THE COUNTRY WILL BRING US NO PEACE BY MATTHIEU SIMARD (BOOK REVIEW)

29/6/2021

Simard offers a novella that draws a lot of its power from its gentle and hypnotic style, with short sentences falling like endless soft drops of rain.

THE COUNTRY WILL BRING US NO PEACE BY MATTHIEU SIMARD
(BOOK REVIEW by daisy lyle)

Simon and Marie, the couple at the heart of Matthieu Simard’s new novella, The Country Will Bring Us No Peace, are getting away from it all in a moribund little village surrounded by woods. The village is not just dying on its feet in the usual way of rustic communities, however: it is also home to a large antenna which exerts a cryptic influence on the surviving inhabitants of the village. As Simon and Marie take turns to tell the story of their summer in their new house, they gradually reveal the nature of the pain they are trying to escape.

If this all sounds a bit familiar, it’s worth bearing in mind that originality of plot is not the name of the game here. There aren’t even any real shocks as such. The Country Will Bring Us No Peace is a timely reminder that there is a lot more to writing than action-packed story arcs. Simard offers a novella that draws a lot of its power from its gentle and hypnotic style, with short sentences falling like endless soft drops of rain. There is also great use of detail, with many evocative “close-ups” of characters’ body language, their house, furniture and so on. All that dust-bunny-and-flickering-eyelash stuff can be ferociously boring if done badly, but Simard’s novella holds the attention and is very readable.

It’s a very film-like novella altogether. In its rustic setting and tense, humid, waiting quality it reminds me of rural Gothic horror films like The Passion of Darkly Noon and The Reflecting Skin in which the propensity of small communities for hoarding secrets and incubating guilt is at least as horrifying as any supernatural content. The air of inescapability, glimpses of sharp humour, and Simard’s decision to have the characters “give away” the ending early on are also reminiscent of the Ruth Rendell novel A Judgement In Stone (though now we’re back in film-land again, since you can’t talk about Rendell’s book without mentioning its great Claude Chabrol adaptation La Ceremonie!)

There is a ‘proper’ weird component to this novel, though it’s not what you might think from the blurb. Although the first third of the book is quite Schitt’s Creek-minus-the-laughs, there are no predictable incest Olympics or axe-happy woodsmen to endure here, and seekers of sylvan horror in the manner of Arthur Machen or Laird Barron will also be wrong-footed (Simard only rarely turns his magnifying glass on the woods that surround the house, although they do play an important part in the proceedings.) L. P. Hartley’s classic strange story ‘The Pylon’ is closer to the spirit of this novella, in which oblique and concise writing generates a constant hum of diffuse dread, a kind of psychic noise floor submerging all but the most powerful pulses of emotion.

Translator Pablo Strauss deserves a mention here too as his translation is well above average. I tend to avoid foreign-language works translated into English because there is often something gauche and “translatey” about them. This is definitely NOT the case with Strauss’ excellent translation – I completely forgot I wasn’t reading an English-language original.

THE COUNTRY WILL BRING US NO PEACE BY MATTHIEU SIMARD

Simon and Marie can't seem to have a baby. They decide to flee the city for an idyllic village, where things, they tell themselves, must be better. But their new home is gloomy, threatening, tinged with tragedy - things have not been the same since the factory closed down and the broadcast antenna was erected. In the trees, no birds are singing, and people have started disappearing... The Country Will Bring Us No Peace is celebrated Quebecois author Matthieu Simard's first work to be translated into English and published in the UK; a strange and poignant novella exploring grief and its aftermath.