By Sam Burt.
Matthieu Simard, The Country Will Bring Us No Peace (Influx Press, 2021)
Simon and Marie, a couple in their late twenties, have fled the city for a woodland village, ostensibly in the hope of ‘a fresh start’ and having the baby they have spent two years trying to conceive. In case we are in any doubt as to how this will go, Simon tells us, not ten pages in:
At this point we don’t know that we’re going to be the ‘murder-suicide’ couple. An episode of domestic violence that will briefly make the news and have everyone shaken up for about five minutes…
This is our first indication that everything taking place after their arrival, though narrated in present tense, is being told retrospectively. Simon and Marie, who take turns at narrating, are already dead. How, then, to account for lines like these?
It may just be me, but I’m starting to believe in all of it: our house, this two-bit town, our exile. We’ll fill that park with little ones. We have to.
Narrating-Simon (or ‘afterlife-Simon’) already knows how this ends, so why does he reduce himself to a mere mouthpiece for the moment-by-moment thoughts of living-Simon? Why do they limit themselves to giving audio-descriptions of remembered events, rather than what we might expect, a director’s commentary? This is perhaps the crux of the novella’s mystery — a mystery of form to complement the more obvious narrative mystery (what is a ‘murder-suicide couple’? who kills who?).
Actually, both afterlife-narrators are noticeably absent throughout the novella, except as transparent screens or portals that we forget are there, like shy authors, surfacing only twice to confirm the outline of the story. Without access to our narrators’ present, we cannot tell if their understanding of these three months — to what extent their recurring expressions of optimism were sincerely felt — has changed at all since the events being described actually happened.
It isn’t hard to see why the narration is so configured. Simard is concerned with how grief erases the buffer zones that ordinarily keep our sense of past, present and future at a safe distance from one another. Instead, grief — the kind that Simon compares to having a tooth yanked out with your insides attached to it — leaves us stranded in an eternal present. Unable to escape thinking about their irrecoverable past for more than a few seconds, Simon and Marie can only make it one from day to the next through ritual incantations to a future that neither one of them believes in anymore.
The cause of their grief (which word is mentioned three times on the back cover) is only confirmed halfway through, yet to say it is foreshadowed would be an understatement. From the start, they use their childlessness to explain not only their depressive states of mind, but even as a yardstick of their own moral worth, as if pregnancy is being withheld from them until they convince themselves they wouldn’t fuck up the kid. At the same time, the prospect of parenthood is their repost to suicidal thoughts: ‘We’re here to make her belly swell until new life bursts forth. That’s the one reason we’re here, and we’re going to survive.’
What they are grasping for, then, is a future that will allow them to hold painful memories at a distance; what the narrative mode seems to suggest is that attaining this safe distance has eluded them, even in death. For it seems as if all they do in the afterlife is float above their living selves, reliving past events as if they were still unfolding in the present. About the nature of the afterlife, including whether the hopes and fears they entertained about it while alive were correct, they are silent.
During their short stay in the village, each experiences immersion in a moment from their childhood past, which is realised in vivid, lifelike detail. We do not know if these episodes were hallucinations or supernatural events, or something else. We know that, at the time, they believed these were glimpses of their pasts, which were recoverable in death — as a previous inhabitant of the village, now deceased, had also believed. But we do not know if they were right. The narrators speak to us for over a hundred pages, and we have no idea where they are speaking from.
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And what of those three months spent in the village? In many respects, they are uneventful. Or rather, events occur — Simon encourages a neighbour to kill her kids; frosty waitresses warn them to ‘stay in your lane’; they find a gun — but don’t seem to stick to our protagonists. They seem detached from it all, unreachable except on the surface. And even where there is a detectable impact, as when local oddball Fisher welcomes Marie to the neighbourhood with a non-consensual kiss, it proves fleeting. Every time they interact with a disagreeable local, they get a scratch that fades almost instantly.
The village itself is dying, its residents bleeding away to the city if they can, or else staying to bitch about the closure of the factory and the erection of a giant antenna that symbolises its reduction from community to place-in-between. The only other outsiders, the Lavoises, have a holiday home for the summer: ‘a perfect family, hence insufferable’, they cling to the newcomers with desperate, cornball smiles.
It might be asked whether, if Simon and Marie were always going to take their lives, if they finish their stay in the village much the same as they started it, and if they leave next to no mark on the place — ‘…they forget all about it the moment they turn off their TVs because it’s getting late and it’s time to go to bed. No one wants to be exhausted the next day’ — then why is the story of their stay worth telling, or indeed reading? One might reply that a story’s worth needn’t rely solely on a completed process of inner change for its character(s) but we needn’t go there. The truth is that we just don’t know how important these months were in their lives, nor the extent to which the broken landscapes and people that populated them swallowed whatever remaining hopes they might have brought with them. Suicide is a mystery, grief may have no closure, and death may be an iteration not an ending — but at least we have the memories.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sam Burt is a writer/tutor and a graduate of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing. He hosts the East London Indie Book Club, and edits for An Inkling and Bandit Fiction. His work has appeared in Ink, Sweat & Tears, Popshot Quarterly, the Guardian and London Magazine.
