The Man From London, Georges Simenon

I found this book difficult to enjoy initially because none of the main characters is likeable. It's a seedy world where nobody is really bothered about anyone else except when they can get something out of them or are professionally required to be involved.

The central character, Maloin, manifests this malaise. He’s domineering, angry and sullen with his family, bored with the colleagues from whom he pilfers brandy, unfaithful to his wife with Camelia, the town prostitute, and sees the murder to which he is an eye-witness as an opportunity for personal gain. Sleazy.

The atmosphere of a sea port in winter with its highly mechanised routines and its cold and foggy inhospitability is well caught. The ancestor perhaps of so many police procedurals on TV, where a bleak background seems to be an essential contrast to the cosiness of say the drawing room thrillers of Agatha Christie?

Nobody communicates in this place – not really. Yes they go through the motions: “How are you today?” “Fine,” or “Morning Louis” - “Morning Baptiste” but these are reflexes. Nobody is really connected to anybody else. Even the most intimate relationships, husband and wife, parent and child, are so deeply imbued with boredom and resentment that they hardly look at each other. The failures of communication between English and French characters arising from the lack of a common language underscore this universal failure to communicate one’s own personal being. It’s just as bad in England: Brown has been deceiving his wife and children about his true lifestyle for years.

The interaction between Maloin and Brown is oddly like an inverted love story. They become intrigued by each other, wonder what each other is thinking, are on constant look out for each other, study each other’s faces and expressions, speculating what the other is really like – except that they are fact falling in enmity, not love. In the climactic scene in Maloin’s boatshed they grapple face to face and body to body but of course with all its physicality it is a deadly fight, not a tryst.

Yet Maloin actually wanted to come to the boatshed in peace. He had compassion, it would seem, strangely enough in the emotional desert of this book, on Brown, who has been locked into the shed for some time without food or warmth.

This scene is a dreadful parody of true communication. Maloin cannot be completely sure that Brown is in there – he might have broken out somehow in the long time available to him – but he decides to reach out to him anyway. He’s brought sausage, pate and sardines for a man he knows to be starving. Almost desperately, Maloin cajoles, entreats and threatens in order to persuade this Brown that he can’t be sure is there to show himself and take the food he needs. All the time, Brown is standing in the shadows behind him, waiting to strike him with a metal hook and kill him if he can.

But of course it is Maloin who ends up killing Brown, in self defence. He is almost apologetic about this, especially with Mrs Brown, who comes with the Scotland Yard detective inspector to view the body. Characteristically he cannot communicate any of his feelings to her because he knows no English and she no French.

Maloin’s attitude during the coda of the story in which he is in custody, charged and sentenced is extraordinary. He has no wish to explain or justify himself even though a plea of self-defence is ready to hand. He is contemptuous of the process and the people involved in it. He seems to feel that he has gained something from his experiences that they cannot understand or participate in, and which is incommunicable to them.

Could it be that his compassion for Brown and his attempt to reach out to him as a fellow human being, even though violently rebuffed, has taken Malois to a new level of being? That he feels authenticated by his own compassionate act in a way that he never could by the life of surliness, routine and self-serving that he has settled into?

And so a familiar landscape starts to loom out of the Dieppe fog. Aren’t we in the land of the French existentialist novel? Isn’t this rather like L’Étranger, where Camus’ anti-hero finds he has killed someone without really wanting to or knowing why or how? Where people live a drifting, inconsequential and purposeless life, unless they can find some action that will raise them into actual personhood? Isn’t this what Malois has done, however feebly he is able to articulate it, in The Man from London? And isn’t it an interesting departure from Camus’ world that the act which validates Malois’ humanity is an act of compassion?

With thanks to Dorking u3a readers' club.