BWelcome to Frzangzwe, a gentle republican monarchy led by its archmarshal, himself strongly advised by his first fifrelin, Gabriel Pipaudi (graduate of the Grande École, Machiavelli class), where the social divide continues to widen between the elite and the people. But the President has his eye fixed on the stars and his fear of an alien invasion rather than on the state of his population. Precisely, on the fringes of the palace, strange things are being prepared.
The baroness, a former dowry-grabber who reigns in her manor over a sort of friendly court of miracles, has a great idea: to take the large Tower F to dismantle it on the 1stis more… « because it’s our turn ” And she easily manages to convince her ” gang of scoundrels, accomplished buccaneers, band of ragged pirates “. “Fake mercenaries” but with big hearts: Mo, an ex-boxer who has fallen to his lowest point, Mouna “the mouse” an IT expert, Hakkon the brave one who thinks he’s a Viking, the old Doctor who has been struck off the Order, or Zap, a young migrant from the East who escaped from the crook to whom his parents had sold him…
On the steps of the Palace, the situation will also go awry when Anne-Sophie-Catherine-Elisabeth, the heiress of the regime, who is to become a “marjorette” when she reaches the age of 18, convinces her official servant Chantal to organize a clandestine escapade outside her palace where she is suffocating. Fortuitously, two worlds will then cross paths as the revolt grows…
Known for his dark or historical novels (such as The Boywhich earned him the Prix Fémina), Marcus Malte offers here a great jubilant social fable. A light-hearted satirical farce in which, of course, any resemblance to existing or former facts and characters would be purely coincidental… or nicely offbeat. Because it would be surprising, when immersing oneself in the 500 or so pages of the book (which can be read in one go) if recent images of the Macronist “reign” did not come to mind, with its court, its ambitious young Prime Minister, its violent repression of the Yellow Vest movement, which the storming of Tower F (which we discover on the cover) strongly brings to mind. Even a very original method for forming a government that could be usefully transmitted to Emmanuel Macron and Michel Barnier…
This outrageous shift is less of a lampoon than buffoonery at its best. A cheerful exaggeration that builds up to an enthusiastic revolutionary finale. And this is all the more so because we will inevitably have vibrated with the characters, atypical, archetypes who all become chic, endearing types.
On the edge of the palace is also a real pleasure to read, with its story that is both wacky and burlesque but perfectly held throughout and with a style full of humor, mixing second degree, puns, inventive wordplay and a narrator regularly challenging the reader. As wacky as its protagonists, here is a unique and exciting book for this fall literary rentrée.
On the margins of the Palace, Marcus Malte. Zulma Editions, 496 pages, €24.50.
