Erasers (Oneworld Classics) [Paperback]

A non-linear crime novel set in the 1950's in some unnamed northern French coastal city. The plot involves an anarchist group who kill a string of 'officials' to a strict timetable. The newly-qualified agent Wallas is sent to investigate and the ensuing events are recorded over a 24 hour period.

Very strong on the geography of the city as Wallas yomps around talking to police and witnesses. The type of novel to expect can be illustrated by a scene near the canal, 'the ocean releases its hissing whirlpool of monsters...be careful..if you want to avoid inhaling them..'

The absence of a traditional narrative drive is a refreshing challenge. However, the random insertion of rather pompous, pretentious paragraphs that require constant re-reading is what really grates.

Of course, we also have the enigmatic title. Wallas indulges himself in retail therapy at local stationers and newsagents for the right sort of 'crumbly' pencil eraser. Metaphor for 'to rub out' as in kill?

The novel does boast a nice denouement. It is worthy, at times clever but with a capacity to irritate.

'The Erasers' ('Les gommes') was Alain Robbe-Grillet's first published novel. It appeared in French in 1953, and was translated by Richard Howard for Grove Press in 1964. It is this translation, with a few minor adjustments, that is used here.

Robbe-Grillet came to the novel from an unusual angle; his professional background was as an agronomist. Nonetheless, he was clearly a product of the French cultural milieu of his youth, which was dominated philosophically by the figures of Heidegger and Sartre and by the twin movements of phenomenology and existentialism. Robbe-Grillet reacts against these currents but also to some extent confirms them. One might think of him at this stage as a sort of anti-Camus.

The story of 'The Erasers' is a version of the Oedipus myth cast in the form of a noir detective story - the type of tale that was to be so influential on the 'new wave' film makers. As such it is both classically French - something that wasn't much appreciated at the time - and innovative.

The world of Robbe-Grillet's story - a port town, somewhere on the North Sea coast, that in truth might be anywhere in the modern world - is not the anguished world of Camus's absurd or Sartre's existential nausea. For the keen but hapless detective Wallas, seeking the truth about the death of an academic whose assassination may be one of a series of linked outrages committed by an anarchist organisation, this provincial town is an enigma and a bland labyrinth that may conceal an appalling truth; a series of surfaces, objects, itineraries and persons that stubbornly exist in their own right and refuse to symbolise anything or yield to Wallas's forensic powers. As Wallas moves almost accidentally towards the solution to the mystery, the reader is forced again and again to evaluate and re-evaluate the significance of events, the question of motivation and the reality of cause and effect.

'The Erasers' (the title taken from the gum eraser of a particular kind that Wallas repeatedly tries and fails to buy) is one of those books that has to be taken on its own terms. It's pretty clear that most French critics of the day didn't know what to make of it, and it was only with the appearance of Robbe-Grillet's second novel, 'Le voyeur', that the author's innovations began to be the subject of popular scandal and accusations of having created a species of 'anti-novel'. 'The Erasers' moves at its own pace, and requires that the reader pay attention, but at the same time be content to allow events to proceed in a fashion that is both mechanical and dreamlike in its fatality.

'The Erasers' is one of the fountainheads of the post-war 'metaphysical detective story' which has since become almost an avant-garde cliché. It's difficult not to notice the parallels between Robbe-Grillet's writing and that of Paul Auster, for example. I prefer Robbe-Grillet.

If there really was such a thing as the 'nouveau roman', this is one of its foundational texts. Because of its relatively conventional style - it's really no more difficult to read than Sartre's 'La nausée' or Camus's 'L'Etranger' - 'The Erasers' is often overlooked in favour of the more obviously avant-garde work that followed; but it's both an interesting novel in its own right, and the right place to start with this author.