Honeymoon

"Honeymoon was the first Modiano I read. I think I heard Rupert Thomson talking about it on the Backlisted podcast, and I thought it sounded incredible. And it completely lived up to it—not always the case when you hear someone raving about a book. I guess it sets an additional bar for the book to get over because it’s not taking you by surprise. I love the atmosphere—he’s an incredibly atmospheric writer. It’s crepuscular; a word I would never use in my own fiction. It describes a beautiful, sad twilit Paris. There’s a moment when the narrator talks about his favourite time of day being the borderland after the sun has gone down but the sky is still blue and the streetlights haven’t come on yet. He talks about it being “the moment to lend an ear to echoes coming from afar,” which is, I think, a stunning image. And much of Modiano’s work is about the echoes that the past makes in the present. A lot of it is tied up in France’s wartime history, and its complicity—in certain ways—with the Nazis, certainly when it came to the Jewish population and the Holocaust. That’s certainly represented in Honeymoon. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s about a guy called Jean B., a documentary filmmaker. He says goodbye to his wife, as he’s off to Brazil to make a film. In fact, he’s planning to drop out of his life, partly because his wife is having an affair with his best friend. He says goodbye but doesn’t get on the plane. Instead he moves into a hotel in an outer arrondissement of Paris. He’s got a plan to spy on his wife, but he reads a newspaper story about a woman’s suicide in Milan and realises he knows her: it’s a woman he met in the 1960s while he was hitchhiking in the Côte d’Azur. It gets quite complicated to explain. It’s a very thin book, but the first 30 pages I never remember clearly because it’s quite intricate. Basically, she’s Jewish, and during the occupation of Paris she says goodbye to her dad one day, goes out and just doesn’t come back. She dropped out of her life in the same way that Jean, decades later, drops out of his. Then she meets this guy and they go down to the Cote d’Azur to keep her safe. There’s an element of tension there, and a sort of Gestapo figure looking for Jews on the Côte d’Azur. The novel plays out in these different timelines: the 1940s and 1950s, and the novel’s present day, when Jean is thinking about why she killed herself and what happened to her between now and the time he met her. As I said it’s got this very intricate structure, but it’s not a big book. Modiano writes with what I’d call complex simplicity. The sentences are straightforward and seem to progress in a kind of logical and orderly manner, but as you read you get this creeping sense that something’s missing here. There’s some kind of mystery. Almost like a floor plan of a house that doesn’t show all the rooms. It’s perhaps not what people might first think of as a literary thriller, because Modiano’s mysteries are often unresolved. Some would say that once revealed, the reason this woman killed herself is a predictable, sorrowful reason, rather than a twist you never saw coming. That’s true. But at the same time, the book leaves you with so many questions and thoughts about human nature and how people try to escape their pasts. We’re going to discuss John le Carré in a moment, but this is certainly true of his fiction too. There are long periods where there’s not necessarily a huge amount of action, but the thrill is in the layers of secrecy and uncertainty. That’s an important element of the thriller. It plays on your mind. It puts you in a situation where you’re not quite sure where you can step."