All alone in the world: three life stories of loss and displacement

HADRIEN LAROCHE’S new novel is a triptych of stories connected by contemplations of orphanhood, and by a shared narrator, the philosophical and apparently free-loading voyeur, Hadrien.

Hadrien, an ‘orphan’ in the boundless sense of the word, takes shelter with three random people and willingly perches on the safe periphery of their lives.

All are emotional outliers in a family unit, all are struggling with abandonment and the horrors of a hard past, and all feel displaced in their own time.

Hannah, née Bloch, is the eldest daughter of a Jewish family settled in France from Eastern Europe.

They were close-knit, ‘like the fingers of a hand’, so when their father was among the first deported to Germany, and the concentration camps, their existence suffered a shattering blow.

Those left behind, mother and children, scattered and hid their way through the war. And into middle and even old age, Hannah remains, in her heart, that hidden child, the sort who hordes stale bread against potentially hungry days and who listens to Hebrew talk-shows just for the feel of the old words.

Because her father never returned from the camps, and because the family never received official word on his status, Hannah has borne decades in denial of an obvious fact, and condemned herself to a kind of living death.

If Hannah is a stranger with whom Hadrien takes shelter, then Helianthe, née Bouttetruie, is a sometime friend.

Helianthe, and her foreign husband, are building their dream home, a mountain chalet designed by her father, a once-renowned architect who now has serious mental issues.

Unfortunately, the chalet is mired in problems, and what Hadrien finds is a house in ruins.

Worse, Helianthe is suffering from ‘an orphan disease’. A world traveller, with a rare aptitude for absorbing languages, Helianthe is now rapidly descending into madness in her own purpose-built prison.

Finally, there is Henry, né Berg, the son of wealthy, if disconnected, parents and a distant cousin of Hadrien’s.

As a young man, Henry had worked as a lowly accountant in his father’s bank and spent years on an audacious secret plan to disinherit his parents.

The scheme’s successful execution not only broke his mother and father, but put them in early graves.

Yet, all that Henry gained was frozen solitude.

With Orphans, Hadrien Laroche has written an existentialist paean to identity and isolation, which considers the brittle structures of the family unit, the grief of loss, and the inability to properly communicate, or even connect with, necessary emotions.

It is a powerful and, at times, harrowing novel, inventive in its structure and never less than provocative in its ideas.