Pierre Lemaitre ([2009, English translation Robe de mariée, originally published in French in 2009 and translated by Frank Wynne] 2016) Blood Wedding.

Pierre Lemaitre’s prior work Blood Wedding (translated by Frank Wynne) contains many of the themes and plots used in later novels. Blood Wedding is not one novel, but two. A rewriting of what the reader believes to be the narrative truth.

The serial murderer often appears in the early pages of Lemaitre’s stories. Sophie Duguet keeps losing things and losing herself in blocks of time she can’t account for, but she found a job that suits her if she can keep a lid on her madness and avoid being locked up. She’s an attractive young woman and Leo, the six-year-old boy she nannies, loves her and his parent’s trust her. But when Leo is found tied up in his bed and strangled by a bootlace from one of her boots she goes on the run.   

Lemaitre flips the usual narrative convention. He wants us to empathise with the killer. To find an explanation that explains things away. Sophie Duguet is a child killer? But she’s really nice doesn’t quite cut it, but we keep turning the pages to find out why?

 Anyone can lie. But as President Trump shows time after time, not everyone can tell the truth.

‘Gaslighting’ entered our psychological repertoire as a kind of in-joke. However, literature has long been using a plot device of a sane person doubting their own senses and for good reason.

The term itself originates from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light (and its famous 1944 film adaptation starring Ingrid Bergman), in which a husband subtly dims the home’s gas lamps. He denies the change to convince his wife she is going mad.

But Adam was forever telling Eve she was mad in The Garden of Eden.

Jane Austen was master and mistress of class. How her characters were belittled and led to believe they were at fault because they lacked power and social cachet. In Pride and Prejudice, Mr Collins tells Elizabeth she is being flirtatious by saying no, she means yes to his proposal of marriage. How could it not be so? Because she is little more than a genteel pauper. Her rejection is playful modesty.

In many ways the archetype of the sensationalist novel was the more recognisable goodies and baddies of  Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) which involved fake deaths, switches in identity and the placing of a lookalike in an asylum and the inheritance of a fortune from his insane wife for an evil villain.

 Lemaitre’s more visceral version as the bodies piled up in Blood Wedding is flipped and tied in with an overview—which is essentially book two—in which Sophie’s stalker, Frantz is revealed, while he stays hidden.

The reader knows what Sophie cannot. And Lemaitre’s endings usually follow a convention of being unconventional. It’s not about winning or losing, but coming to an understanding of where we stand in the world and why. Read on.