Natacha Appanah: Le Ciel par-dessus le toit (2019)

Natacha Appanah's Le Ciel par-dessus le toit is a title inspired by a poem of Verleine's which he wrote in prison for wounding Rimbaud in the wrist, and aptly this novel is a book about the different prisons people build for us (either physically or mentally) or which we build for ourselves. The characters here are shut in on themselves, they are wounded people.

Oddly (on first impressions, that is) I was reminded of The Minipops, a 1980s English television programme which was a huge mistake on the part of those who allowed it to be shown: a paedophile's wet dream, it showed young children mimicking the pop songs of the day, the girls' faces heavily made up and the children dancing around amidst adult lyrics and tried-on adult (i.e. sexy) gestures. Mercifully, this potentially deeply destructive exercise was eventually stopped, although I'm very sorry to say that many Minipop clips on YouTube have been reposted, with comments from a number of women finding the pulling of the programme incomprehensible and 'politically correct'. As if anti-paedophilia were some kind of disease. Dis-ease this certainly makes me feel.

Where is this leading? To the fictional Éliette, the pre-pubescent girl whose parents paint her in make-up, create a singing doll, delight in her singing in front of audiences, until she cracks. She cracks particularly because she's waiting in the wings to go on and sing when a work colleague of her father's smudges her lipstick and puts his tongue in her mouth, smelling of tobacco, sweat and mint. She is eleven years old. And she goes on stage and screams. Psychotherapy doesn't help, and she lives in the unspoken trauma, experienced as conflagration of the self, and she burns her parents' house down at the age of sixteen.

Éliette mentally dies then, and she re-names herself as Phénix, risen from the ashes of her childhood. She goes on to independently rear two children by two fathers, children she will not interfere with as her parents interfered with her. The first is a girl she calls Paloma, and seven years later she produces Loup, a boy who doesn't have any of the ferocity of his wolf name, but is in fact usually very calm and collected. All three, though, live together until Paloma leaves in her twenties and promises to return to the then seven-year-old Loup. But Phénix doesn't even open Paloma's letters and ten years later Loup is left in ignorance, until (without a driving licence) he takes his mother's car in an attempt to find his sister and ends up driving down a motorway bretelle the wrong way, having a slight accident with another vehicle, ending up in a short-term prison cell with the sky above him, through the roof. Rather like Éliette years before him, he voices his protest in court not in a yell, but in an unpunctuated howl.

This is a highly accomplished novel by by a highly accomplished writer.