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Tropic Moon (New York Review Books Classics)

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The prolific Georges Simenon wrote a number of roman durs, or hard novels, which have more of a noir edge to them than his traditional mysteries. TROPIC MOON is a good introduction to them as we follow young Joseph Timar to Africa. In search of job experience and maybe a bit of adventure, he quickly finds himself in way too deep. He almost immediately sleeps with the hotel owner's wife, the morally ambiguous Adele, and quickly thereafter finds himself in the middle of a murder investigation in which everyone else seems to know what is going on while leaving him in the blank.

TROPIC MOON, however, is more than just a crime novel. It is a raw depiction of conflict. After learning, in a rather cold and even humiliating way, that Adele has slept with almost every male character in the book, Timar becomes more and more obsessed with her, especially driven as she appears to be somehow implicated in the murder. Adele walks the tightrope of trying to draw Timar closer personally while seeming to protect him from the dark underbelly of the conspiracy.

This drama is set against the larger picture of colonial Africa, in which whites and blacks live in two different realities. It is a world of moral confusion and comes to the foreground as the details of Adele's involvement become more and more focused. The ending, although a bit weak, leaves Timar in the same state of confusion as the African continent on which the action unfolds. TROPIC MOON is a quick and worthwhile read.

Simenon, the author of over 100 stories featuring Inspector Maigret, did not abandon his skills as a crime writer when writing his serious novels, or "romans durs," of which TROPIC MOON (1933) is one of the first. There is the same laconic straightforward style, the same ability to capture the atmosphere of a setting in a few sentences, and the same interest in those dark areas that lie outside the law. There is a murder here, quite early on in the book, but Simenon's focus is not on who committed it -- that becomes clear well before the end -- but on the psychological nightmare that swirls around it. As the word "dur" (hard) might indicate, this is a hard-boiled novel with a vengeance. Simenon here is the literary cousin of writers of noir fiction such as Dashiell Hammett and (a little later) Raymond Chandler, but his blackness goes beyond being a mere setting for the book; it becomes its principal subject.

The setting is Gabon, a former French colony in West Africa. Joseph Timar, a young man from the French provinces, arrives to take up a job with a timber company. While attempting to discover whether the job in fact exists, he stays at a small hotel in Libreville, the capital, where he falls into bed with the hotelier's wife, Adèle. When her husband dies of bilharzia, Joseph enters into a relationship with Adèle that is held together as much by lust and implicit blackmail as by any business agreement, and journeys with her upriver to a timber concession in the interior. That trajectory will be reversed in the last third of the book, bringing them both back to Libreville for the harrowing climax, and sending Timar home to France a shattered victim of his former innocence.

The parallels with Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS are surely deliberate. Both books are set in African colonies; both feature young protagonists who enter the country full of hope and leave in disarray; even the journey upriver, with its stop at a native settlement along the way, makes one think of the earlier novel. But there is no mad Kurtz at the end; the horror that Joseph Timar finds lies inside himself, his companion, and by implication in all the white colonists. For Simenon is as strong as Conrad before him in denouncing colonialism. The governor, police chief, and other white officials whom Joseph visits in Libreville treat him graciously on account of his uncle, a distinguished French politician, yet they have no hesitation in closing ranks against him once their way of life is threatened. But Joseph changes too, most obviously in his rapid descent into alcoholism, but morally as well. At the end of his first week, Joseph accompanies a group of loggers on a sexual debauch exploiting native women, though he holds back from active participation. In a parallel scene later in the palindromic structure of the book, Joseph will not hold back; although his motives are different, the moral result will be the same.

Norman Rush, in his unusually strong introduction to the NYRB edition of the novel (one which can safely be read in advance), not only places the book within the colonialism of its time but also shows its contemporary relevance to the faded dream of an independent Africa. He also compares TROPIC MOON to the novels that Graham Greene would later write in colonial settings, such as THE HEART OF THE MATTER, and I agree; although Simenon is grittier and Greene more nuanced, their atmosphere is much the same. Yet when Rush suggests that Simenon was not interested in morality, I disagree. Certainly he does not have the explicit Catholic theology of Greene. Yet Joseph Timar struggles with his conscience as much as any Greene hero, but in a fevered state, only half aware of what is at stake. At the climax of the book, in a torment of delirium, Joseph finally takes a moral stand. But we never know if it makes the slightest difference; if there is a God in Simenon's French West Africa, he is not in evidence. That is what makes the book so truly black.

Reading an early Simenon mystery today is as much entertainment as it is a trip into the past. This in especially true for Tropic Moon ("Coup de lune"), originally published in 1933, one of three novels set in Africa. It was also an early example of Simenon's "romans durs" - psychological dramas rather than a Maigret-type detective story that Simenon has been famous for. Having traveled and worked in several countries in Africa for much of 1932, Simenon's personal exposure to the harsh realities of French colonialism are, without doubt, manifest in this brief, intense, yet remarkable and very readable book.

