Philippe Besson: « Arrète avec tes mensonges » | Lie with Me (2017)

The title refers to the narrator Philippe Besson's mother's criticism of him as a child, telling him to stop telling lies. But lies, of course, are Besson's profession: he's a novelist. On the other hand, this novel is the most autobiographical he's yet written. And through this novel, we come to learn that other books of his have skirted around this particular story, especially perhaps in Mon frère, where the character Thomas Andrieu is prominent. And «Arrète avec tes mensonges»* is dedicated to the memory of Thomas Andrieu (1966–2016): he really did exist.
Philippe Besson was born in Barbezieux (Charente), where he spent his childhood and adolescence, and where much of the narrative takes place; also, as Besson says, his family spent their holidays on Île de Ré, taking the ferry as this book is largely set in 1984, before the bridge was built in 1988.

But the main interest is between Thomas and Philippe, who meet for passionate sex on a number of occasions, although Thomas wants their activities to be kept strictly secret, as if he's somehow ashamed of being gay. Thomas lives on a farm with his parents (father French, mother of Spanish origin from Gallicia) and is still expected, as were children many years before, to follow his father's profession. Thomas knows that the academic Philippe will leave tiny Barbezieux (pop. then just over 5000) and that their friendship will end.

It is in fact Thomas who will call an end to the relationship by going to Spain, leaving Philippe with only memories of their affair as he leaves Barbezieux for Bordeaux and later Paris.

The second part takes place in Bordeaux in 2007, and here the narrative seems to swerve a little away from fact and into contrivance, although I may be wrong. The day after a book signing session in Bordeaux, Philippe is interviewed by a journalist in his hotel when he suddenly spots Thomas. Well, it's not Thomas but his son Lucas, the 'spitting image' of his father. Lucas is the product of a relationship with a Spanish girl and Thomas, and as she comes from a staunch Catholic family there's no question of abortion so they marry and live on the farm in Barbezieux. Lucas knows that Philippe is a famous writer, that he's been very friendly with Thomas, and reveals that Thomas has read Philippe's books and that there has to be absolute silence in the house when Philippe appears on TV. Lucas gives Philippe the family's phone number and takes Philippe's number to pass on to Thomas, although Philippe knows that neither will phone the other.

And then, in 2016, the bombshell: Lucas must see Philippe in Paris soon and hand something to him. The meeting takes place in Café Beaubourg, when Lucas tells Philippe that his father's hanged himself but not left a note saying why. He goes on to reveal that two days after Philippe met Lucas, Thomas announced that he was leaving the family definitively, giving his wife his land and his other possessions: they are to divorce. No one knows where he went. Searching around after Thomas's death, Lucas – who's carved a new life for himself in California but returns to France for his father's funeral – finds a number of letters to Thomas from another male lover, threatening to sever their relationship if Thomas doesn't live with him. But Thomas is incapable of revealing his real sexual identity, which is why he'd lived a heterosexual lie for so many years.

Before Philippe reads it, Lucas leaves the café giving Philippe an unsent letter Thomas wrote it to Philippe in 1984, in which he tells him that the time he's spent with Philippe is the happiest he's ever had, and that he knows that he'll never be as happy again.

*This book was translated into English in 2019, with the bizarre title Lie with Me, which didn't exactly receive a brilliant review in i: but then what do you expect, as this wasn't written by Philippe Besson, but a (seemingly pretty wobbly at that) translator?

My other Philippe Besson posts:
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Philippe Besson: Un instant d'abandon
Philippe Besson: Son frère
Philippe Besson: En l'absence des hommes | In the Absence of Men
Philippe Besson: Un garçon d'Italie
Philippe Besson: La Trahison de Thomas Spencer

Philippe Besson: Un instant d'abandon (2005)

Philippe Besson, it seems, can always be relied upon to produce a very good outsider novel, and Un instant d'abandon is no exception. This is told from the point of view of Thomas, an Englishman of about thirty who has lived most of life in Falmouth, Cornwall. He paints a very gloomy picture of the town, although the description of the Chain Locker pub (and there really is one in Falmouth) made me realise Besson has never set foot in a pub in England. An English pub where you order a coffee, sit down, are served, and pay afterwards? And which also serves grenadine? I can't for a second imagine such French café style service in a pub in Falmouth.

Anyway, to cut to the quick. Thomas has been something of a weedy person physically, injured his leg as a child and suffered forever after from torment by his male school counterparts but earned great respect from Marianne, whom he married and had a child by, or rather didn't as he's infertile, although Marianne didn't know that, so her infidelity is ostensibly only known by her. But it makes for a problematic marriage made even more problematic when Thomas kills the son who isn't his biological son.

