Ringing, deafening his ears…What time is it? What? 4h in the morning? It’s a private call. Hello?….Yes?
A deep voice, commanding, presents himself, the gendarmerie, Saint-Eustache-la-Forêt, what? Saint-Eustache-la-Forêt in Normandy, I’m terribly sorry to wake you at this time of night, Camille Texier is your wife?….at the A&E in Bolbec….a car accident, we wanted to notify you as soon as possible.***
Thomas is married with two children and a loving wife, Camille, he works as a programmer in a company which he and his friend Dom helped their joint friend Drincourt to start up and begin to make profitable. The two parents live full professional lives and have little time for their children whom Dana their African “auntie” helps to look after. Time did I say, Thomas’s main project is to work on a software solution linked to a bar code reader enabling companies to know what their off site employees are doing at every moment throughout the day, a wonderful device allowing companies to optimise the use of their employees and helping the employees prove their worth to their companies.
Firstly in the video you see the name of the product: NUXITEMPO, as if it were the title of a film. Then the name of the manufacturer: NUXILOG. accompanied by an epic musical score of the sort with which you can imagine a child being rescued in the wild Pacific Ocean….Then à voice which announces: In five years time 50% of you employees will be nomad. Wherever you are, improve your traceability!***
In the first part of this three part book, Thomas’s life explodes, as we learn of his wife’s car accident in the opening quote, and we examine the circles of deeply engrained lies Thomas doesn’t even realise he is living. What was Camille doing on this lonely country road in the early hours of the morning? How did she have such a dramatic accident on a straight stretch of road where you could see for miles in every direction? Whilst Camille lies in a coma, Thomas investigates the accident and he discovers that there were things he didn’t know about his wife, at the same time his job becomes more precarious as his once friend Drincourt shows no empathy or understanding towards the effects of his private life on his professional performance. On a personal side Thomas tries to protect his children from the dramatic events concerning their mother, but where does protection end and confiscation begin, a question he will be forced to face by his son.
The book then jumps ahead a few months to the summer when Thomas and the children are on holiday at his brothers house high in the Pyrénées, where his much elder brother, Jean is a goatherd living a pastoral life in the family farm. We learn that Camille, although coming out of her coma, died soon after without ever recovering.
The children fit in well and are enjoying the chores on the farm but we sense a closeness that cannot be and a difference in visions of the world between the two brothers as illustrated by the following conversation:
Hang on brother, stop there. Why do you think I don’t have more than 180 goats?
I guess that over that number it’s a change of scale, you can no longer control the population, whereas with my solution, no need for extra staff….
You don’t get it do you? I don’t go above that number, because I wouldn’t know them: Their names, there characters, their habits….180 is already the upper limit. Doesn’t interest me to have more, but go on Thomas what would I do with your system? What would…
You’d manage! I’d install the apps for you, I’d ensure the computer maintenance, the updates, the….
You really expect me to spend my time in front of a screen, “managing” my goats temperature curves, their blood analyses and population curves? I’d call them up by Skype?***
In the summer, Thomas pushes his brother much against his will to take him up into the mountains to see the place his father was found dead after a fall, and then at Christmas Jean suddenly throws their mother out of his house, off of the farm, Thomas doesn’t understand, there is a deeper family story he is unaware of, knows nothing of.
The answers lies later, in the third part of the book, no spoilers here, when Thomas visits his estranged sister, Pauline who lives in The Cameroun following the death of his brother Jean found after a fall at the same place as his father. All becomes clear, the dark family secrets are revealed to Thomas pushing him to act quickly.
Throughout the book, Luc Lang brings to life the different lives and locations, from the hospital in Rouen to the prison cell in the Cameroun, from the café in Paris and the overindulgence in alcohol under pressure of work to the kinship necessary to live in the remote farms of the Pyrénées, slowly revaluing to Thomas the false strings holding his life together.
First published in French as ‘Au commencement du septième jour’ by Stock in 2016
***My translation
South of Paris books 