This French novel has a challenging topography but once you’re used to the terrain it’s a rewarding read. How’s the Pain? appals and delights by turns, undulating between darkness and light, dread and laughter, absurdity and truth. Pascal Garnier’s novels reflect a deeply cynical view of humanity. He writes about people in extremis; impending death is cause for reflection, a watershed moment, unleashing a darker inner rage and misanthropy, a final deadly hurrah not a bucket list. The main protagonist of How’s the Pain? is Simon, first met lying on his hotel bed, ‘a recumbent tomb effigy’. His mortal illness has led to an acceleration of misbehaviour, Simon is an ‘exterminator’, a man with a gun on a last mission. He has a plan which, naturally, will go awry and he is no more able to control the fates than Canute could command the tide. The result is a modern tragedy in which mundanity and ordinariness are bent to absurdity and chaos.
Garnier’s anti-heroes are magnets for the vulnerable and broken. In How’s the Pain? young Bernard becomes enmeshed in Simon’s scheme when he is liberated from his humdrum life and the care needs of his aged and ailing mother. But Simon infects Bernard with his poison in the process, we know how this will end for Simon but how will his young protégé fare? In Garnier’s noir series the sidekick embraces the darkness or, at least, tacitly, implicitly, trusts their new Svengali. Simon is intent on inflicting grief and misery on the world as he hurtles towards the abyss. Garnier adds further jeopardy to the mix as Fiona and her baby are co-opted to the murderous cabal. Simon observes:
‘Babies are like open ended tubes filled up at the top and emptied at the bottom.’
What makes readers engage with a book about people who do the most horrendous things, represent the worst in humanity, and hold the most outrageous views?
‘Rats, people – they’re all the same. They breed just as quickly.’
Why not just revile Simon and leave the pain behind? After all, in Pascal Garnier novels people transgress, goad each other into appalling behaviour and are unrepentant of their actions. Humour is the obvious, but superficial, answer, the things they do are terrible but funny – terribly funny. Humour sustains the read but the lasting memory of these people is one of compassion for their misery, for their marginalisation from society, (whether enforced or courted), and for their misguided rebellion. Garnier makes us complicit as they strive to new heights of wickedness, gazumping each other in cruelty, we laugh but also bemoan the awfulness of their predicament. These people are recognisable, they are not monsters but other darker, perverted versions of ourselves. We are horrified but connected, we’re empathetic to their struggle not their cause, nor their actions. Garnier is a master at making the morbidly shocking come across as comedy. It’s hard to grasp I know, these are not lovable rogues they are reprehensible and villainous but they are not alien to/or emotionally dislocated from us. This is surreal noir and in it lies a bleak candour about the human condition.
How’s the Pain? of course, refers to Simon’s suffering as the disease eats away his insides, but much more than that, the pain is other people, the pain is life. The themes are serious and yet shuffling off this mortal coil and going out with a bang was never more pleasurable to witness. How’s the Pain? is a literary interpretation of the pale horseman wearing a clown’s costume, scythe in one hand, juggling balls in the other – Death for your delectation.
Have you ever been to the theatre and found yourself stifling a laugh for fear it’s inappropriate because the subject is too dark? Knowing full well what you just heard/saw was funny. That’s how some people will feel about How’s the Pain? on first contact. The same reserve, unsure whether it’s too shocking to laugh in the midst of so much darkness. Part of the genius of Garnier is in this juxtaposition. Garnier’s characters are lost, they are battered by life, some like Simon are mortally ill, they fight back in outrageous and inappropriate ways but their swan songs are uproariously entertaining. Garnier has a thing for the ordinary person, the damaged, the downtrodden and marginalised, weather worn citizens casting off rules and norms. This is deadly behaviour from an unexpected, usually harmless, source. John Banville’s introduction to this novel will be liberating for new comers, he simultaneously confirms the awfulness and wipes away this guilt about what the reader is about to experience. Banville speaks to the author’s distinctive misanthropy thus:
“Garnier’s deprecation of the world and the people who infest it is all-encompassing. He’s as indignant as Jonathan Swift at the human state of affairs, only much funnier. His novels are bleak and hilarious, and his loathing of things in general is expressed with the peculiar insouciance – indeed, almost with gaiety.”
Angry novels don’t usually feel like this. To risk heavy cliché; life is bitter sweet, pleasure is only understood in the context of pain and success appreciated more in the light of heroic failure. How’s the Pain? Is way off kilter, blackly comic and quintessentially Gallic. Garnier has absorbed American hardboiled/noir, Simenon and Japrisot, he delights in reprising their themes but this is a wholly original concoction. A bold and enigmatic exploration of the darker side of the human psyche in a mystery that twists and turns unexpectedly, eventfully and explosively. Every light warm moment is accompanied by feelings of apprehension as the tension mounts towards a rabbit punch of an ending.
Garnier is Garnier, what he does, he does with élan, his novels are endlessly inventive and utterly beguiling. Through this exposition of criminality and deviant behaviour you will know thwarted lives and grief and loss; the lives of the disappointing and disappointed. How’s the Pain? It only hurts when I laugh. One final thought, not mine but John Banville’s on Garnier being a prolific writer of children’s books:
‘…what can they be like?’
Gallic Books, Editions Gallic, UK £9.99, ISBN 9781910477922, paperback, 9/7/20.
