More
Marseilles.
In Chourmo, the second book in Jean Claude
Izzo’s Marseilles trilogy, ex-cop Fabio
Montale gives us more food, more drink, more music, more women, more of the aura
of Marseilles.
Two of these women, he says, he should have
married.
As reminiscence
and regret erode the carpe diem present of Fabio’s world, flaws in his own
character become more pronounced.
The sensual
pleasures and camaraderie of Total Chaos
have distilled to more than diversion in Chourmo;
they’re all that’s left to make life worth living when dreams dissolve. Beauty, food, music and “chourmo”
counterbalance racism, brutality and transnational criminals as the noir gets
darker.
Chourmo, we’re
told, is a Provencal word derived from chiourme, the rower in the galley, a
term taken over by young music fans to describe mingling and unifying: “you
weren’t just from one neighborhood, one project. You were chourmo. In the same
galley, rowing. Trying to get out. Together.”
Why escape? In some ways, Fabio has
the life. He lives in Les Goudes, a
small fishing village on Marseilles’ outskirts. He works a few hours in a bar
owned by his friend Fonfon. He’s’ fed –
mouth-watering regional meals of local foods by his next-door neighbor,
Honorine. He has a boat and has little to do but fish, eat and drink while the
love of his life, Lole, is away visiting her parents.
Leaving Marseilles is impossible
for Fabio. Stuck in his rut, he’s as in
love with memories of Marseilles as he is with his memories of its women. He says
his problem is he can’t give up the past. Lole once told him:
“Coming to terms with life meant
coming to terms with your memories. …. It was pointless to question the past.
It was the future you had to question. Without a future, the present is nothing
but chaos.”
Chaos in Chourmo is introduced by one of the
many women of his life. His beautiful cousin Gelou who once kindled his
adolescent desires, comes knocking on his door asking for help, drawing him
back into Marseilles’ dark underside and triggering memories and regrets. Gelou
has seemingly escaped her class; she’s driving a Saab, carrying a Louis Vuitton
bag, and skiing in the Alps; she married and is living elsewhere.
But her 16- year old son, Guitou,
has disappeared – and is likely in Marseilles. She believes he may have made
arrangements to meet Naima, a Marseilles young woman he fell in love with the
previous summer. They’re star-crossed lovers. She’s an Arab and her brother is
an Islamic extremist; his stepfather, Alex, who beats him, hates Arabs and must
not know.
Fabio finds Gitou too late; he’s
been murdered along with a high profile Algerian historian who had fled his
country when threatened with death by radical Islamists. Fabio will seek their
murderers and try to find and protect Naima in a plot that will once again bring
him into conflict with organized crime as well as Islamic fundamentalists.
Along the way, we encounter more of
Marseilles’ racial mixture, a despicable gypsy, Saadna, and a beautiful
manipulative Vietnamese woman named Cuc, whose story of seeking a better life
parallels that of Gelou.
When Fabio served as a cop, he and
a youth worker named Serge worked together to get kids some help, much to the
dislike of those in his department who believed in taking a tougher stance.
Fabio sees Serge killed and discovers that he was on a similar quest. When questioned by the police about his
connection to Serge, Fabio learns Serge was possibly a pedophile.
And that’s where Fabio’s own
troubling character gets ever more troubling for this reader. Not only am I
uneasy about Fabio falling for anything in a skirt, often calling falling
“love” and even fantasizing about his cousin, but Fabio overlooks Serge’s
possible pedophilia, also confusing it with making children happy.
A conversation
with his friend Loubet:
“‘He had a real
faith in mankind, without God’s help. The kids were his life.’
‘Yeah and maybe he
loved them just a little too much, eh.’
'What of it? Even
if it was true. Maybe he made them happy.’
My attitude toward
Serge was the same as with all people I loved. I trusted them. I could even
accept it when they did things I didn’t understand. The only thing I couldn’t
tolerate was racism I’d spent my childhood watching my father suffer from not
being treated like a human being, but like a dog. A harbor dog. And he was only
Italian.”
That’s about all Fabio has to say
though earlier he did concede that Serge reminded him of “a priest.” Fabio’s
easy dismissal of the possible pedophilia will likely jar anyone who has
feelings about the sexual exploitation of children – particularly children the
predator is supposed to be helping though many others must have ignored such predation
for it to have happened. What bothers me is that Izzo introduces the topic, but
does almost nothing with it. So one asks why. Perhaps to underscore Fabio’s
shallowness? Or to show his casual attitude mixing love and sex? My guess is
because Izzo is making it up as he goes along and tosses ideas in and then only
develops some. He intuits rather than plans his story.
As for the Fabio’s hatred of
racism, what do we make of his description of the gypsy Saadna:
“Saadna and I made no secret of our
hatred for each other. He was the archetypal gypsy. Non-Gypsies were all jerks.
Every time a young Gypsy got into trouble, it was of course the non-Gypsies
fault. For centuries, we’d persecuted them. We were only there to cause them problems.
We’d been invented by the devil, to piss off God the Father who, in his
infinite goodness had created the Gypsy in his own image.”
If you substitute any type – Arab, Italian, whatever in place of the
word gypsy, you get a stereotype or an “archetype” that sounds pretty racist,
both from Saadna’s point of view and Fabios'.
What mitigates some of the problems
of Izzo’s writing – so many underdeveloped ideas and characters who serve
little purpose, some cluttered reflections, major diversions and Fabio’s
character flaws-- is the full arc of the trilogy.
It’s as if Izzo writes without direction, but makes discoveries along
the way. He raises the same questions a reader might and responds to them in
each next book. Though neither tight, nor completely satisfying, what emerges
is worth reading, particularly for the view it gives of Marseilles.
Fabio’s condition in Chourmo seems best summarized by a
passage:
I lit a cigarette and closed my eyes. I immediately felt the
gentle warmth of sun on my face. It felt good. That was all I believed in.
These moments of happiness. These crumbs from the world’s plenty. All we had
was what we could glean here and there. There were no more dreams left in this
world. No more hope. And kids of sixteen could be killed for one reason or
another. In the projects, coming out of a dance hall. Even in someone’s house.
Kids who’ll never know the fleeting beauty of the world. Or the beauty of
women.
In Solea,
this bleak view gets bleaker; noir, blacker.
Fabio confronts how he’s loved and lost the too many women of his life,
and he comes up wanting. No longer will
carpe diem serve as way to get by. As all that’s worth living for gets taken
away, Fabio will grapple with what’s worth dying for.
More comments on Solea to be composed……
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