Georges Simenon- The Blue Room

The Blue Room

Orion Publishing Crime Masterworks

Georges Simenon

1955

I went into The Blue Room almost completely blindly, aside from the publishing line. Orion Publishing's Crime Masterworks series first caught my attention as an offshoot of their Sci-Fi Masterworks books, a numbered collection of purportedly the greatest science fiction novels of all time, through which I first read Richard Keyes' Flowers for Algenon  and Kurt Vonneguts The Sirens of Titan. Later, through the crime series, I read James M. Cain's Double Indemnity and immediately knew that if crime could be this good I needed more of it.

When I randomly found The Blue Room and two other crime books from the series, I snapped them up. Now, after reading this one example from Georges Simenon's extensive bibliography, it's clear that although I didn't enjoy it anywhere near as much as Double Indemnity it's opened my eyes to the wider possibilities of the genre. While Paul Auster's New York Trilogy redefined the possibilities of a postmodern private eye, the image of a classic early century gumshoe is probably overbearing when it comes to other varied styles of crime fiction.

What should've registered with me in the first place was that Georges Simenon is French, and while I don't like to generalise an entire nation's literature, I think it's safe to say that many twentieth century French novels hold Sartre-built existentialism at their core. Simenon uses the experiences of his densely-layered characters to explore the gamut of human emotion from romance to tragedy, surrounding it with a very precisely constructed crime story relying on tension created by the narrator's drip-feeding the reader crucial information, as the story is told through a series of interspersed flashbacks.

As the story begins, in the present Tony Falcone is recounting his extra-marital affair with Andree Despierre, hidden from his family and her husband, formed of scheduled liasons in the blue room of the Hotel des Voyageurs. The bulk of the novel is taken up by these testimonies, introduced by Tony's responses or train of thought, but narrated from the third person. That by itself isn't complicated, but Simenon chooses to switch from present to past incredibly abruptly, causing my first problems as the sudden changes in chronology felt unpleasantly jarring. This continues throughout the book, and does become less confusing as the story is filled out, but was a serious annoyance for at least the first half

Simenon's tight control of his narration, keeping even the slightest details of the crime secretive all the while loading the characters with motive, take time to bare fruit. When this eventually happens and the full extent of the plot is laid out, Simenon's approach comes across very well indeed, giving the reader a sense of satisfaction like filling out the last pieces of a puzzle. My overall outlook on The Blue Room was certainly swung from dissatisfied to happily bemused by the last twenty pages or so, and the credit is all due to Simenon's careful planning of that. In the meantime, he uses Tony and Andree to agonise over the morals of love and infidelity, with the delicacy of a philosopher. His style reminded me of Czech author Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), though unfortunately without the overall same quality of prose. Simenon is good, but not great in this regard, and much of his hard work is undone by his infernal framing issues.

In the end, it becomes a question of whether or not to value the high quality of an ending above the drabness that leads to it. There's no real answer to that, I suppose, just an individual certain feeling dependent on the reader. I know that there were times I found The Blue Room to be a real drag, but that perseverance made it feel worth it to me by partially changing some of the context of what I'd read. That being said, I gave The Blue Room continual chances simply based on the publishers, so maybe I'm not the best example. Whatever the case, The Blue Room was an interesting curio of a book, a memorable experiment in style sure to stick with me, but unlikely to make me seek out any other work from Georges Simenon.