This, like much of Blyton, is a tale of children without adults. From the outset, Paul's and Elisabeth's mother is ill. She then quickly dies and other adults occupy only minor roles in what is essentially a modern take on a Greek tragedy written, so I gather, during Cocteau's cold-turkey period in 1929 when he was breaking a serious opium addiction.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, the plot is strange. A tale first of two, then three then four children, all orphans, who live together - closely together - first in Paul's and Elisabeth's mother's Paris house and subsequently in a house owned by Elisabeth's momentary husband who dies in a car crash immediately after the ceremony leaving her to understand marriage as a series of meetings with lawyers.
A normal English version of the title is Children of The Game and it is The Game, a mental journey played in the interstices between sleeping and waking which drives the first three children (including Gérard, Paul's schoolfriend) through their later youth and adolescence. The Game requires mementoes, treasures, a need to be together and to create a Blytonesque camp in the bedroom (a room seldom left - at least by Paul).
A key treasure is a photograph of Dargelos, with whom Paul was obsessed while at school and whose stonefilled snowball, which strikes Paul in the chest, results in Paul never attending school again. But Dargelos doesn't fade; Agatha - a nascent mannequin who joins the group in the second-half of the book - turns out to be the spitting image of Dargelos re-establishing the obsession and unwittingly tightening the incestuous coils which tie Paul and Elisabeth together.
The pair are indeed terrible, consistently striking each other - even on a rare holiday in public - making faces at all around them, stealing, undertaking consistent verbal attacks and yet, at the same time, bathing together, defending each other, indeed loving each other.
This combination of unrequited incest and the reappearance, at least by letter, of Dargelos, forces the end. Gérard is always in love with Elisabeth and later, Agatha falls in love with Paul and he with her although neither gets the chance to tell the other as Elisabeth, turned Greek Fury, intervenes to block such expressions of feeling and to persuade Agatha and Gérard that they're the natural (if unhappy) pairing.
When the four reunite after the wedding, Dargelos, the uncaring or malicious god of the piece, has sent Paul poison knowing Paul to be fascinated by such symbols of mortality. Eventually, Paul takes the poison and Elisabeth shoots herself. Bring down the final curtain.
Written very quickly and gaining from that, Les Enfants Terribles, is a product of the febrile 20s when societal rules had been destroyed by the First World War. It is a shocking tale magnificently constructed.
Les Enfants Terribles, Penguin (my copy 1973) - translated by Rosamund Lehmann
No comments:
Post a Comment