In wartime France a language
teacher is enlisted as a translator by the Gestapo. Knowing that to refuse is
to risk death, the teacher agrees, committing the first of the ethical
compromises that drive the narrative of The
Mercy Room by Gilles Rozier. Gaining some redemption by rescuing Herman, a
Jewish prisoner, the narrator brings him home and hides him in the cellar.
There, Herman is fed and protected for the remaining years of the war. Fraught
with danger as this act is, it is by no means selfless. The narrator is
motivated, at least in part, by an erotic attraction, later consummated on the
dusty floor of the cellar. We never learn the name or the gender of the
narrator, creating a sustained sense of intrigue which overlays the moral
themes of the novel. The drama unfolds as a series of deceits; some small, some
large, all calling into question any notion of an essentially moral human
nature. Set against the background of the Holocaust, Rozier shows how members
of one family make invidious choices under extreme conditions, suggesting,
perhaps, that the absence of morality inherent in atrocities such as genocide
has its basis in the capacity of ordinary people to cave in under pressure.

The
Mercy Room is set in a part of France some way from its western border. The
narrator’s family consists of the mother and a licentious younger sister, Anne.
The father of the household has been transported to rural Germany, although he
maintains a strongly principled presence. Anne, a widow, carries on a torrid
affair with Volker, a detested figure who visits twice daily to shake the
chandeliers under Anne’s room with the vigorous thrusts of his SS hips. Mother
is silent and watchful. Her response to Anne’s orgasmic moans is to scrub the
pots with greater gusto. The narrator loves German literature to the exclusion
of almost everything else. This love is imbued with an erotic quality, first in
the narrator’s attraction to a fellow student Jans-Joachim, and later in the
love felt for Herman. It is not a love that is shared with the narrator’s
spouse. The two share a celibate relationship, as the narrator is too much in love
with books to physically love another human being. It is only with his captive
partner that the narrator can yield to the allure of sex. Graphic sexual scenes
are rendered so as to maintain the secret of the narrator’s gender. As the
allied advance draws closer the novel reaches its dramatic conclusion, and just
as the invading Germans face the consequences of their collective and
individual actions, the liberation is a time of reckoning for the major
characters.

Gilles writes in clear, direct
prose, and the narrative style of the book is uncomplicated. In describing the
assassination of Anne’s husband he tells us: "A car drew up outside the
graden gate. A man with his face exposed produced a gun. Tac-a-tac-a-tac. He
fired at the couple. He hit the husband right in the head and missed my sister,
but it was too late to try again." Rozier also brings apparently minor
events to life with a minimum of fuss, and with absorbing clarity. The aged
narrator, listening to a CD of music first enjoyed with Hans-Joachim, laments
the ‘pasteurized’ nature of the digital format, pleading "couldn’t we have
a crackling version?". Rozier can also write lyrically, as he does in
borrowing from poet Heinrich Heine: "I wanted the fairest cradle of my
sorrows, something authentic, the fairest tombstone of my peace."

The novel contains are allusions
suggesting both the artificiality and durability of differences between
languages, politics, ethnicities and genders, and between war and peace. In the
main, these are structural devices that give the novel its complexity, they are
not the sly contrivance of a knowing author teasing his readers with obscure
references. However the secrecy surrounding the narrator’s gender is puzzling,
to say nothing of the trouble caused to a reviewer deprived of a gendered
pronoun. There are hints, for example in the confession (p. 101) that "I
am still innocent of the writings of Oscar Wilde" (is this the love that
dare not speak its name?) and in the several references to fellatio, that might
lead a reader towards a conclusion. Hints, but no unequivocal revelation. I
found myself reading the narrator as male, simply for the lack of the
explicitly female responses I would expect to see in a female protagonist. The
story is, after all, written in the first person, and it is only the author,
not the narrator who has an interest in concealing the narrator’s gender.

If the overall message of the novel
is that the common certainties of the war are more gray than black and white,
Rozier is less circumspect when it comes to a final reflection on the moral
culpability of the Gestapo. Volker’s children

"wouldn’t know that their father had been part
of the German elite, the master race, good family men, model husbands who
executed thousands of Jews in the back of the neck as their victims stood on
the edge of a pit, heroes who set fire to churches after shutting the whole
population of a village inside them, thus ensuring a radiant future for their
children in a world washed clean, and then relaxed over a nice cold beer when
they got home after along day’s work." (p. 133).

And so on. At this point the
language loses its restraint, and the novel becomes rather didactic. Thankfully
there are few sections like this, and they come at the end of the book. 

The British edition is more
honestly titled "Love without resistance", (the original French is Un amour sans résistance) and that seems
in keeping with Rozier’s persistent use of double images. The narrator’s wife
is given the name "Jude": apparently the "Claude" of the
British edition was considered too ambiguous. But the Jewish name means that
the relationship with Herman has more competition than the author provides,
although there is no other indication that the spouse is Jewish. Despite the
author’s cleverness in concealing the gender of the narrator, the cover
illustration shows a man and woman embracing. This can only be the narrator and
Herman; an interpretation not allowed by the text as narrator and spouse never
hold each other in a naked embrace. Any anxieties about homosexuality are
nicely tidied away by the publisher. (A French edition shows a male
undressing).

The
Mercy Room is a postmodern war novel in that the heroes are not heroic, and
war confers uncertainty rather than certainty. Rozier creates a psychologically
and emotionally complex plot. By invoking the spirit of Mann, Kafka, Rilke and
others he creates high literary expectations and although the book does not
really deliver on this promise, that was always going to be a hard task for a
first novel. But the astute psychological observations, the matter of fact
disruption of the moral absolutes of war, and the unadorned, lucid prose of
this novel are more than adequate compensation.

©
2006 Tony O’Brien

Tony O’Brien is a short story
writer, and lecturer in mental health nursing at the University of Auckland,
New Zealand: a.obrien@auckland.ac.nz

Categories: Fiction