Book review: Black Water Lilies

THIS is a police procedural with a difference. And the difference is France. It starts as so many crime books do with a body. This one is found in a river near the village of Giverny. 

Michel Bussi

Weidenfeld and Nicholson, €14.60

It appears that there is a connection to Monet’s paintings of water lilies particularly those he painted close to the end of his life in Giverny.

It’s complicated at the start, convolutes further and just as it looks like it might all be explained with cool Maigret-style methodology it bursts into outright mystery.

Along the way there is much to enjoy. There are two detective inspectors working side by side. One of them is a man of passion and intuition, the other is the careful and meticulous investigator who overturns every stone.

The dead man has had a lifelong interest in the paintings of Monet and he may also have had a passionate interest in the beautiful young schoolteacher who is married to a man unhinged by jealousy and with a side-line in hunting.

One of the main investigators also cannot help noticing the beauty of the schoolteacher and he is more than happy to compromise his investigation and her marriage. His interest in women does not rest there.

Even during a casual encounter where he is introduced to his more curmudgeonly colleague’s pregnant wife he cannot resist making a pass at her.

The work of Monet is more than a background texture to this ardent novel, it is integral to it.

Michel Bussi, who is a big name in French crime writing, knows his Monet and the many passages on Monet’s life and work are informative.

Of greatest interest to Bussi and to the story is the final works of Monet where the studies of water lilies became more intense and more steeped in a sense of impending death.

The narrative doesn’t flag through the sheer busyness of the storylines. As if two detective inspectors working at times at odds with each other is not enough a third detective inspector, who is now retired, is brought into the mix.

He is asked to conduct a private investigation into a remarkably similar death of a child decades earlier where the body was found with many of the same grisly hallmarks.

That said, grisliness does not play much of a part in this very stylish crime novel. Bussi is much more interested in sensuous and cerebral pleasures to get down and dirty with crime scene decomposition and suchlike. The Frenchman writes with chutzpah and all the more so as the audacious story develops.

Readers who have treaded carefully along the roads of Giverny with this story following every clue may be disappointed with the virtual abandonment of the police procedural aspects of the story in the final section where the novelist takes off on something of a supernatural excursion.

It’s all very stylish but a lot is thrown overboard in the race to the finish line.

In fairness to Bussi, the book is framed from the beginning as something other than a straightforward crime story.

The macabre and mysterious are suggested as keynotes in the novel from the start as we are given a sense of it being some kind of intricate fable.

Lurking in the shadows is an old woman who seems to be pulling the strings of the characters from the confines of her spooky house overlooking the village.

For the more literally minded reader who likes to have the evidence teased out and put into melting pot in the end the story’s skid down a spiritual by-road may be a little disappointing but it is never less than stylish even when it feels more like even when the arty plotline becomes more Magritte than Maigret.