Gilles Rozier's breathtaking third novel The Mercy Room is ample demonstration that a main character doesn't need to be lovable, but only closely observed and adroitly, somewhat ruthlessly portrayed. Set in a small town in occupied France during World War II, The Mercy Room is so precisely placed inside the consciousness of its first-person narrator, an emotionally buttoned-down teacher of German, that it feel claustrophobic, like the "mercy room" in which much of its action occurs. The teacher, whose sex we never learn, has only two passions: for German literature (especially by authors forbidden by the Nazis--Thomas Mann, Heinrich Heine) and for the young French soldier who, before the occupation, had delivered documents to be translated by the narrator for the local
… read more...military leaders. Now the narrator translates for the German commandant instead. In a dark corridor of the Gestapo offices, waiting for the latest assignment, he or she catches sight of the young French soldier, "brought there by fate," in a cluster of Jews being processed for deportation. It is surprisingly easy to lead him away from the group and out of the building while the German guards are busy. And so the narrator, who conceals the beloved in a hidden, dirt-floored reading room in his or her cellar, begins a great love affair--a contrast in almost every way from the narrator's bloodless, unconsummated marriage. An act so personal as saving one's secret beloved and keeping him alive for two years in a cellar room may not be exactly heroic, as the narrator admits. Soon after his arrival, the narrator brought down to the captive two shirts from his or her dead father's wardrobe, and two sets of underwear--one belonging to the narrator and another to the narrator's spouse, Jude. I liked to think of him clad alternatingly in men¹s and women's undergarments beneath his trousers; it was a mild way of humiliating him. Blame it on the war but I wanted to maintain a certain ascendancy over him, make his life easier but not too easy, in the same way as you might keep a canary in a cage and pretend you¹ve forgotten to change its water just so that it can't bathe properly. I could have done much worse, for he was at my mercy. But power, in a love affair, is no simple matter. The narrator still burns for the young soldier. "The dim light down there hid him from me and increased my desire, just as the darkness makes an amusement park ghost train exciting. But what about him? Was he grateful to me for saving him; would that be enough to win him over?" While the narrator's uncertain gender deliciously complicates the relationship between the soldier and his rescuer/captor, the shell game of pronouns and descriptions required to maintain this gender-ambiguous status may annoy some readers. But it also has the effect of implicating the reader in the murky ethics of the situation, since it is the reader's decision, at any moment, which direction the gender should go. It's a gimmick, yes, like the backward narrative of Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, but one which heightens the pathos of an almost unbearably affecting story. --Regina MarlerRead More read less...
