Unravelling mystery

THE novel, a surprise best seller in France, where it was first published in 2008, opens with two dramatic events: the arrival of a man, a stranger, in La Hague, a seaside village near Cherbourg, and the start of the first winter storm.

The storm is announced by a howling wind that silences the gulls, and two bolts of lightning. Then the wind smashes the breakwater like a battering ram …

The stranger stays to watch as long as possible, along with another outsider, the nameless woman who is telling the story. She has lived for six months in this bleak spot on the Normandy coast, not far from the island of Alderney. She shares a house right on the harbour, described as ‘an end-of-the-world sort of place, with a handful of men and only a few boats’.

The woman, just past 40, is a biologist who has taken leave from her post as professor of ornithology in Avignon, to work for the local bird observatory, counting migratory birds. The work is repetitive and badly paid, but it gives her a simple life and time on her own, to come to terms with an unspecified grief.

The centre of village life is the café, run by Lili, who keeps a close eye on everyone. But she is reluctant to discuss the stranger, Lambert Perack, the elder son of a couple who drowned in a boating accident in 1967, along with their younger son. Lambert has come to put the family’s holiday home up for sale, or at least that is what he tells the narrator. Lili knows more about him than she is letting on, and the reader immediately suspects a stronger motive for his visit.

The Breakers focuses on the unravelling of a mystery that affected the village’s inhabitants some 40 years earlier. Everyone in the older generation seems to have a secret to hide, an ancient grudge still rankling: the madwoman, Nan, who seems to recognise Lambert, but calls him by another name, Théo, Lili’s estranged father, and Lili’s now senile mother. Théo, who shares his love of birds with the narrator, was formerly the lighthouse keeper, and was on duty the night that Lambert’s family were drowned.

An atmosphere of menace is built up, aided by the grieving narrator’s often fractured prose, and her idiosyncratic eye for detail. The locals talk of a wind so strong that it blows the wings off butterflies. The reader accompanies the narrator every step of the way as she gets to grips with the villagers and their complicated past. At times the pace flags, and the characters become tedious. The gradual unmasking of the identity of the lost loved one addressed as ‘you’ by the narrator, the source of her grief, is a predictable business.

A novel that is at times grim, with characters hardened by the elements, and twisted by bitterness, passing their hatred on to the next generation, has an unexpected ending. Its flaws are largely redeemed by the clever pulling together of threads which leads to the solving of the mystery. The positive outcome is a surprise, but in retrospect it is perfectly logical.

For all the oddness of the way the story is told, it has been carefully constructed, and the unravelling of the mystery at its core is compelling and convincing.