A murder in Gaspésie

At L'Anse-a-Beaufils, near Percé, a man is found dead during the tourist season. His sulfurous past had earned him many enemies. As the investigation begins, the memories of the disappeared villages of Gaspésie resurface.

The investigator's inner turmoil

Joaquin Moralès knows his trade. He knows himself much less. His love stories, his divorce, his successive losses resurface with an obstinacy against which no police procedure can do much. To move forward, he would have to "summon his dead, exhume the corpses of his memory."

The setting's weight on the story

The novelist places his investigator between two crime scenes: the one he examines, and the one he has replayed for years in his memory. The culprit matters, of course. But the path leading to him displaces things otherwise difficult to look at. Around Moralès, the characters exist even in the ways they divert a question.

The personal and the historical

The case also resurges the wounds of Gaspésie. The evictions, the closed villages, the burned houses, the moved cemeteries do not constitute a picturesque background. They state what a community loses when it is deprived even of the places where its dead rest. The violence of yesterday moves under the works exhibited today.

The moral tension of the novel

The novel finds in these hesitations its moral tension, well beyond the simple game of suspects. The case also resurges the wounds of Gaspésie. The evictions, the closed villages, the burned houses, the moved cemeteries do not constitute a picturesque background. They state what a community loses when it is deprived even of the places where its dead rest.

The language and the landscape

What language! Flexible, rough, suddenly sharp. It lingers on the light then returns to a dry reply; it can wrap a coast in fog and, immediately, bring someone back to their concerns of coffee, car or bill. Quebec expressions are not placed as folkloric memories. They give the characters their breath. "The heart heavy in curse." A few words and all the sorrow stands upright, without speech.

The novel's themes and questions

A character asks: "If we don't reach for beauty, what will save us from our misery?" It is impossible to avoid the question; the book is careful not to offer a comfortable answer. And what language! Flexible, rough, suddenly sharp. It lingers on the light then returns to a dry reply; it can wrap a coast in fog and, immediately, bring someone back to their concerns of coffee, car or bill.

The investigator's moral dilemma

The investigation seems to accept long detours, as if the surf deliberately delayed the hour of answers. It is also the way in which the book makes room for all those the enigma could crush. "I offer you as consolation the sublime fear." The formula could serve as a reading pact. The fear is not embellished by coquetry; beauty does not erase the crime or the compromises. It offers a possibility of standing upright.

The book's reception and significance

In this new Moralès, Roxanne Bouchard signs with La Grâce des fous a noir novel in which attention to people counts as much as the criminal mechanics, and whose most beautiful movement consists of looking at wounds without pretending they disappear. Out at sea, the birds dart toward the water, eyes open. It remains to be seen if the living will also know to look straight ahead.