With “Prime Time”, the master of suspense Maxime Chattam deploys all his art in a story that mixes action and negotiation. In this frantic race against time, he highlights the cynicism of the media, the power games between police and politics and moral conflicts.
At 7:58 p.m., the credits for the MDI channel’s TV news are launched, two minutes before 8 p.m. to grill the competition. Suddenly, Paul Daki-Ferrand, the star journalist who attracts more than six million viewers to the screen every evening, is taken hostage by a masked and armed man.
With composure and determination, the kidnapper, alias Kratos, an automatic pistol pointed at the presenter’s head, announces the color of his synthesized voice: “As you can see, this is no longer your evening news. The situation is under my control from now on. If the signal is cut, Paul will be killed.”
A suspense that builds power
The night will be long behind the scenes at MDI, hours of anguish and stress for Paul and the other hostages on set, for those responsible for the newspaper in management, for Charlène, the editor, an improvised mediator who came into contact with the hostage taker through an earpiece. Yanis, the negotiator for the GIGN (National Gendarmerie Intervention Group), notes that she was able to create a bond of trust with the criminal.
He lets her pursue and pilots her with one objective: to unmask Kratos and his real ambitions. Is it a personal revenge, a call to insurrection, a kidnapping with ransom or a sordid reality TV show that would no longer hesitate to summon death live to explode all audience records?
With “Prime Time”, the journalist in the thriller is not the only hostage. The reader is also held prisoner in spite of himself in a novel that is impossible to put down because the suspense builds so much. The confinement and the urgency to act, without endangering the lives of the hostages, as well as the slowness of the story skilfully navigating between psychology and action, function as a tension enhancer. Maxime Chattam also has the good taste of concluding each of the short chapters with a revelation, a hypothesis to be verified, a bloodbath on the set, a deadly silence in management or a confusing confidence from a protagonist.
Reading a thriller is a roller coaster. To make it addictive, you need tension that rises and falls, a narrative that draws you into a story where you don’t know where you’re going or how you’re going to get there.
A society where image is king
Well documented behind the scenes of a newscast and on the methods of the GIGN, Maxime Chattam distils his clues drop by drop and enjoys considering all the avenues, serious or eccentric, flirting finely with conspiracy theory. As the night goes on, with fatigue helping, each word spoken by Charlene, each reaction of the kidnapper, accentuates the fragility of an already precarious situation, opening the way to a possible bloody slide. Should we attack or not? What will politicians choose in the face of the GIGN recommendations?
With his complex characters immersed in this suffocating closed door, forced to negotiate with their flaws to avoid sinking or risk being unmasked, Maxime Chattam intelligently goes beyond the framework of the entertaining thriller to denounce some of the flaws of our society of the queen image, where TV has established itself as the official supplier of the dark, the sordid and the fear, where the internet plays the leading roles, where the voyeuristic public clings to their screens, sometimes taking takes action.
But who benefits from this crime? This is the question that runs through this thriller and to which Maxime Chattam, particularly well inspired, provides an answer that defies all expectations in a tasty epilogue.
Philippe Congiusti/sf
Maxime Chattam, “Prime Time”, Albin Michel editions, October 2024.
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