There is no one quite like Fred Vargas in crime fiction today. You have to go back to the "webwork" novels of Harry Stephen Keeler and John Russell Fearn to find any writer who comes close to her unique way of constructing novels that blend the weird, the bizarre and the absurd into a mind-tripping, eye-opening, jaw-dropping phantasmagoria. Luckily with Vargas you also get dreamy readable prose and not convoluted syntax or wacky word-winging as in the case of Keeler or mysteries with transparent solutions as in the case of Fearn. In the Vargas universe everything is truly connected. There is a ubiquity of significance in her books. The absurdities and oddities of life cease to be merely strange and carry a hidden meaning that sometimes borders on the supernatural. She brings the mystery back to the mystery novel on so many levels.
Randomness has no place and there are no coincidences. In a Keeler book, for example, the works of George Barr McCutcheon, a mysterious violin playing thief, and the science of acoustics all come together in the plot of
The Mystery of the Fiddling Cracksman. A man eating a bowl of chow mein nearly chokes on a tiny hand made of jade in
The Green Jade Hand, but the scene is not there merely to make us laugh it will have some greater importance to the story. Similarly, with Vargas the birth of a kitten is not thrown into the story offhandedly for cuteness factor; it will have repercussions throughout the entire novel. Likewise other events and discussions that seem to be mentioned in passing -- a brief talk about a man who decided to eat his wooden wardrobe piece by piece, the macabre history of Highgate Cemetery including what was discovered when the body of Dante Rossetti's wife was exhumed nine years after her death -- all have later ramifications in this hypnotically addictive book.
The ripple effect begins when Adamsberg who is in England for an international police conference quite by accident stumbles across a bizarre crime. Eighteen pairs of shoes have been found in front of
Highgate Cemetery. And the shoes still contain feet. They have all been cut from nine different corpses and none of them are English. The shoes show signs of Eastern European manufacture and many of them are decades old. It appears that the feet have been collected over a period of years. But who on earth has dismembered several dead bodies and placed their feet in front of a
cemetery with a past of legendary proportions? What have those feet do to with the horribly mutilated corpse of a reclusive Frenchman whose body quite literally was chopped up to tiny bits? Why are so many variations of a single name continually turning up in the course of the investigation - Plogerstein, Plögener, Plogoff, Plogodrescu.These names become so prevalent that one of the characters coins the term "Plog" as an exclamation denoting significance or surprise.
Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg will face one of the most unusual criminals in his career. He will discover that nearly everything in his life will be related to the solution of the crime. The people he encounters and takes for granted will play major roles. And most importantly he will discover that a long forgotten night in his past will come back to haunt him with a startling revelation. The less said about the wild fantastical plot the better.
And now a word about the oft forgotten yet very important translator. Sian Reynolds' translation is an intricately built, ingenious example of how translation can become a true art. Finding the right word is less important than crafting sentences that retain the original flavor of the author's native language. Vargas' books are intrinsically French and in this case have an added international dimension when Adamsberg must travel to England and later Serbia where he does not speak either language. There are ample opportunities for linguistic wordplay in these new settings. There are amusing scenes with Adamsberg repeatedly mispronouncing the name of a British police officer and his habit of calling the infamous cemetery Higg-gate and in Serbia he goes out of his way to learn a handful of Serbian words to better impress a woman who runs the guest house where he is staying. Finally, there is a policeman on Adamsberg staff who speaks in alexandrines a French verse of 12 syllables which Reynolds has confessed to being one of the most difficult tasks she tried to duplicate in English. For that alone she deserves the awards she has garnered from the CWA.
This is the time of the year when everyone is making lists of the Best of the Year. I can never make one of those lists. But I can tell you that
An Uncertain Place is definitely a book I would consider to be included as one of the best of the new books, if not the
absolute best, I have read this year. A little masterpiece of a book that is also an enviable work of contemporary fiction. It may not be to everyone's taste judging from a variety of indifferent and confused reactions in other reviews I've come across on other blogs. For me, however, this is pretty damn awesome crime fiction.
