Crossing reality

We met for the first time at a young woman's birthday party in a Saint Michel loft, in the 1980s. Traverser la réalité - crossing through reality - was his goal, Alain Claret said. And it took a couple of decades for him to come through.

The online thriller Le marché aux voleurs published on parisiana.com in 2001 was Alain's watershed. Si le diable m'étreint in 2002, and L'ange au visage sale, both published by Robert Laffont, are his literary figureheads in a coming fleet of novels. Tout Terriblement is out in 2005 and POCKET is publishing Si le diable m'etreint in September.

But what is he writing about? L'ange au visage sale, his third major published novel, is a mesmerizing shocker, a roller coaster of action, a controlled flood of phrases, images, symbols and curious coincidences. Alain Claret is a peer of the contemporary European thriller (his publisher Laffont called him "nouveau maitre du romain noir") through his raging force of volatile prose, delirious metaphors and relentless movement in a writing of epic proportions.

Il avait fait un long chemin. Le monde était beau, il était parfait. Rien n'existait. Le monde n'avait pas de début ni fin, seulement un mouvement qui cherchait la beauté.

William Faulkner whose characters live in a "separate world", guided him while crossing through reality and discovering truth on the page. Reality has it's own meaning in Alain Claret's books. Like Faulkner he creates his own narrative universe in which his characters act according to their own laws. And behind their actions hovers the weight of destiny, fate, and finally guilt.

Alain Claret was born in Grenoble in the French Alps in a working class environment, in 1956. Luck and ingenious curiosity lead him to reading, writing, painting and playing the piano. Enchanted from a visit to Paris with his sister as teenager, he returned to settle in 1978 after selling his piano and leaving Grenoble - a different world.

In Paris he wrote and lived selling his paintings and fleecing visitors from his home town during late night poker parties. He worked at the Centre Pompidou library in Beaubourg until he was drafted into the army, spending a year in Lyon. He learned how to load and shoot a gun and returned to Paris to find a night watchman's job at the Grand Palais.

His greatest experience was hanging his own private exhibition of Picasso paintings that had just arrived for a major show and where still in their crates. But the new guard's uniform fitting at La Samaritaine shied him away from a life-long career in national museum security and he sought odd jobs instead that left him enough time to write.

For Dunn and Bradstreet he wrote financial reports and made enough money to start the publishing company Anarkos that existed for a year. Consequently he returned to a paid job as economic analyst for a company that reduced their client's energy bills. In the meantime he had a novel ready. He signed a contract with Flammarion, rue Racine, for a 3 book deal and Clichy Section came out 1991. His editor's sudden death and the poor sales of Clichy Section (in which already appear many of his recurrent main characters, like Polder) got his contract canceled by Flammarion and the next ten years were for us all la traversée du désert.

He wrote tv series, screenplays and plays, Hiver a Malte was successful but of no consequence. Nothing substantial was produced, except 3 beautiful sons born by his wife Hélène. However, in the seclusion of a mansarde Alain Claret accomplished to write a trilogy. Writing a couple of paragraphs a day takes a long time. Once you're finished you may be surprised by the density of the work.

Le diable m'étreint is a thriller emerging from decade long intense writing that actually defies classification. Alain's characters move across the field of action - the USA, France - like pawns across a chessboard. For the first time appears Craven whose past haunts him the day his son Jason is kidnapped in the US. Craven is a reclusive American installed in a small mountain village in the French Alps to escape his dubious past. But Jason's kidnappers want him and he returns to the US where he meets Navajo Indian FBI agent Janet Fresh who leads the investigation and eventually marries him.

In L'ange au visage sale Craven reappears as a painter fascinated by wolves, still living in the same mountain village with his wife Janet, no longer of the FBI, and their daughter, when an evil force in form of a marauding lone wolf appears and destiny comes down on them like a landslide wiping out a whole village...

There's no point retelling the story which unfolds as a mythical tale of destiny, in other words reality in action, where human lives are caught up by their own mechanics, their duplicity and encroaching guilt. The range of the novel goes from action packed scenes to the transcendental moment when Craven emerges from a coma after the lone wolf's death. Devoid of psychology, the characters are those of classic tragedy.

The structure of the novel is in 5 acts. The beginning of the fourth act Libera me gives you the key to the novel. It is a lyric description of the lone wolf's last voyage.

Le loup gémissait en léchant sa patte qui avait le goà»t du métal, de la rouille et du sang.

French literature has once again proven that it marshals the field of creative expression in our moving times. Full of descriptive natural and human violence, Alain Claret's novel has the epic proportions of Greek tragedy. L'ange au visage sale - the angel with a dirty face - is Alain Claret's modern day version of man facing his own reality. And by crossing through reality, Alain Claret has kept his promise in this sublime novel...