Hervé Le Tellier

Brilliant mix of thriller and science fiction, engaging with a magic moment in which an Air France Boeing and its passengers, travelling from Paris to New York, get duplicated during a storm. The one Boeing lands in March, the duplicated one in June. The duplication raises all kinds of existential problems and questions, in particular for the passengers themselves, the security apparatus and the wider human community. This anomaly is dealt with in different ways. It is treated as a threat, a show more sign of God, an opportunity to mend ways, or as a sign of the end of time.

The way Le Tellier relates the story is by splitting the book in three parts. In part 1 we get to know various characters that were on the plane. In part 2, the second Air France plane re-appears and is guided to a Military airbase. Here the security forces and two Princeton computer geeks have to execute their own (ludicrous) protocol dealing with such eventualities. The crew and passengers are held in isolation and questioned. Meanwhile their doppelgangers are apprehended and ferried to the air base. In part 3, the various passengers and crew are allowed to engage with their alter egos and work out a new way of dealing with the aftermath of a shared identity. Those who want, can opt for a witness protection program and continue their lives as different persons.

So what struck me, raised my interest? Le Tellier has found an interesting prism, with the duplicating plane, for exploring some existential questions, neatly elaborated in personal cases. First, there is the gimmick of the hired assassin, who goes missing from the hangar (creating a fire, escaping, taking on a different identity), travels back to Paris and kills his alter ego (chopping up his body in acid, making him disappear). Problem fixed. Second, there is the response of the security apparatus (isolation of the June flight, implementation of a silly protocol dreamed up by a couple of nerd students, mobilization of Nobel Prize winners, presidential coordination with Xi Jinping and Macron), which Le Tellier uses to analyse the banality of power (both political and scientific). Third, is the response of society as a whole and religious pundits/fanatics – le Tellier shows how the security forces try to coax consensus out of all religious leaders, crafting a uniform message of harmony and peace. But that proves futile once the religious fanatics go to town on this unusual event: an opportunity to announce the end of times, or take action, such as the futile killing of a young actress and her alter ego after presenting their case in a famous late night talk show. Fourth, and probably most interesting, are the impact of dealing with 3 missing months of life, for a number of key personalities that have been introduced in part 1. What happens if your alter ego fell pregnant, changing the dynamic of a love relationship (well, the non pregnant alter ego decides to cut loose and change her identity, despite secretly hoping to regain her lover). What happens when an obscure writer produces a master piece and kills himself, only for his alter ego to return in public life and enjoy the newly gained fame (well the latter is exactly what happens, and moreover, he exhibits a totally care free view on life while attracting a new love life). What happens when a relationship that was dead in the water anyway, is viewed upon by the disappointed party three months on? (some kind of wisdom shines thru, but also a kind of infinite sadness and a knee-jerk response to warn his alter ego for what is coming and if at all possible to behave differently to save the affair). What happens when your daughter has been abused by her PTSS afflicted dad in the three months of your absence? What happens when a boy suddenly finds himself saddled with two envious moms? (well, he simply proposes a rational time-sharing system that his mom(s) could never have devised). What happens when a patient with fatal pancreatic cancer gets a second chance at saving his own life, through a new procedure? (well, this the saddest case – the man dies again and his brother, wife and kids have to undergo the same painful process twice…). It is in the individual cases that Le Tellier can table and discuss the big questions in life. Brilliant idea. show less

This was shortlisted for the Clarke Award last year, but lost to Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman (a good winner, I enjoyed it a lot and thought it well done). The Anomaly… Well, when I started it, I wasn’t so sure, but by the time I finished I thought it would also have made a good winner.

An Air France flight from Paris to New York enters a hurricane just off the coast of the US. The book briefly describes the lives of some of its passengers - including a French author who writes a show more book titled The Anomaly, and then commits suicide. Having a book within a book which share a title is always a hostage to fortune. But…

Three months later, the same aircraft appears in the skies off the US. It’s identical in every way - plane and crew and passengers completely duplicated. The US promptly hides them on a military base and invokes a first contact protocol, but no one knows what’s going on. Eggheads from assorted disciplines, including the world’s religions, are consulted. Eventually, they all settle on the “the universe is a simulation” as an explanation, and the duplicated flight is simply a glitch. The Anomaly then charts the subsequent lives of assorted passengers who get to meet their originals from the previous flight - with a range of different outcomes, from good to bad.

In parts, The Anomaly reads like something Michel Houellebecq might have written, although not as pessimistic (I’m a fan of Houellebecq's novels). It has the same level of detail and research, and it foregrounds analysis, rather than emotional interiority. Which is a definite plus for me. I’m not about the “feels”, I’m about clarity and verisimilitude. The Anomaly scores on both.

