{"id":109985,"date":"2021-11-12T17:32:01","date_gmt":"2021-11-12T17:32:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=109985"},"modified":"2021-11-12T17:38:35","modified_gmt":"2021-11-12T17:38:35","slug":"breathe-in-the-petrichor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/breathe-in-the-petrichor\/","title":{"rendered":"Breathe In the Petrichor"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Sam Burt.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Matthieu Simard, The Country Will Bring Us No Peace<\/a><\/em> (Influx Press, 2021)<\/p>\n

Simon and Marie, a couple in their late twenties, have fled the city for a woodland village, ostensibly in the hope of \u2018a fresh start\u2019 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:<\/p>\n

At this point we don\u2019t know that we\u2019re going to be the \u2018murder-suicide\u2019 couple. An episode of domestic violence that will briefly make the news and have everyone shaken up for about five minutes…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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?<\/p>\n

It may just be me, but I\u2019m starting to believe in all of it: our house, this two-bit town, our exile. We\u2019ll fill that park with little ones. We have to.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Narrating-Simon (or \u2018afterlife-Simon\u2019) 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\u2019s commentary? This is perhaps the crux of the novella\u2019s mystery \u2014 a mystery of form to complement the more obvious narrative mystery (what is a \u2018murder-suicide couple\u2019? who kills who?).<\/p>\n

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\u2019 present, we cannot tell if their understanding of these three months \u2014 to what extent their recurring expressions of optimism were sincerely felt \u2014 has changed at all since the events being described actually happened.<\/p>\n

*<\/center><\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t 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 \u2014 the kind that Simon compares to having a tooth yanked out with your insides attached to it \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t fuck up the kid. At the same time, the prospect of parenthood is their repost to suicidal thoughts: \u2018We\u2019re here to make her belly swell until new life bursts forth. That\u2019s the one reason we\u2019re here, and we\u2019re going to survive.\u2019<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

And what of those three months spent in the village? In many respects, they are uneventful. Or rather, events occur \u2014 Simon encourages a neighbour to kill her kids; frosty waitresses warn them to \u2018stay in your lane\u2019; they find a gun \u2014 but don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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: \u2018a perfect family, hence insufferable\u2019, they cling to the newcomers with desperate, cornball smiles.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 \u2018\u2026they forget all about it the moment they turn off their TVs because it\u2019s getting late and it\u2019s time to go to bed. No one wants to be exhausted the next day’ \u2014 then why is the story of their stay worth telling, or indeed reading? One might reply that a story\u2019s worth needn\u2019t rely solely on a completed process of inner change for its character(s) but we needn\u2019t go there. The truth is that we just don\u2019t 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 \u2014 but at least we have the memories.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong>
\nSam Burt<\/strong> is a writer\/tutor and a graduate of Manchester\u2019s 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<\/em>, Sweat & Tears<\/em>, Popshot Quarterly<\/em>, the Guardian<\/em> and London Magazine<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

Sam Burt<\/strong> reviews Matthieu Simard<\/strong>‘s The County Will Bring Us No Peace<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":109989,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-109985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-criticism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109985"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109995,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109985\/revisions\/109995"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/109989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}