The word that best encapsulates these stories is perhaps
“rôder”, to roam, to wander, to hang around. The narrators prowl the streets or
the lakeside paths and watch the other characters, who are generally strangers
to them. One fantasises about killing his wife. Another finds himself in a
canine cemetery in the middle of the night. Still another follows a disturbed
woman into an abandoned casino.
Many of the stories feature some kind of spiritual
revelation, or a character who addresses God, as in ‘Le rabais’, in which a
former priest has given up religion because he fears he is not good enough for
God. The title story, which is among the strongest in the collection, is
narrated by a writer who discovers he has a lookalike who is getting him into
trouble by accosting women on the metro and leaving restaurants without paying.
Rather than being angry or afraid, the writer undergoes a quasi-mystical
experience and believes his double is giving him a message about the true
essence of being.
Sexuality, religion and death are everywhere in these
stories, in many forms, often uncomfortably intertwined. In ‘L’application’, a
young clergyman in a guesthouse is fascinated by a mysterious woman. He finds
his way to her room, where she insists on showing him the hairshirt she has
been wearing as penance since her mother’s death. In the bizarre ‘L’agneau’,
the narrator performs oral sex on a series of women in the mountains, before
pushing them down a steep drop to their deaths. The spare, tightly controlled
prose adds to the unnerving nature of these stories. What sat uneasily with me,
though, wasn’t the peculiar or perverted forms of sexuality encountered in the
stories, but the fact that whenever the narrator of a story determines to have
sex with a female character, he succeeds. These narrators seem mostly to be
voyeuristic, isolated middle-aged men. Why the procession of young women that
passes facelessly through the collection should uniformly desire them is a bit
of a mystery.
My overall feeling on reading Sosie d’un saint, which as far as I know has not been translated
into English (several of Chessex’s novels have been, including The Vampire of Ropraz and A Jew Must Die), was that I was in the presence of
technical skill, but that it had not really resulted in anything I wanted to
read. Some of the stories were enjoyable, but several were so shrouded in
mystery that I felt unable to engage with them. The shadowy nature of the
settings (abandoned buildings, institutions about to close down) and of most of
the characters works well up to a point, but when the two are combined, it too often
results in a story where the reader simply has nothing to latch on to. Chessex
is clearly a skilled writer, but I am inclined to conclude that he is not for
me.