The title of the novel hints at the story's intricacy. A term made up in analogy to "coup de soleil" (sunstroke), "coup de lune" suggests "moon stroke", inviting a comparison between the two in terms of the debilitating intensity on those exposed to it. The "victim" here is Joseph Timar, twenty-three years old, arriving in Gabon (then part of French Equatorial Africa) for a vacation - of sorts - from his bourgeois life in France. He is to manage his uncle's timber business set upcountry from the capital Libreville. But things don't turn out as planned. With a few sentences in the opening paragraphs of the novel, Simenon insinuates that Timar's stay will be anything but a vacation. While there is nothing tangible to justify the young man's apprehension - other than being alone in Africa for the first time - an atmosphere of anxiety and unease is established around the protagonist, as he stumbles innocently on an eerily artificial, yet very real, miserable colonialist community.

With transport upriver not ready for some time, Timar becomes increasingly entangled with the group of regular patrons of the "Central", the only hotel in town, and Adele, the seductive wife of its owner. With a few precise strokes, Simenon characterized this utterly bored, crude, and lowly collection of expatriates, whose main relaxation consists of alcohol, card games and the odd orgy with local women. While Africans are primarily seen as part of the backdrop, supplying services of various kinds, Simenon does not shy away from describing in some detail the insulting treatment that the Gabonese suffer by this group of whites. The overwhelming impression that the author expertly conveys is the dreariness, squalor and the desolation of the place. Slowly it dawns on Timar, who for the most part remains a naïve outsider, that the local white officials are no better than his drinking and gambling companions. When Thomas, the hotel's young African "boy" is murdered, the investigation is undertaken listlessly. While suspicions as to the culprit are rife, nobody really wants to act on them.

A major element amplifying the growing malaise experienced by Timar, is the sweltering heat of the tropical sun, that is stifling any initiative. This is a recurring theme throughout the novel. Simenon aptly employs it to reveal his hero's mental state as he goes through different stages of emotional upheaval and physical illness.

Timar's voyage upcountry, when it finally occurs, is not at all what he had anticipated. Could this be a new beginning? As dengue fever takes hold of him and he floats between reality and hallucination, events and context come into a new perspective and, for the first time, he sees more clearly what has been happening around him. Also for the first time, he experiences Africa and Africans directly and intimately. He is experiences "an immense feeling of peace, ...but peace tinged with sadness". While he cannot identify a focus his newfound "tenderness", "...it seemed to him that he was on the verge of understanding this land of Africa, which had provoked him so far to nothing but an unhealthy exaltation."

This new sense of freedom, understanding and confidence is bound to set him on an inevitable collision course with the white community in Libreville. Is there a compromise possible and what can Timar do? Simenon is unswerving in tone and perspective as he concludes the book consistent with the colonial reality of the time. Even after more than seventy years, Simenon's astute observations on French colonialism and his underlying harsh critique of the treatment of indigenous people and environments, are still relevant. Parallels to more recent historical circumstances come easily to mind. Thanks to the new NYRB edition and translation a wider audience have the opportunity to absorb this evocative story. [Friederike Knabe]

Joseph Timar, a naive young Frenchman, travels to Gabon, a French colony in West Africa, to work for a lumber company. When he gets there, he discovers the position is not actually available yet, so he finds himself with nothing better to do than hang out at a hotel in Libreville, associating with the other whites residing there. Soon after his arrival a black boy is murdered, and though suspicion points toward the innkeeper's attractive wife, Timar becomes involved with her anyway.

Though Georges Simenon is primarily famous for his Maigret series of detective novels, he is also well respected for what he called his "romans durs," more serious literary novels often dealing with psychological themes, of which this book is an example. Tropic Moon is in fact a mystery story and a noir thriller, but the instances of crime and punishment take a back seat to the setting in which they take place. Though Timar enters Gabon with romantic notions about the glamor of the exotic Dark Continent, Simenon indulges no such illusions. His portrait of Africa is viscerally stark. Tropic Moon blatantly depicts the everyday injustices of the colonization of French West Africa. Though this may have been shocking to the audience of 1933, when the book was first published, today the fact that European empires exploited the resources of their third-world territories and oppressed the inhabitants of those territories is common knowledge. Nevertheless, through the direct matter-of-factness of Simenon's descriptive prose, the reader finds himself inescapably effected by the palpable racism permeating the events of the book. The mystery story is what propels the book forward, enticing the reader to greedily gobble up each successive chapter, but the racial tension is ever-present just beneath the surface. The contemporary reader is not so much shocked by the racism as gradually suffocated by it. "They were whites, and they did whatever they wanted to--because they were whites." The French characters in this book take what they want when they want it, whether it's a piece of fruit, a centuries-old tree trunk, a native girl's virginity, or the life of a black boy. We watch as Timar incrementally loses the inexperience and idealism of his youth, becoming ever more acclimated to the injustice and barbarism around him. The real mystery becomes whether he will completely succumb to the callous, brutish attitude of his white peers, or rise above their bigotry and assert his humanity.

Tropic Moon is a riveting thriller, set within a startlingly vivid slice of time and place. Although it takes you down dark roads you may not want to travel, the ride is captivating. Once I picked the book up, Simenon had me from page one, and I didn't want to put it down. At a scant 133 pages, those with an adequate chunk of free time will want to read the whole book in one sitting.