In fact he doesn't really kill him as such, he's just a little negligent taking him out to sea when warned against it, and the child just dies accidentally, although Thomas (rather harshly, I thought) gets five years for a kind of homicide after he's, well, just released a dead body (never found) to the sea. But then he didn't defend himself in court.

And after prison Thomas returns to the completely empty home his wife has left – perhaps to go with her lover: who knows or cares – to the only place he's really known, but to almost universal ostracism, to hurtful oblique comments in the Chain Locker. Almost universal, but there are two understanding souls: both are outsiders of sorts.

First there's Rajiv, the Pakistani from whose shop Thomas buys a large number of things from, and who invites Thomas into his private 'sanctuary' for cup after cup of tea, sessions during which Rajiv listens almost like – I couldn't help thinking – a psychiatrist.

And then there's Betty, an attractive girl of twenty-one who's viewed Thomas for a long time on the sly, recently watched him coming and going from the Chain Locker, identifies a fellow outsider and will have no truck with the mindless ostracism. With great pain, she listens to Thomas in the Chain Locker (and surely prison is suggested in that phrase?), hears of the initial madness he underwent inside, of the violence and egoism of survival. It's difficult for her to listen to Thomas, but she does so because she loves him, as she confesses.

How does Thomas react to this? Well, Betty has also said that she has a young child, so surely he has a ready-made family, a working partner and an end to all the outsiderdom?

Alas, Thomas can't accept the invitation to love and possible happiness and has been waiting for the return of Luke, the guy he met in prison, and who comes to join him in Falmouth. Throughout, the novel had been leaning away from the world of heterosexuality: 'Le désir des femmes, je l'ai égaré, si je l'ai jamis eu': ('Desire for women, I lost it, if I ever had it'); 'Non, la connaissance d'une autre ne m'a vraiment manqué': ('No, I never really missed the knowledge of another woman'). Besson is a world away from the explicit gay sex of some novels, but (rather differently) more tilted to the coded homosexual languages of decades ago. Just a shame he's never been to an English pub though, as he'd have been far better equipped to describe one in the novel.

My other posts on Philippe Besson:
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Philippe Besson: Un garçon d'Italie
Philippe Besson: En l'absence des hommes | In the Absence of Men
Philippe Besson: La Trahison de Thomas Spencer
Philippe Besson: Son frère
Philippe Besson: « Arrète avec tes mensonges »

Philippe Besson: Un garçon d'Italie (2003)

There are superficial similarities between Philippe Besson's Un garcon d'Italie and Linda Lê's Lame de fond (2012), mainly that the novels have three narrators, one coming from the grave.

In Un garcon d'Italie, though, each narrator has no more than three pages in which to tell his or her part of the story, almost always the 29-year-old Luca first, then his girlfriend Anne of the same age, followed by the twenty-three-year-old (but younger-looking) Leo.

The drama, which is very much a detective story, begins to unfold when Luca is found dead in the River Arno in Florence, where the whole story is set. He briefly describes the events after his death up to being buried and adding a few comments on this permanent location, and says that no one will know what has happened to him – although he neglects to say that his readers will find out in the end.

The autopsy reveals that sleeping tablets were in his system, which might suggest suicide or murder rather than accident: this is for the efficient if slightly unpleasant Inspector Tonello to discover, if he can.

Although the relationship between Anna and Luca has existed for a few years and although the couple are obviously in love, Luca has never wanted to live with Anna and has remained a little aloof, only seeing his girlfriend three or four days a week.

Anna begins to discover something of the truth when she lets herself into Luca's place and discovers the existence of Leo Bertina, whom the police know as a rent boy with a criminal record working around the train station restrooms and whose existence is known to Luca's uptight middle-class parents who reveal almost nothing to her about the affair.

The truth is a little less sordid than it appears because Luca has lied by omission to Anna and has been having a non-paying, loving sexual relationship with Leo, and been the only person ever invited to Leo's hotel room. But Luca had had sex with Leo on the same night that he died, he fell to his death just an hour after he left Leo, and Tonello asks himself if he was stuffed with tablets in an act of murder for which the motive isn't clear.

The third section of the book is short and just told by Anna and Leo, when they meet at his place of work at the station. Here two opposite worlds stumble towards mutual understanding, both obviously intelligent people with a strong understanding of psychology, but Leo to some extent hampered by his inability to translate his eloquent thoughts into eloquent words.

I doubt that any reader suspected an unreliable narrator, and indeed there isn't one. Both Anna and Leo return to their respective haunts to cope as they can with their loss of the same – but very differently perceived – person, and it's left for Luca to give the last voice, to reveal the truth.

He'd had a lot of wine that night with Leo, but he didn't think it would help him sleep, so he buys sleeping tablets from a chemist, doesn't realise he should have taken one instead of four, so feels wonderfully light-headed and starts playing on the bridge parapet, doesn't know it's slippery, and falls. So, verdict never recorded: accidental death.

