Le train d'Erlingen ou la métamorphose de Dieu by Boualem Sansal (review)

Élisabeth Potier, a retired history and geography teacher, is seriously injured by four Arab toughs shortly after the events of 13 Nov. 2015. Her aggressors might have been terrorists or just thugs. Élisabeth lies in a comma for a month, and when she emerges, she begins furiously writing a novel, narrated by her invented alter-ego, Ute Von Ebert, an immensely rich German woman living in an idyllic albeit non-existent city, Erlingen. The story is set in the not-so-distant future. Everything was harmonious in this place until a mysterious, unseen enemy begins to ravage the land, killing people singularly and in small groups. Eventually, Erlingen is informed by governmental order that it must be evacuated. Two trains will be sent to the city, and as many people as possible will have to be stuffed into the voitures, which resemble cattle cars. The rich and powerful will have priority, followed by the middle class. A third train, to arrive later, is supposed to carry the poor to safety. Élisabeth dies before she completes the tale, but her daughter will endeavor to finish her mother's work. Until the unexpected appearance of les ennemis, Erlingen was a well-governed town whose lucky residents were enjoying ideal existences. Yet the arrival of this unwanted element provokes a rapid rendering of the social fabric. Suddenly the long-repressed racism of the inhabitants is obvious, as is the mendacity of the city fathers, and the passivity and obsequiousness of the majority of the inhabitants. Erlingen is an obvious image of France today, terrified by real and imagined enemies and ready to sacrifice traditional social values in the interest of safety. Le train d'Erlingen is an ambitious novel. Yet despite its aspirations, Sansal's conception of the work is more compelling than his realization. Too much space is accorded to the usual suspects of France's moral decline: "le cancer du béton, [...] le modernisme artificieux, [...] la chape de l'inhumain argentroi, la surpopulation" (201), without anything particularly interesting being said about them. The author's contention that, "Dieu n'est plus Dieu" (171), but merely the embodiment of humanity's worst attributes, reads like theological melodrama. Sansal makes abundant use of literary allusions to authors such as Thoreau and Baudelaire, but the writer he quotes most frequently, Kafka (notice the novel's subtitle), seems particularly unhelpful to his cause. By constantly referring to The Metamorphosis, he sounds a contradictory note. Metamorphosis is a natural and ineluctable process. Applied to Le train d'Erlingen, this would appear to imply that the decline of the West is unavoidable. Yet the tenor of his novel suggests that activists, such as Élisabeth Potier, may well prove successful in the struggle against the enemies within and outside of Western society. Le train d'Erlingen is a complex, at times engaging novel, filled with good intentions. Yet, as is all too well-known, excellent intentions do not necessarily engender excellent literature.