Prickly Characters Reveal Their Hidden Qualities

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday September 20, 2008

Reviewed by Andrew Riemer Andrew Riemer is the Herald's chief book reviewer.

The Elegance Of The Hedgehog

By Muriel Barbery (translated by Alison Anderson)

Gallic Books, 322pp, $19.95

CHANCES are these days that if a zillion copies of a novel are sold within a few weeks it'll turn out to be feel-good pap. In some ways this novel, first published in France last year, is no exception. Renee Michel is an unattractive, shuffling 54-year-old widow, the concierge of a posh apartment block in a posh part of Paris. Almost without exception, the occupants of this converted hotel particulier treat her like dirt. Her only friend and support, besides her cat, is Manuela, a Portuguese cleaning woman.

Suddenly fortune shines on Madame Michel. The owner of one of the apartments - an impossibly conceited and self-important restaurant critic - dies. His flat is sold to a middle-aged Japanese gentleman of great wealth and impeccable refinement. Very soon the gentleman and the concierge discover that they are soul mates. He invites her to dinner and prepares a succession of sophisticated Japanese delicacies. Their relationship does not end entirely happily, it is true, but in the last pages the concierge comes to understand the meaning of love.

Upstairs, the 12-year-old Paloma, the offspring of super-rich socialists (her father is a parliamentarian), despairs of the stupidity and vulgarity of her world: her parents, her sister, her schoolmates, the other occupants of the building, indeed, everyone she knows. Being preternaturally intelligent and perceptive, she decides that the only course left open to her is to kill herself on the day she turns 13 and (for good measure) to send the building up in flames. In the meantime, she keeps a journal recording her profound thoughts and observations on what she calls "the movement of the world".

So, this is the kind of stuff that you'd expect the fashion magazines quoted in the blurb to love to bits, an upmarket substitute for daytime TV. Yet, in an unsettling way, this book (or most of it at least) proves to be surprisingly sharp, witty, off-beat and occasionally quite moving. A large part of the reason is that Muriel Barbery (this is her second novel) commands the sophistication, polish and mental agility that often distinguish French fiction - and infuriate many a Francophobe.

Barbery's conceit is this. Renee is a frump - that's what concierges are supposed to be, after all. But inside this shambling creature, whom the occupants of the building order around in the most offhand manner, lies a sensitive soul and an incisive mind. She is an autodidact familiar with the best of philosophy, art, music and literature. And she has a sharp eye for the follies and vulgarity of her betters. She pounces on their grammatical errors (this doesn't always come across clearly enough in the English version). She immediately picks up an allusion to the opening sentence of Anna Karenina. She identifies a snippet of music, which blares out every time a loo is flushed, as Mozart. She is familiar with the writings of Descartes, Kant, Marx and Freud besides tribes of other thinkers. She recognises a first-rate Dutch still life when she sees one. But she is canny enough to know her place. She hides her light under a bushel and observes her masters' foibles with undiminished malice.

I enjoyed Barbery's social satire. It may consist of no more than the commonplaces of contemporary French culture, especially when it points the finger at the hypocrisies of privileged Parisians with their stultifying good taste, their apparently enlightened social and political attitudes, their devotion to psychoanalysis, modish cuisine and designer boutiques.

There are, nevertheless, one or two exceptions: an aristocratic grande dame who, for all her icy snobbery, is a creature of charitable impulses; a young woman who wants to be a vet; and, above all, Paloma, the parliamentarian's suicidal daughter. Paloma is the one, indeed, to recognise something in the concierge that others miss: "On the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fierce, solitary - and terribly elegant."

How a 12-year-old (no matter how precocious) could know this is questionable. But this quirky, smart book (something of a philosophical fable, not entirely remote from Candide in a way) has little patience with the niceties of the probable and the plausible. That is why, I think, Barbery allowed herself to pull out all the stops when describing how the Japanese gentleman and the intellectual concierge fall for one another. It may be corny - and once or twice towards the end of the book I found myself cringing - but Barbery has a warm heart and a heart, moreover, that knows that great art and the best philosophy may (just possibly) possess redemptive qualities, or at least make life bearable in a materialistic and self-indulgent world.

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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