Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
Here are two stories about two couples a century apart but united by location and events.
In a village on the fringe of France’s Massif Centrale on the eve of the first World War the doctor’s wife and a lion tamer are as yet unacquainted. A hundred years later two Parisians, long married, arrive to spend three weeks in a primitive gîte a thousand feet above the same village, now demolished.
Franck is a film producer, at odds with his two young partners who are bent on weaning him away from independent movies to make a series for Netflix and Amazon. Franck is an urban animal, keeping in touch on the internet, hating isolation but humouring Lise who is in remission from cancer. Lise, vegetarian, organic, convinced that pollution, notably radiation, is toxic, wants only to return to nature. When it’s discovered that there’s no signal at the gîte, no town within 30 miles, Lise is amused and relieved but Franck is distraught.
Not much happens at the gîte – Franck finds a signal and organic produce in town, holds heated meets on-line with his partners, befriends a suspect wolf-dog, but all the passions and carnage of the real world are - or were rife in that other story - parallel in the novel but not in time - when a travelling circus was stranded in the village and the performers, with all the active village men, went off to war. Wolfgang, the lion tamer, was left behind because he was German (and now the Enemy), but he had five lions and three tigers to feed and the village had a flock of sheep so he was allowed to stay, hidden with his beasts in the forest. He was the only able-bodied man left in the village and he helped out: a disturbing presence in a community of women and old men, disturbance epitomised by the doctor’s wife, now a war widow. Her marriage had been affectionate but sterile; she was a beautiful woman and the lion tamer was irresistible. Nature took her course.
There’s a lot of repetition in this novel: of the horrors of war, of wild creatures in the forests, some caged, others loose; there was too much roaring and growling in the night a hundred years ago, and now there’s a surfeit of nocturnal silence and unidentified sounds about the gîte. There are challenges, suggestions, innuendos everywhere, only when it comes to lust the depiction of the sex-starved nymph riding her black stallion through summery woods is overt and quite outrageous.
Alas, it’s the only bright moment. This is a novel full of dire threats and promises but it falls short on delivery. It has an ending – two endings - but both leave one vaguely dissatisfied.
Editor’s Note: Translated by Jane Aitken and Polly Mackintosh
