The Birthday Party

Laurent Mauvignier is a French author who has published regularly since 1999 but has only been translated into English twice previously, despite The Birthday Party (translated by Daniel Levin Becker) being his thirteenth novel. This novel is a thriller but one in which the execution of the prose is as important as the pace of the plot. The novel is set in an isolated hamlet of three houses known as Three Lone Girls. One house is inhabited by the painter, Christine, another by the Bergogne family – the father, Patrice, the mother, Marion, and the daughter, Ida (the daughter’s age is not mentioned but we can work out from other information she is around ten). Mauvignier moves from character to character to tell the story in a style that may prove frustrating for readers who just want to know what happens next, but ultimately increases rather diminishes the tension.

The novel opens with Patrice taking Christine to the police station to report threatening, anonymous letters she is receiving, the latest of which “wasn’t mailed… someone slid it under my door.” Although the letters are, to an extent, a misdirection, they immediately place the reader on alert. Mauvignier quickly establishes the relationships between the characters: Christine is friendly with Patrice, wary of Marion and affectionate with Ida. Ida comes to Christine’s (whom she calls Tatie or Auntie) after school, taking the drawings she intends to give her mother for her birthday:

“Ida hopes Tatie will like them, her drawings, because Tatie’s opinion counts for her almost as much as her mother’s.”

That, when Ida asks Christine if she has a present for her mother, she gets no answer suggests the coolness between the two women:

“Ida doesn’t dare ask her if she has a reason for avoiding talking about Marion, if it’s all just in her head or if there is something amiss between them, if what Tatie thinks of Mum means she can’t say…”

Patrice, too, can find Marion remote. His love for her tempered by a feeling that she is too good for him; where Christine is suspicious of her, Patrice regards as her as exceptional in a way he does not quite understand, but this can also make her seem distant:

“This pain, so often renewed, of feeling like he’s not there when she looks at him, when all this beauty to which he believed – used to believe – she gave him access, the possibility of contemplating it, or touching it, cast him back even more violently into his loneliness…”

Today is Marion’s fortieth birthday and Patrice has not only invited Christine over, but also two of Marion’s work colleagues (who, it must be said, also look on her as something out of the ordinary).  Into his preparations for the evening, Mauvignier injects further tension via everything from the moral dilemma of whether he should sleep with a prostitute (later we will realise this is thematically relevant in the sense that we all have aspects of our lives which need forgiven) to a flat tyre. In fact, over a hundred pages have passed before we really enter thriller territory with the arrival of a strange car at Three Lone Girls and the disappearance of Christine’s dog (set up as far back as the first chapter when Christine was worried about the anonymous letters):

“I have my dog you know. I have my dog.”

At this point, Mauvignier has cleverly removed all his characters from the scene apart from Christine, yet the reader knows each one will return: first Ida, from school, then Patrice, from town, and finally Marion, from work. Each arrival will offer potential plot twists, until all the characters are together, including Marion’s work colleagues. As to what happens on the night of Marion’s’ birthday, that is best left for each reader to discover for themselves, but the final section is a masterpiece of narrative control.

The Birthday Party has the plot of a thriller but the prose of modernism, as if an artist had decided to render a superhero comic in the style of Vorticism (as I am sure someone has). Most successfully, it does not lose its power as a page-turner, but brings with it a depth of character and stylistic panache that should have transported it into the shortlist of International Booker Prize.

Tags: International Booker Prize 2023, laurent mauvignier, the birthday party