Sure, reading The evil ones, it is impossible not to think of Hitchcock, but it is also difficult not to remember Simenon and his Harbor of the Mists which makes Maigret despair. We are on very different levels, of course. It is true that the French province is always present; fog and water too; the mystery, then, we don't really talk about it. But the psychological degradation together with all its irrational facets that become a meal for cynics; here, the commissioner does not have to deal with that. Or rather, not with such abundance of expression and lexical precision.
The original title is Cells qui n'etait plus, but it is much better known by the name Les Diaboliques that Henri-George Clouzot gave to his film adaptation (in the photo, Vera Clouzot). The two authors - Pierre Boileau is Thomas Narcejac - created the perfect anguish novel: the one in which the victim has the main role and the characters are psychologies in conflict with each other. And it is with this book that Adelphi, in his legendary necklace Fabula, begins the publication of the most interesting novels of the two noir innovators.
They are a rather unusual couple, Boileau and Narcejac; literary couple, of course. Almost like the artisans of fiction able to create very convincing narratives. The evil ones they are - probably - its apotheosis. Even more than the work written on purpose - although he has always denied it - for the master of the thrill: The woman who lived twice (D'entrs les morts). The two are well divided the bank: Boileau assures the intrigue; Narcejac psychology.
As for "women who live twice", of course, nothing new: they are a haunting topic. And that's what it's all about here too. But even in terms of "cinematographic" we are not very far away: the story is surprisingly visual. Sometimes, despite the fog, one has the sensation of perceiving objects, of perceiving the colors around them. The language has a marked propensity for precision: images, environments, spaces, colors and objects are rendered with surgical effectiveness. But the syntax is also surgical: full of incidents and few subordinates, it produces a pressing rhythm. The Italian translation conducted by Giuseppe Girimonti Greco and Federica Di Lella succeeds in effectively reproducing the stylistics of the French text. The choice, then, to keep the tenses in the present helps to reproduce the instantaneous construction effect of the plot during reading.
And, speaking of intertwining, this is all the more complex the more the story, the fabula, is simple. It doesn't take us long to find out who the real victim is: Ravinel who, having disappeared the body of his wife - Mireille - whom he believed he had murdered together with Dr. Lucienne, proceeds towards his total self-destruction parallel to the gradual reappearance of the woman from the world of the dead . And the more the story proceeds, the more we see characters and events polarize in a binary way according to rationality / suggestion, materiality / ghosts, cynicism / sense of guilt schemes. With a constant that gathers words, actions and descriptions: the semantic fields of water, fog and darkness. The thickening of the haze coincides with Ravinel's psychological disintegration, the reification of the people with whom he interacts and the loneliness in which he increasingly finds himself.
It is - needless to say - a novel more to be read than to reread: the perfect construction of the plot hides a final surprise which, once known, makes anxiety and apprehension vanish. But not the feeling of witnessing the staging of an authentic sample of humanity, which, at a certain point, turns into pure objects. Traces of human presence that let us feel with terrible precision the loneliness in which Ravinel is reduced, a wreck unable to bear more than the weight of life.
"I diabolici" by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (Adelphi, pp. 173, 16 euros)
Published on CultWeek.
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