April, 2006

Paris in the riot in the springtime

Just back from a visit to Paris in the springtime, and what could be more traditional than a student riot. Call me an old fashioned romantic but I love to see young people get violent and political about the obvious injustices. Not that it's likely to happen in England, where our students seem more interested in having highlights put in their hair (the boys) and getting a good discount at Gap (the girls and the boys).

Five days in Paris and I'm Francophile again. Though I think I might have inadvertently started the riot. For some reason France makes me smoke like a kiln. I'm easily influenced by les autres and it's the only place where I do smoke with any degree of seriousness. Anyway I was discarding un clope - cadged as usual - in a waste bin and it must have set fire to the rubbish therein. One thing led to another, and well, Paris was in flames.

Didn't see any of the subsequent mayhem. Was in the wrong district.

But I had a magnificent time, and it was good to have the opportunity to exercise my impeccable French. In fact my command of the language is so good that it always produces a slightly quizzical Gallic look from the natives. I know what they're thinking: Sacre bleu! How can this Englishman speak French so well? The trouble is that Parisians will never suffer a visitor to speak French. It's a matter of honour. The instant I was collected at the airport by Leslie and David from Bragelonne, my charming publicist and brilliant head of design respectively, they formally rejected my adventures into la langue. Actually what happened was that I'd just got past telling them that I was fine (they hadn't asked yet) and that my flight was a comfortable onion from the forest, when the PA system crackled into life and they were able to simulate having misheard me.

Leslie: Graham, here you are! Welcome to Paris!

Me: Thank you I'm fine also to the full strength. And you two cabbages? You are fine with all fineness?

David: Eh?

Me: It's quite a lively rocket, isn't it?

Leslie: Err... was your flight good?

(here the PA crackles and drowns out everything.)

Me: I still have to change some small regrettables.

David: Eh?

Me: The pen of my aunt is on the table. Oh bugger it, let's speak English.

Which they all did, and for the five days I spent in town I only had one other opportunity to get the tongue into gear, and that was an equal disaster. What can you say? Most of the staff at Bragelonne speak better English than your average Anglo or American native. An what's more, when I was interviewed by Le Monde, Liberation and National French Radio and the quality of translation was so sophisticated I could hear myself being glossed beautifully to sound more intelligent, on air or in print, in paraphrase. Disconcerting, that.

The Paris Book Fair was exciting and overwhelming. In England they tend to keep authors away from the London Book show, so that the public can't see what they're really like, but in France it's more of a public event rather than trade fair. Thus about 3,000 authors appeared over the period of the fair. Bloody sobering, that. It was like a scientific equation: how much neurotic energy can you fit into an aircraft hangar before it reaches critical mass?

However I did meet a lot of readers who wanted books signing, and it became clear that Melanie Fazi has accomplished a superb translation of The Facts Of Life (Lignes De Vie) and that many new readers were also attracted by David Oghia's hauntingly beautiful cover http://www.bragelonne.fr/boutique.php

I also met a lot of French authors, plus all the remarkable Bragelonne staff who swig champagne, smoke millions of fags, play video games endlessly AND produce great work and sales results that are currently the envy of Paris publishing. Put that in your Protestant Work Ethic and smoke it. I even met a French writer, Magali, who had lived in Coventry and who described my home town as "more beautiful than Paris."

Okay that was a lie. You caught me. Magali never said that. But she did say she'd had a great time in Coventry, so that proves it can be done.

Now Bragelone were impeccable hosts, escorting me to some exceptional restaurants and attending to my every small wheat-free need. But after a few days of never being permitted to speak French I asked for an hour or two to myself, to wander the boulevards, chat with the natives, join the riots, that sort of thing. Unfortunately I chose a Sunday. The 8th precinct was like one of those after-a-virus-wipeout movies. I walked for an hour and the only living thing I could find on which to practice my schoolboy French on was a pigeon pecking at a wet bit of a croissant on the echoing pavement, and even that wasn't having any. Flew off. At last I came upon the ONE café that was open in the entire neighbourhood. Exhausted, I went inside and flung myself into a seat.

After a long while the person I took to be the waiter walked through. He looked surprised to see me:

Me: Hello. An omelette provincial with grand cheese, if it please you my brave sir.

Quizzical Bloke: You'd be better off lifting weights at the station judging by your chequered nature.

Me: Eh?

The lines in the waiter's brow went all parallel-horizontal and he left. Five minutes later another bloke bustled in with a pot of paint and a paint brush. He also seemed very surprised to see me:

Man with paint brush: There's no reason why Sundays are full with expectation of mirth.

Me: Okay, I'll be a young coffee would be fine.

Man with paint brush: Up there I would only sing if you don't mind the rain.

Me: Eh?

Finally he made me understand he'd just popped in to splash a bit of emulsion on the ceiling. He kindly offered to share his flask and sandwiches, but, in my canon-ball holed but still floating French, I declined. Him and his mate shrugged and watched me go, eyebrows a-twitching. By the time I got back to my hotel my face had just about stopped burning.

Oh God, I've become Homer Simpson.

Thing is, I'm a fairly seasoned traveller. How come, just next door in international terms, it all comes unglued when I'm left on my own for five minutes? My publishers Stephane and Alain took me on the train to Arras to address a group of academics. Here, I thought, I can prove my mettle. I had plenty of time to get in my head a brief introduction, in good French, thanking them for the invitation which I did appreciate, and apologising for the fact that my French was not quite good enough to deal with the nuances of literary discussion and would they mind if I continued in English? I rehearsed this to myself a few times on the train. Come the event I managed to utter, oh three, possibly four syllables - yes, not even words - before it all turned to a dry-cracker-biscuit challenge in my mouth. I think it was the expressions of sympathetic horror on the polite, attentive faces of so many amiable academics that made it go to pot. After beating a hasty retreat back into the mother tongue I spent an hour trying to erase their memories of my complete idiocy by talking gibberish about William Blake.

Though I am very at home with the French literary concept of Fantastique. There is an interesting French tradition of dividing Fantasy from Fantastique. The former tends to apply to mediaeval, heroic and sorcerous high fantasy; the latter tends to apply to the marvellous and the supernatural, with a clear relationship to symbolism, surrealism and other anti-rationalist modes. Now the Wikipedia, which can swing from maddening to inspirational, says this:

What is distinctive about fantastique is the intrusion of supernatural phenomena into an otherwise realist narrative. It evokes phenomena which are not only left unexplained but which are inexplicable from the reader's point of view. In this respect, fantastique is somewhere between fantasy, where the supernatural is accepted and entirely reasonable in the imaginary world of a non-realist narrative; and magic realism, where apparently supernatural phenomena are explained and accepted as normal.

But even more interesting for me was when my publisher Alain Nevant made the observational aside during an interview (switching effortlessly from French to English) that in my novels the element of the fantastique proceeds not from the narrative conditions but from inside the characters. That is, from a sealed place inside the characters which then leaks into the world. This was a revelation to me. I don't know why but I hadn't quite seen it before, or heard it said, with such definition. See - I told you they were out to make me look cleverer than I am.

C'est fantastique. I am resolved to improve my French forthwith. In fact I've already started. The savages are protesting because I'm practising on them every day, even though the primitive little monoglots roar their protest over breakfast. Too bad, let them roar. I'm going back very soon to find some more French words. Absolument.

Graham Joyce can be contacted by emailing graham@grahamjoyce.net