What we do in the Shadows... Rapports de force/rapports de France dans quelques romans de Jean-Christophe Grangé

Abstract

Middlebrow author, Jean-Christophe Grangé is little studied as such, but his novels (widely read) nonetheless draw a strange map of France: the police, the seat and visible embodiment of official power, is regularly overwhelmed by a shifting and disparate sects, camarillas, more or less occult organizations or all-powerful paramilitary groups, in line with the apocalyptic thought of the illuminists of the eighteenth century.The France of the balance of power is fantastically present, crisscrossed at full speed by movements precisely described and timed, but totally improbable by their very ease.There is therefore realism - the Brittany of Lontano, the rue Goujon de Miserere, the cathedral Notre-Dame du Serment des Limbes... and at the same time immersed in a “liquidity” of actions and journeys which properly belong to the dream. Spectrography of an overexposed unreality, Grangé's romantic universe could be summed up by the leitmotif that runs through most of the meetings and exchanges, like an isotopy: “I'll be there in less than an hour”. This curialized “power” of the sects of the bizarre, of the hellish returns of the past, of the ill-liquidated ghosts of (de) colonization is embodied in several figures of Evil, serial killers or sorcerer's apprentices (La forêt des mânes) which never ceases. to undermine the official instruments of democracy. The juxtaposition of the licit and the paranormal, the realistic and the wacky, creates the special atmosphere of this universe where the swarming and deadly “below” undermines and corrupts more and more the orderly and brilliant “above” of social norms, and where savagery winds infinitely in the signs of modernity.