Pierre Lemaitre (2021 [2018]) All Human Wisdom translated from the French by Frank Wynne

Pierre Lemaitre writes block-busting novels with larger-than-life characters and elaborate plots that rise and fall in the right places. All Human Wisdom is a block-busting 417 pages. And he deals with big themes. Here it’s the interwar years of great poverty and great wealth in France and other European countries. Hitler is on the steps of the Reichstag. Bankers and industrialists know which way the wind is blowing.

Lemaitre’s novels start with a bang. And have unconventional heroes. In Three Days and a Life, for example, 12-year-old Antoine murders his younger neighbour. Sophie, in Blood Wedding, keeps forgetting and remembering, but she can’t deny she murdered the child she was child-minding for a middle-class Parisian couple. The Silence and the Rage is a family saga, like All Human Wisdom, but in which Jean, the eldest son of the Pelletier family, has the unfortunate habit of killing young women in bouts of rage.  

Lemaitre might have the reader empathising with misogynist serial killers and child killers. A real test for his novelist skill would have us sympathise with a draft-dodging, rapist, paedophile, crook that somehow blags his way into public office and with the help of richest people in the country gets involved in Ponzi schemes, the private looting of public assets, stages an insurrection and threatens to hang the Vice President, but denied it happened and called it fake news. Hey, that’s contemporary history, which is hard to Trump without starting a small war.

Madeleine Péricourt is not the kind of person a normal person could feel sorry for. By normal I mean, when the story opens in 1927 France, her father, Marcel has just died. The President de la Republique will be attending the funeral. Everyone who is anyone will be paying their respects.  Péricourt’s banking and property empire lives on. It falls mainly on Madeleine and her seven-year-old son, Paul’s ever-growing portfolios. It’s difficult to imagine the less than one-percent of humanity that are so rich poor has no real meaning for them. Not even relatively, because they have no relatives or friends that are poor. Poor doesn’t exist in such world or exists only in caricatures.

Lemaitre deals with that swiftly as the devil deals with Job. In the first few pages, Paul falls from a first-floor window onto the black canopy of his grandfather’s casket. He does not die. But is crippled and in a wheelchair. Nobody much can understand what he says.

Madeleine never had to think about money. It was left to others. Gustave Joubert was a valued banking employee. After Madeleine’s divorce, her father hinted that the older and respectable Joubert might be a candidate for a more respectable marriage. He knew about money and cars and little about women.

A guiding hand of the Dickensian Uriah Heep variety (or the Balzac equivalent).

Voila!

Madeleine’s fortune is gone. Her son is not the hopeless cripple he first appears. They seek revenge on those that have wronged them with a large cast of memorable characters the world can once more be turned upside down. Read on.