At only 220 pages in largish print, this is a quick read, but a very fruitful one: once again, Philippe Besson shows he's a powerful writer.

My other posts on Philippe Besson:
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Philippe Besson: En l'absence des hommes | In the Absence of Men
Philippe Besson: La Trahison de Thomas Spencer
Philippe Besson: Son frère
Philippe Besson: Un instant d'abandon
Philippe Besson: « Arrète avec tes mensonges »

Philippe Besson: En l'absence des hommes | In the Absence of Men (2001)

Most of the men are absent in this summer of 1916 because they're fighting in World War I, although a few men are brought together in Paris: the aristocratic Vincent de l'Étoile and the great writer Marcel Proust; and Vincent again with the housekeeper's son Arthur Valès, a soldier who has a week's leave.

Vincent, a sixteen-year-old far wiser than his years, is soon seeing the forty-five-year-old Proust every afternoon either at his home or in an expensive café: the two men are of the same class, are very intelligent, and almost instinctively recognise that they are of homosexual persuasion. But although the relationship becomes loving and confidential, it remains Platonic.

When Vincent gets together with the twenty-one-year-old Arthur though, the two enjoy seven nights of sexual bliss. Vincent's father knows nothing of this, although he knows that his son is friendly with Arthur and tries to discourage the mixed-class relationship. Later, Housekeeper Blanche will initially tacitly show that she is aware of the real nature of the relationship.

More than half of the book is the first part, which ends with Arthur leaving for an unknown future in an increasingly bloody war. The second half – almost a quarter of the book – is purely epistolary, with Arthur and Vincent expressing their deep love for each other, and Vincent slowly revealing his love affair to an understanding and avuncular Proust. The final letter is just a few lines: Vincent sending the news to Proust of Arthur's death.

The final part of the book is brief, with Vincent giving some consolation to Blanche by telling her of his deep love for her son, who Blanche informs him has loved Vincent since he first saw him. She also tells Vincent why she could never reveal who Arthur's father was. At the end of the 19th century circumstances drove Blanche to prostitution, although her shame led her to only have sex once with one client before she fled from the brothel.

The client was an aristocratic man whose father had given him money to go to the brothel because of his reluctance towards the opposite sex, and both Blanche and man found the experience uncomfortable. It doesn't exactly require great guesswork to figure out the identity of the father of Arthur.

The strength of the book is in its psychological insights, its understatement, the subtle characterisation. This is Philippe Besson's first novel, and I found it much more successful than the other two novels of his I've read: Son frère and La Trahison de Thomas Spencer. One small point though – on page 66 Vincent mentions the word 'surréaliste': this is supposed to have been written in 1916, but surely the word wasn't used until later?

My other posts on Philippe Besson:
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Philippe Besson: La Trahison de Thomas Spencer
Philippe Besson: Son frère
Philippe Besson: Un instant d'abandon
Philippe Besson: Un garçon d'Italie
Philippe Besson: « Arrète avec tes mensonges »

Philippe Besson: Son frère (2001)

Lucas has returned to his family's home on the coast to join his brother Thomas, who is suffering from a blood disease which is incurable: his time is limited.

The brothers have been separated from each other for some time, and this is a final opportunity for them to be together at their childhood holiday home at Saint-Clément-des-Baleines on Île de Ré – the place where land meets the nothingness of the vast Atlantic, seeming (symbolically, of course) the end of the world.

As with Besson's La Trahison de Thomas Spencer, the main characters of Son frère are two males, although in the former novel they strongly resemble brothers as opposed to the actual brothers of this novel. But there is no (self-evident) homosexual undertow in Son frère.

The narrative takes the form of a kind of journal narrated by Lucas, although it weaves between the past and the present. But most of it is in the present, involving Thomas's illness, a series of blood tests and operations, usually negative results, and much heartache.

The drama of the second half of the novel is dominated by an old man who at first comes to tell the brothers that he's been watching Thomas – who now looks like an old man too, many years more than his chronological age – and who talks to them on several occasions. His final talk is addressed specifically to Thomas, and tells of a young woman who was drowned off the coast. His words 'On ne va pas contre la volonté de l'océan' ('You can't argue with the will of the ocean') seems to have a symbolic – even premonitory – significance. It certainly has a strong effect on Thomas.

Thomas confesses to Lucas that he had a girlfriend, Annette, whom he got pregnant and – contrary to Thomas's wishes – refuses to have an abortion. (Lucas muses that the same problem wouldn't have happened to him as he's gay.) Annette goes swimming the day after the argument, gets in trouble and yells to Thomas for help, but he hesitates, then goes to rescue her, is within twenty metres of her but he's too late to rescue her.

