Tempted To Disappear
Have you ever wanted to disappear; to just walk away from work, family and financial obligations, without a word to anybody, without leaving a hint as to where you might be going? Disappearance, or escape, is a common enough fantasy, perhaps tempting middle-aged men more frequently than anybody else. Such a man succumbs to that temptation in “Monsieur Monde Vanishes,” a short novel by the prolific Belgian author Georges Simenon (1903-1989).
Monde’s escape is a simple matter of boarding a train, leaving behind his orderly life in Paris, to push through a long, dark night to the seedy, dangerous port of Marseilles. I’ve long been a fan of Simenon’s sparse but vivid prose. He’s known for his ability to set a scene, to create an atmosphere, and to draw credible characters with a minimum of exposition. His descriptive skills are impressive. “The rhythm of the train took possession of him. It was like some music with a regular beat, the words for which were provided by scraps of phrases, memories, the passing images that met his eyes, a lonely cottage in the countryside where a stout woman was washing clothes, a stationmaster waving his red flag in a toy station, people passing ceaselessly by him on their way to the toilet, a child crying in the next compartment and one of the soldiers asleep in his corner, his mouth wide open in a ray of sunlight.”
Simenon is best known for the 80-some-odd mysteries in the Inspector Maigret series, which are entertaining, certainly, but also formulaic. More significant are his noir crime stories, which he called “the hard novels.” Monsieur Monde is one of these, full of foreboding, set in a nocturnal Riviera that tourists only see in nightmares, peopled with whores, thieves and junkies. Monde learns to navigate this world, in which nobody can be trusted, just as adeptly as he navigated the Paris of a bourgeois executive, husband and father. In Marseilles and Nice, however, he is none of those things, and the necessity of living a very different role forces Monde to contemplate whether such a drastic change in circumstance must also transform his essential character.
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