Joseph Andras’s slim debut novel, winner of the prix Goncourt du Premier Roman (First Novel), is the fictionalization of the story of Fernand Iveton, a pied noir in Algeria in early 1957, during the Algerian War for Independence.
Fernand and Hélène are lovers in Algiers during the Algerian War for Independence (1954-62). When Fernand plants a bomb in the factory where he works, he is quickly arrested, tortured, and sentenced to death. Joseph Andras skillfully weaves Fernand and Hélène’s present with their past and presents this single action as a launch point for this brief novel about love, politics, and freedom.
Opening the novel, Fernand meets with his Algerian National Liberation Front (NLF) contact, who gives him two bombs in shoeboxes. Due to the size of his bag, he only takes one, which he hides in the factory. Within hours, revealed by some unknown source, the police arrest him. They are aware of the existence of the second bomb and torture him with increasing brutality to reveal the names and descriptions of his accomplices, as well as the location of the second bomb, the factory where the bombs were made. He knows very little, yet he eventually tells what he knows, while inventing answers for the other questions, to cease the ongoing torture.
While Fernand is held in custody, Hélène supports him by destroying evidence left at home, and undergoing her own interrogation at the police station, albeit under far less duress. Upon her release, the reader gets their first clear insight to the split in the society. The police have paraded Fernand before photographers and placed stories in the media naming him a terrorist and traitor, a danger to society. Yet, when Hélène takes a taxi home from the police station, the driver, upon learning her identity, reveres them both. He calls them heroes, patriots, and he refuses payment.
Interspersed amongst these present narratives is the tender story of the couple, and their relationship. Fernand is Algerian, though his parents came from the continent.
Hélène comes from Poland. They each have communist roots and links to—and pride in—the French Resistance against the Nazis. Her support for Fernand, and resilience in the onslaught of local media and manufactured outrage would be ripe territory for a novel of it’s own.
By and by, the novel explores, moving easily from past to present and back, the ugliness and brutality of the French control in Algeria, through revelations about murders, inequality, and prisoner treatment. Colonial police commit ruthless torture against orders from France. Inequity is punctuated by Fernand’s treatment, where, even in prison, European prisoners receive two blankets to one for Algerians, and two showers and shaves per week compared to a only one for the North Africans. The murder of Fernand’s friend, Henri, triggers his activism.
Throughout the novel, Andras draws lines to show the segmentation of the Algerian society—French versus Algerian, French versus pied noir versus Arabs, French resistance versus Algerian freedom fighters.
By turns, readers will feel the echoes of Camus, a pied noir himself, whose opposition to Algerian separation still contributes to his complex legacy; Sartre, (We Are All Assassins), who supported the Communists who favored it; and Kafka, who reverbates in the bureaucracy of the courts and sentencing. Iveton’s end is at once unfairly expedited and concurrently dragged through the black box of the French-Algerian penal system, where the inputs of politicians and public outrage hold a higher stance than justice.
In all, Iveton’s story, whether you know or not the ending in advance, is one of political outrage, tender relationships, and an ending stirring in pathos.
