EDEN

Guns, Alain Claret's main character Eden realizes, had replaced books. Von Clausewitz claimed that “War is the continuation of politics by other means”; means dissected in EDEN, a cutting-edge thriller about todays globalised neoliberal economic practices.

The corrupt Mexican Senator Perez Estrada sends his daughter Juana to Paris, to trace money belonging to the Sinaloa cartel. On the day of the dead, the cartel declare their war of “economic expansion” in Paris, leaving a bloody mayhem and the political system in disarray.

Alain Claret flourishes in Paris, knows its ins and outs, transforming real Paris into the stage of deadly entertainment.

EDEN is Alain Claret's 7th “roman” under the auspicious banner of Editions Robert Laffont, Paris. Unknown in English, his writing is closer to Bret Easton Ellis, to Jim Thompson or Raymond Chandler than his French counterparts. There are hints of Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes in EDEN. It is contemporary action-packed mystery writing at its best.

In 2009, Philippe Lemaire wrote in Le Parisien: “J'ai suivi ce funambule qui maitrise les mots comme un balancier, qui fait surgir l'action là où on ne l'attend pas et la met en scène comme des hallucinations.” (I followed this funambulist who masters words like a clockwork and surprises us with unexpected actions like hallucinations.)

So why isn't AC known in English? He is, unfortunatly, only published in French.

I was mesmerized by the first sentence: Il entrèrent dans la ville et cherchèrent leur chemin. (They entered the city and explored their trail.)

“They entered the city and explored their trail. They came to fight the war, an ancient war older than Pericles and the invention of democracy. They were barbarians sprung from the masses who came to slaughter the masses.”

They are described like a pack of wolves. They are hardened clay figures from the Mexican Mictlan's master Xolotl, come to slaughter the masses, in Paris.

And slaughter they do from the first chapter, discharging their heavy artillery indiscriminately on the racaille (scum) of the cité, a no-man's land outside Paris, to spread chaos and consternation.

They shatter the comfort of Pierre-André Eden, an investment banker with offices on the Champs Elysées. He becomes the victim of theis cult of death, his orderly life demolished by the forces of Xolotl.

Short chapters interweave two stories in 7 books like steps of a Tenochtitlan pyramid. À mon seul desir, la cité invisible, dead chess, la noche de los muertos, la mangeuse de merde, Le mictlan, el paraiso. Flashbacks provide the characters' background with a good deal of black humor.

Inescapably haunting, his characters act diabolically not out of human baseness, not from psychological impulse, but from lack of any restraint: they are zombies.

The Totonec Indios are illiterate killers who don't speak French. Installed in a Mexican restaurant, they sleep and eat on the floor like at home. They idolize the virgen de Guadalupe while fulfilling their ancestral role as messengers from the Aztec underworld requiring sacrifice. Their captain is Manuelito, executing still higher orders without asking questions.

On these orders from their jefe they follow a Muslim imam into the hinterland of this postcard city towards his miserable abode. He is murdered in cold blood by wild animals escaped from a zoo. 

Manuelito is a poor peasant boy from Sonora known as the smartest assassin of the cartel. His sidekick, coyotino, a bare-handed killer, is more powerful, yet lacks the secret intelligence of a single-minded peasant. Behind the invasion of these barbarians from central Mexico is the shipment of cocaine sufficient to set Europe awash.

The star of the novel, Manuelito, witnessed his father's body pulled from the confessional, his white dominical shirt dyed red from his spilled blood, at 10.

He was sheltered by la bruja, a shaman or witch doctor. His exploits in Mexico give him the credentials to be trusted with gruesome operations. El jefe Enrique favors him so far as to send him on special missions and having him around in elegant company. He entrusts him to Juana, the “cabeza”, the moment she steps into this overseas operation.

His diminutive stature stereotypes him as a cartoon figure out of a telenovela. He is a trashy thinking cynical devil, yet the most entertaining character in the novel. Although loyal, he is treacherous. He will come under the spell of Juana's powerful Peyote that bonds him to Xolotl, and, like an Übermensch, survive.

His narration closes the novel in an epilogue in which he finds redemption in his paradise. It merits reflection.

Out of place from his hot sunny Sonora with uncluttered high flatlands, Manuelito asks Enrique what they are doing in Paris. "We're bringing them the glut," the jefe says.

This "glut" becomes the literary “Mac Guffin” that drives the rest of the action in relentless suspense. Whatever it is, it is a lot, a lot of cocaine, a lot of corpses, a lot of blood, a lot of money.

Paris, the city of lights... Where you walk along the quais of the Seine, cross historic bridges, sit in a café over a cappuccino looking out at the glory of civilization. This is the city of dreams, the city where romance blossoms under each street light.

“...Paris...une ville qui ne savait pas encore dans quel monde elle entrait.” (Paris didn't know yet in what world it was entering.) “Paris...ville putassière,” whore-town, is what the Mexicans call Paris. They are insensitive to beauty.

This is a picture perfect hell in which Eden, the only pure person of this nightmare, has become the victim of a machine gone berserk. In such a rotten corrupt criminal world, does a pure person still exist? You will find him in Eden.

Who is Eden?

Eden is Alain Claret's finest character creation to date. In his early 30s, Pierre-André Eden is the European agent of Huttington Invest. He is the chosen one. His life is ideal. His office opulent, his clothing the finest money can buy. So is his whiskey. But the day Bernard Maddoff is arrested the SEC begin investigating Huttington.