On the other hand, The Anomaly thinks it’s cleverer than it actually is. Its plot is not dissimilar to some recent popular TV shows. Which is not unusual when non-genre authors write genre - although the situation is slightly different in France. But non-genre writers’ takes on genre tropes often proves as interesting, and sometimes more so, as the best the genre has to offer. Le Tellier’s take here is neither ground-breaking nor especially startling to a genre reader, but he not only makes a good fist of the trope, he wraps it in a novel that’s well-written and interestingly structured (it’s Oulipo, apparently).

As I said earlier, it would have been a good winner of the Clarke Award. show less

Ramblings ahead but I'll LOL the day when this multi-translated hype gets made into a Hollywood movie and completely misses the point. Because, it's impossible to not read this novel as an oulipian work—read it as magical realism and it would be a grandiose four stars, as post-modernism a confusing three, as an anti-thriller quirkily two and as a mystery 'novelty' maybe a puzzling one—but you'd be at a loss entirely by that time or drop it at p. 100 or not get why it even won the show more Goncourt.

Generally speaking, without spoiling (because even while the plot is irrelevant it's still a joy to unravel the textual structure) L'anomalie is all about iterations. At first that harks back to Queneau's [b:Exercices de style|957691|Exercices de style|Raymond Queneau|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1463177532l/957691._SY75_.jpg|310551], then to Perec's [b:La Vie mode d'emploi|411678|La Vie mode d'emploi|Georges Perec|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1395577344l/411678._SY75_.jpg|1953902] and eventually to Calvino's [b:Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore|71608|Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore|Italo Calvino|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1461524332l/71608._SY75_.jpg|1116802]—which are all stylistically and directly referenced throughout.
The novel also folds onto itself numerous times. The L'anomalie that I read, L'anomalie that Tellier has his alter-ego Miesel write, and the novel that the 'not-quite-the-same' Miesel ends up working on are (and are not) the same works but distinct and self-referential versions of it.

I've read this novel is not 'Goncourt' material because it's not 'in that style' (which would be something like 'deep and French and troubling' I suppose) but that eludes the fact this work isn't just 'this-one-novel', it isn't even writers' writing, it is pure text's text—yet it is a story (and yes, it's also deep and French and troubling)—but a story about how we tell stories to create 'order out of chaos' and in this case, no, it's not the narrative we're reading that does the trick, it's us: we the reader (to paraphrase an oulipian) are the primary characters of this story, piecing together the semblance of reality our skull-bound brains are trying desperately to make sense of, through the order of the text.

Grappling with this book is grappling with life. Like Miesel perhaps: look for a clever one-liner that solves it, and move on—there's really not anything else to do. show less

This seems to be either a philosophical novel cast as a pastiche of a science-fiction disaster thriller, or a science-fiction disaster thriller that is making fun of the French tendency to turn everything into philosophy. Or possibly both. Something strange happens to an Air France flight from Paris to New York when it passes through a storm cloud in March 2021, and there are repercussions on the individual lives of the passengers and crew, a good dozen of whom are named characters in the show more novel.

I found the initial exposition of the characters' back-stories quite engaging, and the working out of the consequences for them in the closing chapters a little bit less so, but I got rather fed up with the middle section, where Le Tellier brings in every Hollywood cliché he can think of and then tries to excuse it by making fun of himself (one "top scientist" summoned to discuss the problem can't stop giggling when she realises that she is sitting with a bunch of generals at the famous conference table from Doctor Strangelove; another character is charmed to find himself being debriefed by an FBI psychologist using the actual interview script from Close encounters of the third kind...).

It is all very French: we never find out for sure what the anomaly means or what caused it, and all is not put right at the end; similarly, many of the characters have stories that are resolved in ways that are deliberately messy and unsatisfying. We are supposed to reflect on questions of mortality and identity, the reality of the world and the irreversibility of time, not on heroes and villains. And we are quite likely to wind up asking ourselves whether it was really worth being put through all those red herrings about wormholes and quantum physics and weak jokes about Trump and Macron just for that. Maybe, just maybe, because Le Tellier is a competent and efficient storyteller even when he's trying to deny that there is a story to tell, but I'm not really convinced.

Whatever else, it's also a nice demonstration of the risks of setting a book on a well-defined date in the near future. When he was writing (in 2019?) and when the book came out in August 2020, Le Tellier obviously never thought that Covid-19 would still be the only disaster we would be talking about in early 2021, or that the idea of 240 "normal" people simply getting on a plane from Paris to New York and being allowed to disembark without endless health formalities would itself seem like science-fiction... show less