Fred Vargas: Dans les bois éternels (2006)

I suppose I'd been putting off the moment for as long as possible, reading a novel by the 'queen of the rompol' (roman policier, or crime novel), but after seeing her on La Grande Librairie talking about the ecological disaster we're heading for, she convinced me that I had at least to give her a go. And I was by no means disappointed.

Fred Vargas has a doctorate on the history of the plague in the Middle Ages, is a specialist in archaeozoology, and her pseudonymous surname was taken from the Ava Gardner character Maria Vargas in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's film The Barefoot Contessa (1954). Most of her books star the commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, as does this novel.

And here we enter a whole different world, with a host of characters in Adamsberg's cop entourage, many of whom have presumably appeared in other books in the cycle, and Vargas leaves footnotes for the reader to refer to other incidents in her previous novels. All of the main characters have recognisable character traits, such as Danglard's erudition, Kernorkian's fear of the dark and microbes, the female Froissy's love of food (two breakfasts a day, for instance), Mercadet's sleepiness, etc.

There are realistic descriptions aplenty here, although the novel can hardly be described as in the realist vein: there are way too many coincidences, wild acts, feats beyond imagination, loose ends neatly tied up, and so on.

It would be difficult, nay impossible, to sum up these almost 500 pages in a few paragraphs, but the main plot (and there are a few) concerns a serial killer (of people, and maybe animals too) who has killed two outsider characters for unknown reasons, although it soon appears that this is a female, then a female who has committed numerous murders before being imprisoned, or is it a female at all? Or are we looking at this from the wrong angle, and what has the 'new' lieutenant Veyrenc (from the Béarn area like Adamsberg) to do with this, if anything?

There's a ghost, a magic potion for eternal life, and...did you know cats have a bone in their penis, or stags (representatives of eternal life) a bone in their heart? Nor me, but it's true. And at least we now understand that the picture on the cover (and the 'bois' in the title of the book) refer not to 'woods' but to antlers.

The world of Fred Vargas's novels is a very complex and a very engrossing one, and I shall no doubt be revisiting it.