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La chasse par Bernard Minier

2022; American Association of Teachers of French; Volume: 95; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tfr.2022.0033

2329-7131

Nathalie G. Cornelius,

Historical and Scientific Studies

Reviewed by: La chasse par Bernard Minier Nathalie G. Cornelius Minier, Bernard. La chasse. XO, 2021 ISBN 978-2-37448-321-4. Pp. 472. Commander Martin Servaz of the Toulouse crime squad confronts his seventh mystery in a procedural thriller firmly anchored in 2020 France. Under a hunter’s moon in the Ariège countryside on a late October night, a frantic young man rushes into the path of an oncoming vehicle. He is naked save for a deer head strapped over his own, and the word “justice” branded on his chest. As Servaz digs into this case, in which humans hunt their own kind, his philosophical views and steadfast integrity are put to the test. Each discovery he makes is inexplicably leaked to a public already on edge from civic unrest and the COVID-19 pandemic. The resulting media circus further polarizes the inhabitants of Toulouse. The rich are pitted against the indigent, criminals against the police, and police officers against each other as acts of violence escalate in this microcosm of French society. Minier’s characteristically cinematic landscapes mirror the psychological and financial hardships of their denizens: atmospheric forests hiding dilapidated châteaux evoke the milieu of an old France in decline. Equally evocative are the oppressively overpopulated urban housing projects where the desperate poor, left to their own devices, struggle to make do. An array of characters from varied walks of life, all mistrustful of authority and demoralized by the present health crisis populate these venues. Small business owners scrape to make a living, exhausted medical personnel labor in packed hospitals, professors refuse to teach contentious topics for fear of retribution. While the youth are lured into a life of crime by religious extremists, Minier shows that a worn-out police force constitutes the last line of defense in the novel and the reader’s reality. Statistics, testimonials, and allusions to recent French social unrest confirm that the characters’ tendency to act in their own interests, circumventing the system’s fail-safes, is not only fiction. The novel’s portrayal of the government fares little better than that of its citizens. Lists of French government interventions and their subsequent scandals are reminders that even the best intentions can hide ignoble acts. In this world where the violence of a few is supported by the passive complicity of many, Minier’s ambitious novel asks some valid questions about the nature of justice and morality. But making this undertaking into a thriller may be what makes the novel’s social commentary less effective. Although well-written and suspenseful, the intrigue is more simplistic and less original than Minier’s past works. By emphasizing the unsolvable gray areas of social problems in a world that is already familiar to the reader, the author sacrifices both the reader’s pleasure of escapism and the educational benefit of a different perspective. As a literary reconstruction of the violence inherent in contemporary society, this novel can be interesting. But for a more compelling thriller with a similar message, there is Minier’s own 2020 work La vallée (FR 94.3). [End Page 251] Nathalie G. Cornelius Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French