L'armée furieuse by Fred Vargas (review)

plusieurs écrivains contemporains, pour qui l’Italie et son patrimoine catholique ou romain constituent un des derniers refuges à la mondialisation, à la disparition d’une civilisation européenne aux racines gréco-romaines. L’autre sujet du livre est la consternation engendrée par “l’aplatissement actuel”, “le complet asservissement américain de l’Italie” (33) et de l’Europe, la “dévastation générale” (37), la “banalisation globale” (46), moins technologique qu’éthique. À Venise s’oppose l’Amérique démocratique et raisonnable, prude et uniforme, que résume la formule “morality and money”, qui empêche que rien “de gratuit ou d’essentiel” (20) ne se passe, ce qui exclut tout bonheur. Car après tout, le seul réel qui compte est “l’impossible d’imagination” (30). Saint Louis University (MO) Jean-Louis Pautrot VARGAS, FRED. L’armée furieuse. Paris: Viviane Hamy, 2011. ISBN 978-2-87858-376-2. Pp. 427. 19,50 a. After a hiatus of three years, Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg of the Paris criminal brigade and his quirky crew of officers return to collaborate in solving two perplexing crimes. Adamsberg seeks to exculpate arsonist Momom èche-courte, accused of the murder of a wealthy Paris CEO, and to investigate a violent death in Normandy after a witness claims that the victim is one of four men she saw being dragged along by the mythical Mesnie Hellequin or Armée furieuse . It is this supernatural element that will allow Vargas to explore how collective memory can affect a mind already rendered fragile through past trauma. The medieval legend alluded to in the novel’s title is recognized throughout Northern Europe, and dates to the eleventh century. A priest claimed to have seen the spirit of the Seigneur Hellequin and his ghost army gallop by, trailing with it unpunished living criminals who would die a short time later. Since this legendary sighting, the horde is rumored to exact justice on its chosen victims. Reappearances of the procession with its future victims dictated that the inadvertent witness divulge the identity of the condemned. This allowed them a chance for pardon before their death. In L’armée furieuse, the witness Lina Vendermot should alert the villagers of Ordebec, but she is unable to identify the fourth victim. Fearing a rise of mass hysteria and violence in consequence, her family turns to Adamsberg for help. Verbally awkward and deceptively clumsy, but extremely sensitive to visual and emotional cues, Adamsberg epitomizes Vargas’s universe, where belief becomes fact and internal anguish threatens to break through the surface of polite civilities. As Adamsberg ruminates on incongruities, L’armée furieuse plays upon unexpected symbols, showing how ordinary items take on new meaning when placed in extraordinary circumstances. Bread crumbs are portrayed as nourishment , but are also a weapon in a murder-preface that introduces the central plot, and take on a sinister dimension through the fantastic realm of popular folklore. “[Q]uel Petit Poucet, ou quel Ogre en l’occurrence, les avait perdues là” (7), wonders an unsettled Adamsberg in the face of a trail of crumbs. As the primary plot develops, the crumbs become a metaphor for any hidden frustration that can push a singular but seemingly harmless individual to violence. Sugar cubes are another clever example of how Vargas transforms an everyday object into a symbol whose various functions and treatments surface as Adamsberg ponders the Reviews 229 murders. L’armée furieuse depicts an unsettling universe, where heredity and childhood experience fuse with history and mythology to mold the present. Ordebec is a world of fairy-tale creations populated by its own Tom Thumbs and Ogres. Eccentric counts, countesses, and military heroes live alongside the unusual Vendermot brothers: Antonin believes he is made of clay; Hippolyte of the six fingers speaks backwards; Martin eats only insects. Like its Vargassian precursors, L’armée furieuse intelligently combines the detective genre with fantastic elements. The dialogues are witty; the characters are irresistibly peculiar. Lyrical digressions on collective and personal history are as thought-provoking as the central mysteries. And there are many mysteries. In contrast to Vargas’s earlier works that focused on a single knotted problem...