Only two of French writer Laurent Mauvignier’s 12 previous novels have appeared in English: The Wound (2015), about the Algerian war of independence, and In the Crowd (2008), which followed four groups of characters en route to Brussels ahead of the 1985 European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus, drawing grisly voltage from the reader’s foreknowledge of the Heysel stadium disaster.
Although Mauvignier’s new novel, The Birthday Party, deals wholly with fictitious events in the present day, its remorseless narrative logic likewise has us reading from behind our hands, as we watch its ensemble cast stumble into catastrophe. Patrice, a farmer in a remote French hamlet, has driven to the nearest town to stock up for an after-work celebration for his wife, Marion, turning 40; their daughter, Ida, is on her way home from school to get cake ready with an elderly neighbour, Christine – whose dog we’ve just witnessed being butchered by intruders who are about to take them both hostage.
Four hundred pages of agony remain. Our compulsion is basic but extreme: why is this happening? And what’s going to happen next? Amid the moment-by-moment dread emerges a knotty tale of two obscurely connected families, one superficially happy, the other luridly dysfunctional, as the pressure-cooker scenario brings the buried secrets of Marion’s premarital life – arson, abuse, murder – bubbling to the surface.
