Customer Reviews

A Double Life

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Noted screenwriter and novelist Raphael has written a dark story of self-deception and isolation that has a larger political scope. Looking back on his life, French diplomat Guy de Roumegouse writes a memoir that shows how distant he's always been from reality and his own feelings. His teenage years paralleled the approach to WW II and the war itself, and eventually the links between French wartime self-deception and hypocrisy and the narrator's psychic life emerge with surprising results.

Raphael writes about warring couples better than anyone around, showing how they can launch nuclear strikes at each other with just a sentence. And because of that gift, the most effective parts of the book analyze Guy's failed first marriage.

This story of a French diplomat's life traces the ways in which duplicity plays out in all of his relationships, and ultimately destroys his first marriage. His conflicts over sexual identity, his role in the Resistance and even how much he can express of his true feelings create a sense of brooding doom. That's why when a murder takes place, you're both shocked and nodding, "Yes, I knew something bad would happen."

There's no catharsis here, just beautiful prose as Raphael's narrator aphoristically tells his dark tale. And as he showed in "Coast to Coast," Raphael is a master at depicting a marriage collapsing into clever cruelty.

Compelling and distancing at the same time, the book mimics the story of the main character, Guy, a career diplomat now retired who was once active in the french resistance. It's difficult to chart the development of Guy's almost numb approach to life and relationships, but clearly the guy is unable to connect with anyone including himself. His double life could refer to his inability to acknowledge and act on his homosexual feelings; or his marriage to two women that he can never really love; or his inability even to know who he himself is (this is played out in the many different names he adopts, the meta thinking that goes on as he watches himself and even as he writes his memoirs and tries to track not only the events that shaped his life but his reaction to them.

What is especially powerful is Raphael's ability to project a wrenching emotional angst within Guy even as Guy acts and professes an emotional nonchalance, an anti-emotion if you will. It's almost as if those things that are supposed to make people feel good, Guy interprets in his own life as errors or evidence of his faults and those that are bad, he interprets as his true self. Yet, he can't reconcile why it is that he does "good" or "moral" actions, such as standing up when his friend is taken off by the Nazi's, not killing a man who he believes is not part of the Nazi's, etc., unless he can interpret them as somehow weaknesses of character, which he has plenty of as well (seeking out prostitutes to somehow prove he is a man; developing an intentionally adversarial relationship with his first wife Bertha). Yet, there are these glimpses of a man who would have been different if there had been any way to be so. Perhaps part of the underlying tension of the novel comes from the reader wondering why is it that he can't ever be himself? Is it the social ostracism around being gay? Is it the strange relationship his parents and uncle have?

The biggest weakness from my perspective was the long mental digressions as Guy or another character ponders a moral dilemma or a psychological interpretation. These go on too long and just aren't realistic. It's like philosophy underlying the plot, and it got to be too much for me. There are interesting things said in these digressions, but it just seems like they should be in a philosophy book. So, maybe the book's double life is also this tension between the human being and the philosophical/psychological metathinking about the human being?

The book is told in leaps forwards and backwards so you have to keep track of characters and their names (Fritz, first love who is taken by Gestapo; Felix second possible love who services Germans in the furthering of resistance ends, David and his family that serves as all Guy could want to be but who abandon him and he can never understand why, Maureen and Berthe, his wives; the prostitutes, including Pia who he finds almost dead and does nothing to help, his family; his two sons, one of whom is also named David; his uncle). You have to keep track of places (the attic he is stashed after he stands up for Fritz and where he meets Felix), David's home (where he becomes active in the resistance), rome (where he lives with Berthe), his family home where he lives as a child and then later with Maureen, etc. And Raphael moves fluidly between these places and the current era, where Guy is recording his memoirs.

It's a good read, but it's long, dense and ultimately wrenching, as it raises questions about what it means to like yourself and how not liking who you are projects to all of those around you; questions about morality, survival, and doing what is right.