SEEKING WHOM HE MAY DEVOUR, Fred Vargas

A young woman, a black boy-child, and an old man travelling through the southern French Alps in pursuit of a lycanthrope, a werewolf - almost the makings of a medieval tale, if it were not set so firmly in modern times by technology like the mobile phone. As just as they are about to give up, the puzzle solver, in the person of Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, comes to their rescue.

The annual migration of wolves from the Italian into the French Alpine wildlife reserve is on, but something is amiss. Pockets of sheep outside the reserve are being killed, seemingly by a rogue wolf, but then the rumour starts that the culprit is not a wolf at all, but a man called Massart. Massart, a butcher by trade, has gone missing, and the locals who have always mistrusted him, are more than willing to believe a suggestion that he has become a werewolf. It is Suzanne Rosselin who comes up with this theory, because Massart is smooth skinned, but then she too is found dead, killed in the same way as the sheep. And that's how the pursuit starts.

Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg in Paris, himself the object of pursuit by a crazed young woman whose lover he shot, makes only cameo appearances in the first half of this novel. But he is aware of the wolf problem, and he recognises a face from his past in some of the television news footage.

In an earlier post I pointed out the wonderful descriptions of Adamsberg's method of thinking, and indeed the book itself uses a similar methodology. The reader is presented with an array of material from which to select bits to remember, that may or may not be relevant.

The translation of SEEKING WHOM HE MAY DEVOUR appears to be beautifully done. The main characters are fascinating: apart from Adamsberg himself there is the old shepherd Watchee who rings a friend everyday so that he can talk to the lead ewe in his flock, George Gershwin; there's Soliman constantly spouting word definitions, and telling African folk tales that he is making up as he goes; and Camille, the truck-driver, carrying around with her an A-Z catalogue of tools to dip into for comfort reading.

SEEKING WHOM HE MAY DEVOUR is the second in Fred Vargas' Chief Inspector Adamsberg series. It was originally published in French in 1999, translated into English in 2004. The book was a finalist for a Dagger Award in 2005. Vargas went on to win the Duncan Lawrie International Dagger twice with THE THREE EVANGELISTS (2006) and WASH THIS BLOOD CLEAN FROM MY HAND (2007).

Make time to find this book. You won't regret it.
My rating: 4.9

How Adamsberg thinks

I am in the process of reading SEEKING WHOM HE MAY DEVOUR by Fred Vargas.

I'm fascinated by the descriptions of the thought processes of Vargas' protagonist Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg.

Commissaire Adamsberg liked solitude, he liked to let his mind wander far out to sea, but he also liked people and the movement of people, and he fed on their presence around him like a flea... Adamsberg spent many an hour dreaming away, peacefully waiting for ideas to rise to the surface of his mind.
For that is how Adamsberg found his ideas - simply by waiting for them to turn up. When one rose before his eyes like a dead fish on the crest of a wave, he picked it up, turned it over, asked himself whether he needed this item at the moment, whether it was of any interest. Adamsberg never thought actively, he found it quite sufficient to day-dream and then to sort his catch, like a fisherman scrabbling about clumsily in the bottom of the net and finally picking the prawn out of the mess of sand, seaweed, pebbles and shells. Adamsberg's thoughts contained plenty of seaweed and sand, and he didn't always know how to avoid getting caught in the mess. He needed to jettison a lot of it, evacuate great heaps. He was aware that his own mind produced a mixed bag of mental items of uneven size and value, and that things did not necessarily happen the same way for other people. He had noticed the difference between his thinking and the mental products of Danglard, his number two, was identical to the difference between a netful from the river-bed and a fishmonger's neatly laid-out slab. He couldn't help it. Anyway, he always ended up fishing something useful out of his glory-hole, as long as people gave him enough time. That's how Adamsberg used his brain, like an ocean that you could trust entirely to feed you well, but which you've long ago given up trying to tame.

And then ten or so pages further on, we see it from Danglard's point of view:
Danglard had never grasped the peculiar logic that lay behind Adamsberg's decisions. In his view, of course, it was no logic at all, just an unending kaleidoscope of hunches and surmises which inexplicably gave rise to undeniably first-rate results. That said, Danglard's nerves could not stand the strain of keeping in step with Adamsberg's thought processes. For not only were the commissaire's thoughts of indeterminate substance, hovering between the solid, liquid and gaseous states, but they were forever aggluntinating with other thoughts without the slightest rational link. So while Danglard with his well-honed mind sorted the sheep from the goats, put things in little boxes, found the missing links, and thereby solved problems with method, Adamsberg put one thing with another, or turned them upside down, or scattered what had been brought together and threw it up in the air to see where it would fall. And despite his amazingly slow pace, he would, in the end, extract truth from that chaos. ... he remained torn between finding Adamsberg's mind admirable, and finding it exasperating.

This is just wonderful writing and I look forward to learning more about Adamsberg's methods.
This is the first Fred Vargas novel I have tackled, and I can see already that I have a great treat in store.