How’s The Pain - Pascal Garnier - Translated by Emily Boyce

I put it to you that only Pascal Garnier could get away with making a novel about a terminally ill hitman on his final contract amusing and almost a light-hearted read. Note I say “almost” for the absolute joy of Garnier’s style is his ability to fuse the black with the light. You find yourself laughing instead of crying and sometimes vice versa, for the surefire skill of a funny man is to extract the emotion from both ends of the scale.

As with all Garnier’s novellas he has this incredible knack of creating a concise narrative without seeming to skimp on any of the detail or salient characterisations. The plot and structure are equally economic without being lacking. There are other writers out there who would require double the page count to achieve what Garnier achieves with apparent ease.

Like A Long Way Off this story takes us on a journey with our “hero” Simon Marechall and, his polar opposite in so many ways, the innocent, the naive, the impressionable and the absurdly optimistic Bernard Ferrand. The dynamic between the two offers a great deal of the humour in the novel whilst also offering us the “Pascal paradox” - that ability to inject a poignancy into the vein of the jocular. Simon makes Bernard an offer he can’t refuse financially but he hasn’t any real idea of what Simon’s job as a vermin exterminator really entails. And it isn’t going to be me who tells you!!

Readers familiar with Garnier will find that surreal, psychedelic atmosphere he creates so well, something almost but not quite dreamlike, triplike. Yet somehow, amidst the mayhem, Garnier seems to put his finger on the paradox of the human spirit, that inherent frailty that provokes doubt and uncertainty even when the way ahead may be crystal clear. 

Using Simon and Bernard as perfect counterweights in the pendulum tick-tocking of life he shows us what it is to live and to die. And yet I feel there is an underlying sense of a more serious Garnier than in his previous work. It’s as if he’s saying, it’s been a blast but now we’re getting down to the wire, there’s pain here too, the title is not just for effect.

It would be unfair not to offer a shout out for Emily Boyce whose sterling translation  loses none of Garnier's wit and perception. And this new edition boasts an introduction by John Banville. My thanks to Gallic books for a copy.