If he hadn't hesitated he'd have saved her, wouldn't he? The guilt. Thomas knows he's dying, but he cuts his life slightly shorter by yielding to the will of the ocean. The police find Lucas's body in exactly same spot as they found Annette's body: on the beach of Saint-Sauveur.

Unfortunately, this is a book that only really seems to take off in the second half.

Links to my other Besson posts:
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Philippe Besson: La Trahison de Thomas Spencer
Philippe Besson: Un garçon d'Italie
Philippe Besson: Un instant d'abandon
Philippe Besson: En l'absence des hommes | In the Absence of Men
Philippe Besson: « Arrète avec tes mensonges »

Philippe Besson: La Trahison de Thomas Spencer (2009)

Philippe Besson's novel essentially involves two Americans – Thomas Spencer (the narrator) and Paul Bruder – who were born on the same day: 6 August 1945, when the plane Enola Gay dropped its lethal cargo on Hiroshima. Thomas was born in Savannah, Georgia, although he never met his father, who left when his mother was pregnant, and who took her young baby to Natchez, Mississippi, where the Bruder family lived next door.

So the story begins in 1945, when Thomas and Paul started growing up together and for many years are inseparable, much like loving twin brothers. The novel traces the couple through school, through their lovers, up to and a little beyond the messy end of the relationship. To a lesser extent, it also traces the history of North American culture of the time, particularly the South which was still living through the Jim Crow period.

The back cover explains many of the important elements in the story: Claire McMullen, a free spirit (young, like the brotherly pair, in the 1960s) comes along and brings great danger to the Thomas-Paul bond: as Claire Chazal states in Le Figaro magazine (also mentioned on the back cover), this is – but only in some ways, I have to add – a darker version of Jules et Jim. Claire has previously had a relationship with Paul, but as an adolescent has to move with her family to Atlanta, thus severing the relationship. But she returns years later, and begins living with Paul.

La Trahison de Thomas Spencer translates as 'Thomas Spencer's Betrayal', and it is more or less this betrayal that the story in general points towards. Thomas and Paul have continued to be 'brothers' throughout and no girl or young woman has come between them before. More importantly, they have maintained this strong bond in spite of political differences. Thomas is the more studious, left-wing one, and when he moves to 'Ole Miss' (Oxford University, Mississippi) he  (not altogether wholeheartedly) joins in the demonstrations and drug-taking that were almost part of the fabric of student life in the sixties; but he still returns home to Natchez by Greyhound during the summer vacation. Paul, however, has been indoctrinated by his commie-hating parents, and feels that it is his duty to go and fight in Vietnam.

Paul and Claire promise to remain faithful to each other, although the inevitable happens and Thomas and Claire get together sexually and intend to remain that way on Paul's return. When he does, though, the new lovers feel that the physical wreck of a man that Vietnam has made of Paul – who returns with one arm and half his face a mangled, gruesome mess – that he would be better dead. Claire confesses her relationship with Thomas to Paul, who not long after puts a bullet through his own brain.

This ends the affair between Claire and Thomas, who exiles himself to Oregon with his guilt. What is the real betrayal? Simply Thomas having sex with Claire? In a much colder clime, Thomas now misses swimming in the Mississippi, and the final short paragraph states that he misses 'La sensation de l'eau sur la peau nue' (The sensation of water on my naked skin'). This doesn't relate to the time when the 'brothers' were spellbound by watching Claire swim naked in the river, but rather to the elephant in the room.

Thomas is thinking of when he and Paul used to swim naked as children, but probably more specifically to when the slightly later developing Thomas first sees Paul's pubic hair by the river, to when Paul clutches him in fun in the water and he feels Paul's cock rub against his buttocks: as Thomas says: 'C'est un moment de communion absolue.' Although no specific homosexual desire is mentioned between the 'brothers', throughout the book there are references to or allusions to homosexuality: at school a lesbian 'girlfriend' uses Thomas as a cover, thinking that he too is homosexual and doing the same; lack of interest in sport (in this case football, which Thomas tries to hide) is a stock 'code' used in homosexual fiction; but far more telling is when Thomas says that although he found Elizabeth Taylor 'very sexy' in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof', Paul Newman impressed him more: 'It took me a long time to understand why. I was too young at the time, it was impossible for me to put words to my confusion.' Quite.

This I thought was a central problem in the novel: there's a huge homosexual undertow that is going nowhere.

On a few minor notes, occasionally I was struck by an incongruity, such as a reference to 'traversin', the long sausage-like French pillows that surely aren't used in the USA, and one definite anachronism is that 'flower power' didn't appear in the early seventies but the late sixties.

Link to my other Besson posts:
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Philippe Besson: Son frère
Philippe Besson: Un garçon d'Italie
Philippe Besson: Un instant d'abandon
Philippe Besson: En l'absence des hommes | In the Absence of Men
Philippe Besson: « Arrète avec tes mensonges »