Anne Provoost’s intended audience is generally younger readers and one of the five prizes awarded her novel Falling was for youth literature. However, this novel also has a wider appeal. Indeed, it quickly became a Belgian bestseller after its publication in 1995, addressing as it does a couple of timely issues: the seductive power of rightist attitudes following Flemish nationalist successes in a general election and, near the century’s end, the enduring influence of the past even on later generations.


In this case the vulnerable teenager Lucas is pulled two ways: between the right-wing journalist Benoit and his American-born girlfriend Caitlin, who embodies liberal principles. Following the death of his grandfather, his mother has taken him to her childhood home in the Ardennes for a long summer break. He arrives at a sensitive time. A run-down quarter of the town is being taken over by Moroccan immigrants whose open thieving has aroused local passions. Towards the end of the war, the grandfather had informed on the next door convent, which was harbouring Jewish children. He has therefore become an icon of the new Right and Lucas is sought out by the extremists. Lucas, however, has been brought up in ignorance of the past by his ineffectual and neglectful mother and it is only gradually that he fathoms the incomprehensible treatment to which he is subjected by activists on either side. He is equally surprised to learn that Caitlin’s mother, staying with her at the convent, was one of the children betrayed by the grandfather (all of whom survived Auschwitz).


Before he has all this sorted out, Lucas has been manipulated by Benoit into taking part in a couple of covert Right-wing operations. Just as he takes the decision to renounce his associates, Caitlin is involved in a car-crash. Lucas can only rescue her from the burning car by sawing off her trapped foot, thus destroying her dream of becoming a dancer. At first he is feted by the media as a hero but then Benoit, in order to head off a threatened denunciation, uses his position as a journalist to blacken Lucas’ name. At the end of the novel we are left with two young people whose lives are irreparably damaged before they have much begun.


Lucas is the narrator in the book, so we are able to share through his innocent eyes his puzzlement and slow comprehension. Things happen to him, he is seldom the initiator. But the book is the more disturbing because Anne Provoost herself is not writing a humanist tract but making a genuine attempt to understand how situations of intolerance and conflict come about. We see things from the grass-roots rather than ideological level, experience political side-taking as the result of small town jealousies and of self-delusion — ‘You mustn’t forget: our country is at the moment being occupied by a foreign people. A bit like the Germans during the war. With this difference: they brought civilisation with them, while now we are regressing into barbarism. If you look a it that way, we are simply the Resistance.’ (p.188)


This is Benoit at his most manipulative. But the rhetoric of those on the other side is equally thin, prejudiced and opinionated; they too emerge as manipulative. What is worse, they are too self-absorbed in their own schemes to mount a really effective resistance. Indeed, their behaviour is often as cruel and unthinking as that of which they complain in those they oppose. This gives the novel an almost perversely amoral tone. Its argument is that evil is demonstrably rooted in the trivial. One thing leads to another through inanition and, if there is a logic behind it, it is that of tragic inevitability where no decision is the right one.

As I stood looking, I became conscious of a thought that has not left my mind since that day: that life is intolerable. It hurts on all sides and, no matter how you wriggle, you can’t escape the blows. You have to make choices, and every choice is the wrong one. I stood in the Cercle and could not choose. So I stood, waiting till it was over.

‘You know what makes me more angry than anything else?’ said Benoit when the boy stopped moving. ‘It’s the fact that they always force you to use violence. I hate violence. I never use violence unless I am provoked. Some people ask for it. He asked for it. That makes me furious: that they can drive you so far. They deserve a beating just for that.’

‘He is bleeding,’ I said weakly.

‘That’s nothing,’ said Benoit, guiding me away from the place. ‘A split lip and a bit groggy. It’s no more than what they did to you that time.’ We walked out of the street. Behind us we heard the boy calling out one word which he repeated over and over. I assumed it was a term of abuse. Only much later did I learn that he was calling, in Arabic, for his mother. (p181-2, tr. John Nieuwenhuizen)