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Review
--"Guardian"
"A delicious Parisian chiller."
--"Independent"
"Fred Vargas has everything: complex and surprising plots, good pace, various and eccentric characters, a sense of place and history, individualized dialogue, wit and style."
--"Times Literary Supplement"
"From the Trade Paperback edition."
Guardian
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fred Vargas - Have Mercy on Us All,
By
This review is from: Have Mercy On Us All (Paperback)
Three times daily in a small Paris square, eccentric Joss Le Guern cries out the news items people have dropped into his box. Over a few days, a series of increasingly disturbing and eerie messages are left, the Plague their theme. Nervous tongues begin to wag. Strange markings are also starting to appear on doorways in various sections of the city; symbols once used to ward off the Black Death. Commissioner Adamsberg gets to hear of the bizarre events and senses something sinister. It’s a sense that’s borne out when a charred and flea-bitten corpse turns up, and panic starts to set in across the city…Have Mercy on Us All is a strange, twisted, gothic thriller. Impossible to categorise, it is, like the very best of crime fiction, completely original. Originality is harder and harder to come across, given that so much has been written, but this prize-winning book has it in spades. The plot is like nothing I’ve really read before, an eccentric, esoteric examination of hysteria and plague, while still managing to be a detective story too. Vargas seems to have a fascination with fear and hysteria; old mythologies, old atavistic phobias that worm their way into an old, vulnerable part of the human brain and fascinate at the same time as terrifying, are placed in modern society, and she observes what happens. (The second novel, Seeking Whom He May Devour – which has just been shortlisted for the Gold Dagger, (and I hope it takes at least Silver) – is about werewolves.) Her subject matter is interesting; archaic and fatally fascinating. And her interest in the human response to hysteria and fear is nicely relevant in today’s world. The characters, too, are unlike any I’ve come across before. They too are touched with the magical originality that lifts the rest of the book above almost everything I’ve read this year. An old ex seaman who now spends his days in a small Parisian square crying out news-items people drop into his box along with a coin? Genius! Elderly ex-teacher Decambrais, the an who realises the messages are warning of plague, is great fun also, and the old antagonism between he and Le Guern is oddly charming. These elderly gents behave in exactly the same way as younger people, which is nice to see. They’re all an odd, eclectic, eccentric bunch. Oddly sympathetic, despite often being a rather stubborn lot. The protagonist, Adamsberg, is like the rest of them quirky and interesting; he’s enigmatic, intuitive, and he carries what you sense is quite a lot of pain very close to his heart and protects it quietly and determinedly. The translation by award-winning David Bellos is what gives the icing to the cake. It’s archaic, olde-worlde, brilliantly atmospheric and just as eccentric as the plot and the characters. It’s also a lot of fun. It helps bring across a sense of old history that’s crucial to the sense of the book; a kind of melding of mediaeval gothic with universal human nature. Have Mercy On Us All is a fun, disturbing, quirky, engrossing, charming, fascinating read. It’s a superb crime novel, and it’s no surprise to know it won a clutch of awards on the continent. I can’t wait for more to be translated (and apparently there are quite a few). I can guarantee it’s like nothing you’ve read before; to sum it up best is to say that it is very, very French. Get it now.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Not the first one,
By
This review is from: Have Mercy On Us All (Paperback)
This is not the first book to feature Adamsberg, something I only found out after reading it. (Apparently Chalk Circle Man is #1, followed by Seeking Whom He May Devour, with this one being #3)
I did feel a little as though I had been thrown in at the deep end, expected to already know things about the characters, but actually I didn't find it off putting and if this IS the first one you read, I think you will be entertained. I really liked the peripheral characters from the Square as much, if not more, than the cops. As others have said, very quirky & not your run-of-the-mill types. I know nothing of the book in French, so am not qualified to comment on the translation. All I can say is that I really enjoyed it, hardly put it down till I finished it (in under 24 hours) and have since ordered all her others.
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Fred Vargus fan,
By
This review is from: Have Mercy On Us All (Paperback)
I have read all the Fred Vargus books in French and one translated into English. L'homme a l'invers. I believe that they are better in French than in English. The story in translation was inferior in comparison to the story in the natural language. You don't need to be brilliant at French but you do need a good dictionary. I fininshed " Pars vite et reviens tard "( Have mercy on us all) late last night, Wednesday and could not put it down since I began it on Sunday last. Some of her books' characters link up in her other novels. I liked the historical content and learned a lot about the plague. I write notes as I go along to keep track of characters and events and try to solve the mystery. Can't wait for the next one. I will think about the book and characters for days now.
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