“By a Slow River” is a perfect title for this meandering novel that is part reminiscence and part detective story. Phillippe Claudel’s melancholy work, translated from its original French, tells of finding peace in the confrontation of loss.
The narrator, a former police investigator, and the town that is the setting remain nameless. The investigator opens this letter to his long-dead wife, Clémence, by saying, “It’s very difficult to find the beginning. So much time has gone by that words will never bring back – and the faces too, the smiles, the wounds.” But though the past can’t physically be reincarnated, its essence is alive, burned into memory.
An enigmatic prosecutor and a murder, never solved to his satisfaction, focus his tale. Pierre-Ange Destinat, born into one of the town’s wealthiest families, could have practiced his profession in a more urban area, but on finishing his education, he returned to the town where he was born and the chateau in which he was raised. He’d been a formidable foe in the more than 30 years he prosecuted criminals, who called him Bloodsucker.
Destinat had been retired for a little more than a year when a particularly horrible death rocked the community. In December 1917, the body of a 10-year-old girl, Morning Glory, was found next to the river. In a town where the sounds of World War I are the background noise and where the wounded are a constant presence, the strangulation of a little girl is particularly shocking. “In this time of war, when all the killers had forsaken civil life so they could ply their aggression more violently in uniform,” how could such a killer wander the town?
Morning Glory’s death is central to the novel, but hers is not the only death the narrator explores. The loss of several women, including Destinat’s wife early in their marriage, stand as markers on this story’s path.
The narrator takes a circuitous path in relating the connection between the man and the murder. He paints a rich portrait of the town during wartime, of the men who investigated the crime and of his role, and shortcomings, in finding justice.
There is a seeming randomness to the narrative that, in lesser hands, would be off-putting. The early chapters of the book are anything but sequential. The narrator talks of Destinat, and his role in the community. He tells of the discovery of Morning Glory’s body. He tells of the factory that has built the town, of the difficulty of finding a school teacher during wartime and of a house on the property of Destinat’s chateau. Each new topic seems an invitation to a gem-like side-trip.
And each ostensibly unrelated chapter emerges as part of a foundation, built without the reader realizing it. Then, gradually, the pieces begin to coalesce, and the picture that emerges manages to be shocking in its revelations while fully anchored to that which precedes it.
The somber prose and the dark, unrelenting revelations turn the reader into a fellow voyager. It is impossible to predict the turns in the path Claudel imagines, but guessing the next step is not what this novel is about. It is, instead, a complex and lovely meditation on possibilities honored and ignored, and on one man’s brighter and darkest moments. It is a journey of the soul.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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By A Slow River
By Phillippe Claudel; translated by Hoyt Rogers
Knopf, 208 pages, $23
