posted on 23 Jan 2020

Lie With Me by Philippe Besson

Philippe Besson is big news in France and has a quite prolific twenty or so books to his name. I have to admit that he’s a new name to me though and until I stumbled upon this (longish) novella of gay adolescence his work hadn’t crossed my consciousness threshold at all. ‘Lie With Me’, which is already an established best-seller in France, has been translated for an English-speaking audience by the actor, Molly Ringwald and a mild curiosity about that was part of what made me pick the book up in the first place.

I have to say however that I’m so glad I did because this is a carefully crafted jewel of a book that belies its rather slim size and holds you mesmerised in a bubble of memory that has the timeless quality of your own teenage years. Because Besson is French and cannot deny his own literary heritage, you won’t be surprised to find fleeting echoes of Proust or Rimbaud here and the slower you can force yourself to read this, the richer the lyrical experience.

The author is playing with us to certain extent by using a form of auto-fiction – a novel based on autobiography – but without really telling us the boundaries between reality and the invented. The story is told by a successful French author called Philippe Besson who is looking back to his teenage years and his awaking as a gay man through a love affair with the handsome but frustratingly enigmatic Thomas Andrieu, to whom the book is dedicated. It’s an affair of stolen moments and fleeting ecstasy conducted in a strict public secrecy that Thomas insists upon.

Besson’s memories of that teenage epiphany are triggered by a chance meeting in a hotel lobby with a young man who turns out to be Thomas’s son and who is able to give Philippe the details of what happened to his teenage lover after the two drifted apart. It’s a story of regret, misplaced assumptions and unfulfilled promise that ends in minor tragedy but it’s also a story of how social class divides people.

I really have no way of judging whether the translation of the original text is good or not but it is good enough to sustain an atmosphere. There is a tangible sense of a close but paradoxically distant past moment of time that was, for the protagonists, packed with an emotional intensity that makes a few months feel like a lifetime. Besson’s prose relies heavy on short impressionistic sentences that are more interested in conveying emotions than physical detail and perhaps it is this trick in the writing that stops the reader from stepping back too far to ask awkward questions about the probability of some of the story.

I have to say that, for me at least, the meeting with his lover’s son in the hotel lobby was the weakest part of the book and by some distance the most improbable. I think it’s almost certainly the case that this piece of artifice (because it must surely be so) is thin stuff in comparison to the richness of the remembered relationship with Thomas.

This is, however, a book and a story so intimately told that it stays with you long after you have finished the story and its weaknesses drop away when compared to the emotional intensity of those remembered teenage years. Some reviews have been a bit sniffy about the book but I was much more enthusiastic and I’m sure that the fact that it didn’t outstay its welcome had a lot to do with that in an age when many books dealing with similar themes come in the guise of volumes the size of doorstops.

 

Terry Potter

January 2020