They Were Coming for Him review: stranger in a strange book

Albert Camus, French-Algerian writer, existentialist thinker and prophet of the absurd, died on January 4th, 1960, at the age of 46. He was a romantic figure who in 1957 became (and remains) the second youngest Nobel literature laureate.

Camus's small body of work includes two of the major core texts of 20th-century literature: his career-defining debut, L'Etranger (1942; translated into English as The Outsider in 1946), and a later work, La Chute (1956; translated into English as The Fall in 1957), both of which continue to influence writers from all traditions. Put plainly in as crude a synopsis as this, Camus is extraordinary.

Camus died prematurely in a freak accident: he was a passenger in a car being driven by his publisher, Michel Gallimard, who later died of his injuries. Theories of foul play abounded. Camus had angered many dangerous factions due to his outspoken opposition to Stalin’s Russia and Franco’s Spain. Algerians intent on independence were outraged by his suggestion that Algeria should agree a union with France. Camus knew he was being watched and was suspicious of everyone while also juggling several lovers.

Of the many ironies in his story is the fact that on the day he died, Camus had intended to travel by rail; an unused train ticket was later found in his pocket.

All of this should make Spanish writer Berta Vias Mahou's ambitious narrative, which juxtaposes Camus's life, work and an alter ego at work on what was to be his final and unfinished novel, The First Man, fascinating. Except it doesn't. Instead, this unconvincing novel, which mingles known facts and many personal descriptions of Camus with clunky reimagined sequences, drags along with a ponderous worthiness.

They Were Coming for Him reads as an amateurish labour of love. Indeed, a love of Camus is crucial; otherwise the flat writing, which is wordy and repetitive, marred by stylistic limitations and odd word choices, would prove impossible to negotiate.

Torn in translation

Adding to the difficulties is the translation, which errs towards diligent caution, such as repeatedly referring to the road as a pavement. The fact that it appears to be suspended uncomfortably between Anglo English and American English does not help. There are also odd copy editing choices, such as “a horde of crows” instead of the correct collective, a murder of crows. Pedantry aside, a reader only notices the creaking floorboards when the quality of the narrative is strained and laboured. At no time does the translator decide to cut the superfluous descriptions.

There are passages when one is left wondering where the real Camus stands back for the alter ego and vice-versa. Whatever about the material, Mahou has been let down by her approach to structure and an ill-developed technique, which is frequently exposed by the poor characterisation. No one in this novel, real or otherwise, convinces.

It is also an extremely violent book. Reading the action sequences is similar to watching a movie in which the soporific verbal exchanges are enlivened only by another burst of machine-gun fire heralding more crazed killing.

Of the many ironies, one is the most obvious. Camus, the creator of one of literature’s most compelling outsiders, Patrice Meursault, a man so detached as to be executed less for his random killing of a famously unnamed Arab than for his failure to display emotion at his mother’s funeral, was himself a complete outsider. He was born the son of an Alsatian father who died at the Marne without ever seeing his son. Camus’s mother was Spanish and he was born in Algeria. For him, France was another country.

The enigma lives on in Camus’s work and in his sad, handsome face. Interestingly for such a charismatic figure, he was a poor speaker and his gruff voice, on recordings at least, is unexpected. That said, his Nobel acceptance speech is very powerful. But no one, not least Camus himself, would have claimed he was a talented debater.

Mahou makes good use of this in a passage in which two conspirators are passing time. One of them turns on the radio. By chance, Camus is about to be interviewed about his play, an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Possessed. "The writer coughed and cleared his throat, but immediately continued, his voice reflecting a mix of timidity and affectation."

Novels that take a real life and attempt to mix fact and fiction are difficult to do well unless there is an assured stylistic and linguistic cohesion, such as Colm Tóibín achieves in The Master (2009), which made inspired use of Leon Edel's definitive five-volume biography of Henry James.

Mahou does include the various – at times contradictory – news reports covering Camus’s fatal crash, as well as an article that considers the atmosphere of rumour, but does not refer to specific biographical sources. Her ill-judged use of Jacques, the central character from a final, unfinished Camus novel, as an alter ego merely distances the narrative from Camus.

An unfinished draft

Because Mahou takes the writer’s aversion to violence as one of her themes, it is puzzling that she didn’t frame her narrative entirely on Camus the man. Instead, she takes the unfinished novel,

The First Man

, which is a beautiful work, and his most autobiographical. When it was finally published in 1995 after years of opposition from the family,

The First Man

revealed Camus at his most personal and human, a man searching for the father he had never known. One of its many tender images is that of Jacques standing by the grave of the long-dead soldier, a man so much younger than he is, who was his father.

Yet again, irony makes a point. Camus continues to speak both as an artist and, in that final work, as an individual who could explain the unexplainable. He is both elusive and candid.

This disappointing novel, by contrast, merely wades through the material. There is no insight, just a sequence of awkward improvisations; the day of the fatal accident is tediously over-drawn.

It should have worked. Yet They Were Coming for Him fails to convince, and the most pressing sensation is that of a fatalistic Camus, who for all his resignation remains most definitely on the run.

Most ironic of all is that when Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud set out to subvert L'Etranger with his satirically titled The Meursault Investigation (translated by John Cullen), it seemed at best a worthy proposition. But Daoud wrote a splendid riposte on behalf of the unnamed Arab, giving him a presence in an angry, human, convincing and witty book. Admittedly, Cullen was working with a sharp, well-developed, first-person voice, and brilliantly conveyed the laconic tone.

Daoud's thesis is far more daring, and it succeeds in so many ways, all of which eludes Berta Vias Mahou in a project that struggles from the opening pages and never establishes an authentic sense of purpose. Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent