Sabri Louatah’s exhilarating four-volume epic holds up a mirror to modern France. Funny, clever and brutal, it is the story of a working-class family of Algerian descent in Saint-Étienne, in eastern central France, caught up in the election of the country’s first Arab president.
Louatah grew up in social housing in this former coal-mining city, the third generation in a French family with roots in the Kabyle region of Algeria. When riots tore through the banlieues in 2005, Louatah was reading Dostoevsky’s Demons, pondering rage and nihilism. His Saint-Étienne quartet – part family saga, part political thriller – scratches at the unresolved anger of those riots, which he saw as “the year zero of contemporary France”.
The action is set seven years later, during the “election of the century” between the rightwing incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy and the left’s charismatic “French Obama”, fictional politician Idder Chaouch. This first volume, published in France in 2011 and translated by Gavin Bowd, takes place over 24 hours as two families of Algerian heritage gather at a wedding party while the feverish nation prepares to vote. It takes a certain Joycean nerve to set a novel over one day. The story inches for a long time through the wedding party’s dizzying array of characters. Suddenly there is a heart-stopping revelation of racial violence and the possibility unfurls of an imminent terrorist attack.
Chaouch is seen by some as the only hope to kickstart the “integration machine”, promising to reconcile a country obsessed with national identity and plagued by discrimination. He is the popular mayor of a rough Paris suburb, a charismatic former student at France’s elite graduate school, the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, who has taught economics at Harvard and whose slogan is “The Future Is Now”.
The idea of France’s first Arab president is becoming a recurring feature in French fiction. In 2015, Michel Houellebecq’s controversial novel Submission imagined France in 2022 when an implausible Islamist, Muhammed Ben Abbes, beats the rightwing Marine Le Pen and brings Islamic law to secular France. But Louatah’s Savages came first. Indeed, the witty, secular Chaouch, who hums Mozart operas and has a Jewish wife, couldn’t be further from Houellebecq’s dry Ben Abbes.
During the campaign, Chaouch is considered under threat from Islamists but brushes it off. “Let the bastards be bastards, nobody will listen to them any more when we’ve put an end to massive youth unemployment,” he says. Diverse crowds turn out to cheer him. But a mysterious home-grown threat is bubbling away against him.
The Saint-Étienne characters dragged into this national saga include Fouad Nerrouche, a TV hearthrob who plays the manager of France’s most popular fictional football team in a hit series. He is dating Chaouch’s daughter, Jasmine. His cousin, 18-year-old Krim, the central character, is a gifted pianist with hypersensitive hearing, experiencing sounds more loudly than anyone else. But he has been sidelined at school, put on vocational training schemes, just like his Algerian-heritage aunts were before him. A “problem teenager with a severely shaved head and a drooping, bellicose bottom lip”, he decks his manager at McDonald’s.
There is an astonishing prescience to this first volume, written before a young Toulouse panel-beater, Mohamed Merah, carried out terrorist attacks in 2012 and French gunmen struck Paris three years later. Intriguingly, the new edition features an 18-page prologue, written in English by Louatah, which introduces Chaouch on a campaign trip to the Petite Camargue’s far-right heartlands in the south. “Half of the country hates us – half of the country thinks you’re not even French!” Chaouch’s wife Esther exclaims.
Saint-Étienne itself – too often maligned by politicians and the press as a symbol of de-industrialised urban decline – is lovingly drawn. It is beautiful, with “apricot sunsets”, but also bleak: “Behind the library, the slag heaps lurked, sullen and immovable.”
Louatah set out to make his cliff-hanger addictive. It’s a shame that the second volume – which romps along faster than the first, tearing through the French police, politics and the justice system – is not out in the UK until October. And he is a name to watch in English too. In 2014, he decided to move to America, telling the French daily Libération that “I’m going to have children, children that will be the fourth generation of Algerian immigrants. Are they going to be told: you have to integrate? It’s humiliating to have been here for so long and still people tell you to ‘integrate’.” He is currently writing in English about the US. We can hope that Savages isn’t the last word he’s got to say on France.
• Savages: The Wedding is published by Corsair. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
