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Monday 1 December 2008

Fire in the Blood

A gathering of ghosts

Patrick Marnham

The narrator of Fire in the Blood is an old man, Silvio, who lives alone and walks around his neighbourhood, watching his friends and acquaintances and at first revealing very little about them, below the superficial facts of their daily lives. But his memory is jogged when he goes to the wedding of his young cousin, Colette. ‘My God’, he says, ‘a wedding in the provinces is such a gathering of ghosts.’ He notes the old gent who married his cook, the sisters who have not spoken for 14 years, the lawyer whose wife left him for a travelling salesman, ‘how many old memories they dredge up’. And at the centre of it, the bride, his pretty young cousin, whose ambition is to achieve the perfect marriage, just as her parents have done.

From this simple opening Némirovsky weaves a plot so complex that the short book demands an immediate second reading to pick up all the clues that one has inevitably missed. Her technique of gradually stripping layers of deception away from her characters to show us more and more about their real behaviour, gives the story its excitement and pace. And by the end of the book, Silvio himself will be drawn into the drama he sets out to describe.

There are echoes of Alain-Fournier in Fire in the Blood, as there are of Simenon — whose popular success paralleled that of Némirovsky. The title, the setting and the sexual passion are all reminiscent of contemporaneous Simenon’s such as Les soeurs Lacroix, Les inconnus dans la maison or La nuit du carrefour. When Colette says of her lover, ‘The first time I saw him, the very first time, he could have done whatever he liked with me…’ she is stepping into any one of a dozen of Simenon’s romans durs. But there is another element in Némirovsky’s story which is all her own, and that is her sense of passing time. Early on in the story Silvio, who has spent many years in Africa, looks again at the land of his childhood and says, ‘This region has something restrained yet wild about it, something … that is reminiscent of another time, long past’. Tradition rules in this world, and yet everything changes. Characters come together, engage at close quarters, draw back, but never really separate.

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