The author’s name may be familiar to you, but unless you are unusually keen on mid- to late-20th-century French fiction and the nouveau roman, only distantly so. You may know about Robbe-Grillet’s collaboration with Alain Resnais on the 1961 cult French film L’Année Dernière à Marienbad, and have been either delighted or repelled by its deliberate lack of clarity as to what is fact and what is fiction. In France, however, Robbe-Grillet is considered one of the key authors and cultural figures of the century. So this book is a big deal. An Event. You could say it is France’s Go Set a Watchman, in that it, too, was a first novel initially rejected by the publishers, which appears now decades after its creation. The similarities end there, though. It was written in 1949 and rejected “pleasantly enough” (Robbe-Grillet’s words) by a major Parisian publisher. In 1953 he published The Erasers, which was more or less ignored by the public, and ditto his third novel, The Voyeur (1955); but the fourth, Jealousy (1957), was lauded by Roland Barthes and from then on Robbe-Grillet, whose fiction had always played with the old-fashioned certainties of narrative, became a fixture on the scene: a writer (and then film-maker) to whom people paid close and reverent attention. A Regicide finally appeared in French in 1978. Robbe-Grillet revised the first nine pages so completely that he ended up rewriting them. He then realised the absurdity of this, and the rest of the book is as originally written.
I can see why A Regicide might have put off publishers. It is very weird. In it, Boris, a man living in an unnamed fictional country, decides, for no reason, to kill the king. Boris has a job collating statistics in a factory; it’s the kind of meaninglessly monotonous job that future dystopians have made much of in films such as Brazil (1985) and The Matrix (1999). “The clock … counted off the minutes in an ever more dubious fashion, dissociating them from each other; having arrived at the bottom of the dial, the minute hand stopped altogether, being incapable of following an itinerary so devoid of sense.” The tedium is minutely and superbly described. The country is politically stagnant, with a vastly apathetic populace ruled by a party that has won only a small percentage of the possible vote. (The sections dealing with this resonate here, today.)
Interspersed with this life are descriptions of a radically different one: that of a man living on an island, pre-industrial, on Earth but not of it; a second-rate kind of place, where the world’s detritus washes up on its shores, where spring is announced by the arrival of millions of insects it is impossible not to inhale, whose bites, though painless, can bring on a sleeping sickness that can mean you miss out on summer; a rude, miserable, wretched place. There is no clear break between these two worlds: the second is clearly a kind of alternate dream world, but as the book progresses they bleed into each other, to the point that not even sentences separate them.
The effect is disorienting, spooky and melancholy: the “modern” part of the narrative is strongly reminiscent of Albert Camus; the other reminded me of Mervyn Peake, but with mermaids. Life on the island becomes better after Boris kills the king – or thinks he has. This is a narrative of insanity that, marvellously, makes you question your own mind; and it is timeless.
There are passages of great beauty, all very well translated by John Calder. Calder is a notable figure in the avant garde. He was Beckett’s first publisher in English, and it’s fitting that he has completed the first English translation of this book. It’s an extraordinary work, unafraid to be different, whose games with narrative haunt and nag at the mind.
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