Huttington is found dead with a bullet in his head in his New York office. A suicide? Predictably the next one to fall will be Eden. Eden is part and parcel of a massive scam involving hedge funds, high finance, flash-trading, shady deals, money laundering, shadow economy and shadow war. He also incarnates the ideal world in a fantastic Paris.

Eden is not conscious of the whereabouts of that money. The financial scaffolding escapes him. He knows though, that “Money just doesn't disappear, it changes hands.” He is prepared to open his files and collaborate with justice.

Eden is waiting for the financial brigade. Instead, an impertinent caller announces that the next day at noon a visitor will arrive who needs to know who to kill to recover the money.

Eden had done brilliant studies; but hesitant of his future, had made a pact with the devil. The power lawyer Jacky Wennefeld of Wennefeld Partner's, “Des brutes puissants qui faisaient la pluie et le beau temps sur le marché européen"  (...powerful brutes who decide whether it rains or shines over the European markets,) had called him to his office. Impressed by his essays on Max Weber's concept of legal domination he had proposed to connect him with Huttington in a scheme that would make everyone rich.

When things go wrong, unscrupulous Jacky Wennefeld reminds Eden that: “The world is divided between those who read the news and those who write it.”

Eden is young, serious looking, intellectual glasses, long white hands. A romantic type, not yet fully grown up to the reality in which he exists.

We know nothing of his past, nor his family. His humiliation in a situation of attrition when he reaches bottom elicits our empathy. Despite the worst, he always retains a deep sense of humanity.

Placing Eden inside the tapestries room of the Medieval Arts Museum of Cluny, formerly a cloister, clearly establishes him as cultured. Refined. On his way to a meeting he has time on his hands. He sits on a bench in the circular room displaying the most magnificent tapestries of the Middle Ages known as La Dame au licorne, the Lady and the Unicorn. There are six: five representing the five senses, the sixth, À mon seul désir, is a mystery. It is interpreted as representing love. A woman sits down next to him and they are suddenly left alone in front of the Lady and the Unicorn.

Their acquaintance is as mysterious as the tapestry. Unknown to him she has come a long way from the beyond.

"La Dame" - the Lady -, as Eden calls her, Madeleine, is one of the two women characters that are bonded by Xolotl. Their appearance is evanescent, erotic, drifting through fumes of tequila and whiskey.

Eden tells his assistant to take off. He calls the Lady - la Dame - to propose that she leave town with him. She drives him to the coast, from where they board a ferry across to an island. Her husband has a house at the very end of that island. An old woman arranges their quarters, mumbling: "... we can no longer live with lies and appearances".

Eden doesn't know that escaping the mysterious assassins won't keep them off his track. Even on an island. Panic installs itself in the book when the Lady vanishes and he discovers his assistant's mutilated body.

Eden seems too cultured and intelligent to be involved in any crime. Parallel security forces under orders of Wennefeld place him in a safe house in the most miserable neighborhood of Paris, in a room filled with books. Suddenly Eden is confronted by a world of misery that he could never have imagined existed.

You are in deep shit, his minder tells him. Now that he has fallen this low, Eden reconciles himself with this predicament and emerges purified.

Des gens, ponders Eden, des gens.... Just people. And Eden blends into these people.

People of Paris painted by an expert of milieu-like figures in an urban landscape where you never see the sun. With the sharp eye of the painter who knows the value of a reflection in a puddle. The true side of Paris where people from all walks of life mingle. Criminals claim this turf as their backyard. It is claustrophobia you will see in Paris for the first time once you read EDEN. Paris suddenly has another meaning than those given in romantic films or National Geographic magazine.

Finally Juana and her father. Their relation is revealed throughout the novel like a puzzle where the terrible ending presages the end of the old corrupt order.

She forms the spine of the story. Juana opens up to her psychiatrist in New York. Not enough, however, to cure her thirst for blood. She is a Shakespearean heroine who brings about the transformation of the patriarchal order by substituting it with a matriarchy through a terrific retribution. Her father already predicted, “There are new forces born in this world and they are female, and you are one of them.” He did not know what was coming to him...

Conclusion:

Two women, twins of the underworld, representing the twins Xolotl and Quezalcuatle. An assassin, Manuelito, who finally becomes the messenger between these twin worlds. 

In EDEN, this dualism merges and polarizes. Opposing forces dance in a finely choreographed ballet of death. They present the transmigration of reality. And Eden, purified by the liquidation of evil in a procession of blood, survives his destiny.

AC reaches his climax in an event that lets us foresee the following sunny episodes.

Here is a shocking intellectual thriller that frisks along with sustained suspense. Spiced with lyrical pathos, sensuous erotica, gruesome detail of blood and guts as well as comic relief. (The irony is that the story seems implausible yet not impossible.) Elegiac elegance and a surprise ending.

As far as contemporary philosophic thrillers go, EDEN fits perfectly as the bible of Generation "Y". The google translation of EDEN is PARADISE. EDEN is the voice of the Occupy Movement. It is for the "99%".

Like the tapestry inside the cloister of Cluny, "À mon seul désir", EDEN is of course a triumphant allegory.

©2012 Einar Moos

Interviewed in 1966 by François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock illustrated the term "MacGuffin" with this story:
It might be a  Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says "What's that package up there in the baggage rack?", and the other answers "Oh, that's a McGuffin". The first one asks "What's a McGuffin?". "Well", the other man says, "It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands". The first man says "But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands", and the other one answers "Well, then that's no McGuffin!". So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.

http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php