The French loved American pulp fiction and film noir because they felt it reflected, usually unwittingly (which pleased their aesthetic prejudices) their own Existential world-view. This got refined into the French new wave (novels and films by the likes of Robbe-Grillet and Goddard) which took many of the elements of American genre fiction and stripped it of everything but its bare narration.We can argue the relative artistic success of such work until the semioticians come home to roost, but in Afraid To Death what we have is the next step, the existential novel reduced to thriller motifs.Originally published in French in 1991, this is Marc Behm's companion piece to Eye of the Beholder, which lent itself famously to a stylish, substance-free neo-cultish mini-hit movie, so cool it had a sketch of an eye instead of 'eye' in the title.Like Eye of the Beholder, Afraid to Death is primarily a road story, where the same danger keeps recurring, with the protagonist helpless to stop it, at least in part because he seems to be bringing it on himself. Life is like that, as Sartre might have said if he were a contestant in Big Brother. If you've a fondness for your metaphors big and your style worn upfront, you'll like Behm a lot. Even if you don't, you might enjoy the trip anyway.
Posted at 12:00AM Monday 01 Jan 2007
