A ring in Bordeaux

Alan Massie’s quartet of Bordeaux novels, recently completed by End Games in Bordeaux, is a modern Ring cycle, a bleak picture of wartime France, with a Wotan (Inspector Lannes), an Alberich (the venomous advocate Labiche), and a Valhalla of sorts (Vichy, the temporary seat of the shabby wartime government).

The tetralogy, written like Wagner’s over a period of years, needs to be experienced from the start. Lannes, its sustaining feature, fails to bring it to the happiest of ends, after Paris has been liberated and the Nazis driven out.  The main villains of the story are the French themselves, and Massie sardonically spares them nothing in his quartet’s substantial denouement.

He is a skilled and sensitive writer, whose exploration of European corruption has spread through numerous excellent books. That he is a fellow Scot and one-time Edinburgh neighbour, whom I got to know in my days as Scotsman music critic, when he was the paper’s principal book reviewer, has contributed to my feelings of closeness to him.  His articles in The Spectator, now collected in book form, are well worth reading.

But the Bordeaux books, though genre writing in the John Le Carre tradition, have developed quietly into a minor masterpiece, filled with acute observation of what Bordeaux, as opposed to Paris, must have been like in the  war, with life struggling on in the city’s bars, where vital glasses of Armagnac seemed always to be available even if the food and the coffee were deplorable. The saga has a discreet vividness and, I would guess, truthfulness that pays off on every page.

Massie, like the much-missed James Kennaway (author of Tunes of Glory) and my musical predecessor on The Scotsman, Christopher Grier, was schooled at Glenalmond, which must have implanted something in him that has influenced his writing. The Bordeaux quartet, though not unflawed, is something to be savoured and to be disturbed by, but it needs to be read complete, if possible without a break, not just because, dead or alive, characters keep recurring, but because its desolation becomes so powerfully pervasive.
13 April 2016