Who set fire to the Maison Dieu? In a third novel with a sparkling style, Céline Laurens uses this Cluedo as a pretext to unravel another mystery: the complex relationships between the inhabitants of the estate. In a jubilant play of the pen, the novelist makes the reader fly from one soul to another, adopting a new point of view in each chapter, with an impeccable mastery of style and a terribly undifferentiated empathy, whether it concerns the good guys or the bad guys.
The world through the eyes of another, isn’t that the definition of the novel? The portraits, masterfully rendered, are always through the eyes of one of the characters. Like for example the maid about the mistress of the house: “It’s funny because her young face wasn’t meant to look like the one I know her to have. Especially the eyes. Now they’re like turned inward, not toward us.”
The passage of time, which removes the childish down from the figures, is the other undercurrent, along with the fire, of this novel with its melancholic tones. Action and description merge in a microcosm that the reader takes pleasure in seeing form before his eyes, with its cornfields, its forest, its washhouse, its tales, its Dépêche and its Maison en feu. Each detail seems new, uncreated, as if the author had properly managed to remake the world. As if the Maison Dieu was in every way his work.
In the field of fiction, Céline Laurens breaks down comforts and conformisms. In the manner of one of her characters, she also castigates the “digestion aphorisms” : “I could perfectly imagine their authors, satisfied with themselves, putting their pen back in the inkwell, already wearing their nightcaps.” The author surprises, to the point of destabilizing. While all readers will find the text wonderfully written – how can one claim otherwise? – some who are used to moral tales will close it before the end, their fingers burned by flames that are always bright, sometimes murderous and bitter, where the devil himself resembles Prince Charming in the eye of the character he fascinates.
The world seen through the eyes of another, isn’t that the definition of a novel?
At a time when every work is required to situate itself on the flat terrain of morality, is it not the nature of true literature to seek with talent to touch what lies further away, or elsewhere? Even Abel, the aptly named brother of the Maison Dieu, recognizes this with all his innocence: “In our village there are good people and bad people, even if these things are always a bit mixed up.” Céline Laurens here simply reminds us of Céline, with her: “It wouldn’t be so bad if there was something to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys.”
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This judgment, first or last, social or religious, literature reminds us of its futility, slipping towards other, larger spaces, aired by emotion and by the spirit, where only aesthetics takes the place of ethics. For the greatest (selfish) pleasure of literature.
The House of God, Céline Laurens, Albin Michel, 240 pages, 20.90 euros.
© Albin Michel
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