Hey, child molestation is sick. Disgusting. Wretched. Those molestors, they're the fucks who get beat down in prison first, before any other of the hardened criminals, all of whom did terrible things in their lives. Taking advantage of the helpless...despicable. Yes.
Just as despicable as thoughtless child-worship. Yes.
I have to admit that there was a time that I, now a teacher, fell into that group who placed children on a pedestal, the future, and so on. But thankfully your first year of teaching brings you back down to Earth -- these are little human beings, as beautiful as a 55 year old obese, pasty white man, with hemorrhoids. We marvel at their potential, but really, they're just going to grow up to be just as diverse and interesting and hopeless as the rest of us grown folks...or worse. Worse if we keep putting them on a pedestal.
I know that sounds like me going on a rant, but it's a rant inspired by the magnificent and harrowing "The Little Girl and the Cigarette", a book much more eloquent and thought-provoking than what I have typed so far. Also much deeper, delving into many ironies of society, from bureaucratic contradictions, to people's pathetic ability to empathize with a killer so as long as he's a killer who can put on a show of conscience when his back's to the wall. Benoit Duteurtre, a French author incapable of putting up with the nonsense any longer, puts forth this mind-shaking novel to caution us all.
The conflict to watch here is that of a middle-aged man working for the city, who goes through a daily routine that by many standards is hedonistic -- he cares not for having kids to raise or extra responsibilities to have, but to enjoy his life outside of his menial (but seemingly well-paying) job in Adminstration City -- going against not just the word of a child who sort of claimed (led by adults, contrary to the truth) that she was molested by the man, but a city who unquestioningly believes the word of the child. A city who belives the word of children, the innocence and purity and wisdom of children so much, one of the clinching episodes of the story includes children putting the man on blast in their own mayor-approved court run and overseen by them. This man stands no chance.
On the other side of town, another man, on death row, well-suspected of murdering a police officer, goes free. How does he manage this? He buys himself time and the area in which to make a public spectacle of himself by asking for a cigarette as his last wish and engaging a conflict in rules: the prison rule which explicitly states there is no smoking allowed, and a law which declares that smoking is a right of a person on death row requesting their last wish. Eventually, with the help of Big Tobacco, and incompetent warden and, yes, the Supreme Court, there is a garden and smoking area created for such a special request. And the man milks it, and makes an arrangement of flowers spelling "Long Live Life", a show that will pull at the world's heart strings and make him a media darling.
A killer an idol. A decent if not quiet and harmless man a reprehensible human who "attacked a child".
And if you question any of the absurdity, you are as disgusting as the awful man himself.
Sound like any place that you know of?
In a mere 187 pages, Duteurtre exploits much of the illogic of the current first-world human mind-set. He does not only attack child-worship and bureaucracy, but our fundamental willingness to deceive ourselves. Frequently he picks apart even basic environmental policies set forth by his characters to show how they are actually creating more pollution. Yet, the people celebrate Pure Air days, driving en masse to the celebrations and increasing the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere on these occasions where traffic goes sky high. He spares no one, and especially aims the dagger at bleeding hearts with sparse brain capacity. He begs for logic, even in the places it seems he knows it will never arrive.
And somehow, in all of this, he manages to make you laugh. Not just cynical giggles here and there, but this book is actually ridden with ironic humor that evokes real laughs. The incredulity of the warden faced with the ever-growing, ridiculous situation of whether or not to let the convicted killer have a cigarette; the counter-cultural mindset of a man, completely irritated, who cannot stand kids, especially when they become a fixture of the place he works at for reasons of seeming "ambiance"; the hilariously nonchalant manner of a less-than intelligent prisoner who becomes a "people's champion" for all of his trite and endearing antics. He builds situations that are dark and haunting, but manages to inject a good laugh into it all.
Reflecting on the episodes of this book, I realize that yet another strength is in Duteurtre's ability to paint scenes that stick to your brain (with the help, in this case, of English translator Charlotte Mandell). Nearly every place you go here is memorable, with a few sticking out, those being any place that children have invaded. His imagining a world where children are invited to spend time after schools running rampant through the mayor's offices/compound, doing as they pleased while the workers were expected to stay out of their way created a magnificent discomfort in your's truly. Accompanied with the Children's Court scene, the author is able to paint the danger of child-worship by extrapolating their presence into crucial parts of the adult world of which many of us, I think, agree that children have no place. Also, the isolated garden in which our convict picks the flowers to send his life-loving message to a mass of receptive souls, this isolated, caged environment that was truly a stage for a performance that would sweep the sheep off their feet was vividly alive and shameful. And they are places you won't soon forget.
And I've managed to tell you all of this without giving away anything about "A Martyr Idol". Ooops. I did it. Well, you still have so much more to discover here.
An all-around memorable and frightening account, there is no one I wouldn't recommend "The Little Girl and the Cigarette" to. It's dystopian, but not dystopian in that "future, probably never really, you know, going to happen" sort of way. It hits close to home. It exaggerates where it needs to, for effect, but there is no ridiculousness to what Duteurtre's getting at. Illogic is the new logic. Come and get some.
"'All I did is smoke a cigarette.'"
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