Thomas Bronnec completes his work of political thrillers with a dystopia where four politicians ready to do anything to succeed, radical feminists and a lawless society of the spectacle intertwine.
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Thomas Bronnec definitely likes to sail against the times, in troubled waters, and shake up political correctness. After having denounced the reign of a green dictatorship and a French society kept under a bell jar in Collapse (Série noire /Gallimard, 2022), here he is attacking feminists in a new police dystopia, Coliseum, very cleverly constructed and very well researched on the political world, a world he does not seem to hold in very high esteem.
Three days of exhibition
The plot is set in 2028, that is, tomorrow. The main part of the story takes place in Plaine Saint-Denis, north of Paris, where television channels produce their reality TV shows. One of them is about to start, “The One”, copied from the emblematic show from the beginning of this century, Loft Story. Except that Loana and her cronies have been replaced by four political figures from the majority camp, two men and two women, candidates in the presidential election. An idea initiated, in a period of acute democratic crisis, by the President of the Republic: “The intelligence of Damien Clairville, a kind of good-natured social liberal who was rather ill at ease in an era that demanded radicalism, had been to understand that he could do nothing with the power he had inherited. The man was cultured and he knew that throughout history all the social groups that had suffered revolutions had been losers. Changes had to be accompanied and even provoked. […] Even before the legislative elections, he had announced the holding of a “citizens’ convention to rethink the democratic process”. […] Since the election no longer allowed the exercise of democracy, it was necessary to end the election. It had taken more time to find what to replace it with. But a consensus had emerged over the course of the debates among the hundred French people. The president was to be chosen, in the long term, during a television broadcast.
The One is therefore the primary of the majority. The one who will be chosen by the public at the end of these three days of exhibition will compete in the next presidential election. The candidates are all very different. Yann Privat is a man without much scope, Muriel Brey a rather traditional sixty-year-old who is smarter than she looks, Nora Sadaoui a businesswoman with the allure of a bimbo and a devouring ambition, and finally Nathan Calandreau a former fallen minister who dreams of returning to power. The latter is incidentally the former lover of one of the producers of the show.
Revenge Business
Everything would be going for the best – or rather for the worst – in this sort of cage in Seine-Saint-Denis where each candidate will have to show ingenuity to symbolically kill the other three if, at the same time, a radical feminist group had not undertaken to avenge each femicide committed by killing a man at random, or almost. “Three men have been killed in the last few weeks. They did not die for nothing.will soon indicate a press release written by one of them. They died because three women were killed. These men didn’t ask for anything? These women didn’t either. And we will continue. Every time a woman dies at the hands of a man, a man will die at our hands.” What the small group does not know is that one of them plans to take revenge on a particular man, who once attacked her, and this man is precisely participating in The One. She intends to reach him indirectly while he proclaims in the cage, in front of the public, that his objective is to “gather” (well, well, we hear that a lot too, these days): “The time of “at the same time”. […] The left has become a caricature of what it was in the 70s, outrageous and demagogic. The Republican right, for its part, is being swallowed up by the extreme right and, in order to survive, it is aligning itself with its theses by pretending to believe that this is what will allow it to survive.” A true crime novel of current events.
Thomas Bronnec knows his subject, he follows political affairs and the upheavals in society from his position as a journalist at West France. And he is beginning to have a substantial body of political thrillers to his credit. His latest novels, The Initiates (Black Series, 2015), In conquered country (Black Series, 2017) and the Pack (Equinox / les Arènes, 2019) already formed a trilogy on the French elites and their compromises in the face of power.
Coliseum by Thomas Bronnec, Série noire /Gallimard, 272 pp, €18.50.
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