfriends, although of course he’s getting older now (53) and reflects on his losses. Strangely, though, after the ‘FIN’ there’s a PS saying they met again, will continue to meet, and will always see each other. It’s in italics, though, like so many of Christine’s wishes have been: presumably this is as real as Régis’s imaginary Muriel?

Very 1980s of course, but a fascinating read nevertheless.