Book review: The Great Swindle is fine tale of deception amid devastation

The Great Swindle is a fine and gripping tale of friendship, lies and struggle in post-WWI France.

A bombed-out France and a gutted French society set Lemaitre’s stage. Roger Viollet / Getty Images

Opening in October 1918 in among the muck and mud of the trenches of the Western Front during the fraught final days of the Great War, the first three chapters of The Great Swindle, winner of the Prix Goncourt, set up the power play of relationship dynamics to come.

Keen “to profit from the opportunities such an exemplary conflict could offer a man like him,” the dastardly Lieutenant (soon to be promoted to Capitaine) d’Aulnay-Pradelle murders two of his own soldiers in order to provoke a desperate attack on an important German outpost. Then, when he realises that one of his men, the unassuming and all-too-easily flustered ex-bank clerk Albert Maillard, is onto him, he attempts to kill him, too.

In a stroke of astonishing luck, Albert is snatched from the maw of death – a gut-wrenchingly, viscerally drawn scene in which the soldier finds himself buried alive, his face pressed tightly up against that of a putrefying decapitated horse’s head – by the heroic efforts of one Édouard Péricourt, scion of a wealthy Parisian family in possession of certain eccentric and artistic sensibilities that don’t sit well with his father. Just minutes later, however, Édouard’s lower jaw is ripped away by an exploding shell.

Indebted to the man who saved his life, Albert is like a faithful puppy thereafter keeping vigil by his master’s side, the two men’s fates now locked together. Lemaitre is hardly the first author to run with the idea that lasting friendships are forged among the mayhem of battle, but the relationship that subsequently plays out between Édouard and Albert – two men who never would have met, let alone become friends, during peacetime – is wonderfully and realistically complex. A single but all-defining shared experience is their only common ground, other than that they remain strangers bound together “by a murky combination of guilt, solidarity, resentment, diffidence and comradeship”.

In many ways, this description sums up post-war France in its entirety. One can understand why Lemaitre, an acclaimed crime writer known for his dark, gory thrillers, was attracted to this particular period in his country’s history. He paints a bleak portrait of suffering and despair. Albert, psychologically damaged and struggling to hold down a job in order to support himself and Édouard (henceforth his responsibility after Albert, at Édouard’s request, falsifies records claiming his friend died in battle), wears a near constant “expression of defeat and resignation” – that same “haggard, exhausted face one saw in so many demobbed men”. That compares with the monstrosity that is Édouard’s damaged, reeking face: “Below his nose is a gaping void; his throat, his palate, his upper teeth are visible, beneath them is a pulp of crimson flesh and something deep within which must be his epiglottis, there is no tongue, his gullet is a red-raw hole …”

Reinforcing these details is the fact they’re set against a backdrop of broader desolation.

This is a nation as much in denial as it is in mourning. In a bewildering juxtaposition, a country that is keenly honouring its dead – an impetus manifested in a countrywide obsession with erecting war memorials to the sons, brothers and husbands who didn’t return home – it’s looking the other way when it comes to the soldiers who survived, the “Lost Generation” that need help the most.

Thus, the “great swindle” of the title both refers to a very particular fraud that Édouard and Albert set in motion – the impressive dexterity and magnitude of which is sharply contrasted with a parallel but much more lazily envisaged and haphazardly perpetrated scam embarked upon by their nemesis Pradelle, a man who stalks the sidelines of their civilian life – as well as the deception perpetrated on those who fought in it by the war itself: those “condemned to live” despite their existence having been reduced to little more than that of the living dead.

There’s something gloriously reminiscent of a grand 19th-century novel about Lemaitre’s story – a quality, via a particular tone, also at work in Frank Wynne’s elegant translation – not least in his mixture of overarching omniscient third-person narration tempered by just the right amount of first person forays to render each of his protagonists believably authentic. This command of his characters, combined with the precision of his historical detail, all tied together by the thriller-like pace and tension of his plot, combines with masterly and enthralling effect.

Lucy Scholes is a freelance reviewer based in London, who writes for The Independent, The Observer, The Daily Beast and BBC Culture.