Claude Ollier’s “Law and Order” (1961)

I wrote a review recently of Ollier’s best-known (in English, which isn’t saying much) work, The Mise-en-Scene. As one of the less-publicised nouveau-roman authors, only four of his books have been translated into English. The first of these – Law and Order (translated by Ursule Molinaro) – was published in 1971 by Red Dust in New York, and doesn’t seem to have been reprinted since.

First of all, that title. Law and Order suggests a police procedural, a crime novel, a daytime TV drama. It isn’t any of these, though unspecified violent crimes have taken place and corrupt police are responsible. The original title is Le Maintien de l’Ordre, the literal translation of which is “maintaining the order” or “the maintenance of order”. Either would have been a more appropriate – if perhaps less eye-catching – title. Because this is a story in which a narrator, trapped by circumstance and under surveillance, evidently in fear of his life, attempts – constantly – to impose a form of control upon his situation. He does this by means of the detailed description of the view from his seventh-floor apartment, in a (possibly) North African town. Everything the eye can see is documented, and, unlike The Mise-en-Scene, the narrative voice conjectures about what can’t be directly seen. That at times it does this by trying to account for the length of time certain actions may have taken, to fit hypotheses, immediately draws parallels with The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet, where a travelling watch salesman who has (probably) murdered a young girl, endlessly tries to stretch real and fictitious events to cover the time of the incident in order to provide himself with an alibi.

The dustjacket of Law and Order, obviously trying to hook readers of Robbe-Grillet, describes Ollier as “a friend and contemporary” which, given that his book is so similar in many respects to Robbe-Grillet’s masterpiece Jealousy, is slightly unfortunate, and risks painting Ollier as an epigone of the more rigorous, more experimental Robbe-Grillet. (There is another nod, within the story, to Robbe-Grillet in the naming of an establishment “Cafe des Allies”, the same as that in The Erasers.)

Jealousy uses a narrative technique which has since been dubbed “je-neant” (absent I). The story is told by a narrator so passive he effaces himself completely from the action, to the extent that the reader has to make inferences from the text in order to realise his existence. Law and Order almost – but not quite – does the same. Most chapters are bookended by third-person reports (“Without a moment’s hesitation I turned around”), which undermines the effect somewhat.

As in The Mise-en-Scene, the description of a map is given particular emphasis. In the earlier work, the gaps and empty spaces of an under-surveyed terrain create a highly ambiguous, and ultimately useless document, illustrating that work’s exploration of the impossibility of knowing anything for certain. Here the reader is treated to a stunning inversion of cartography, with a wonderful description of the town plan not as a network of streets surrounding built-up areas, but as a built-up area worked upon by lanes and alleys, much as a massif is eroded by streams, gulleys and rivers. This is done as part of the narrator’s epiphany, exactly midway through the text; a moment when he at last is able to impose order on the initially random features that make up the view of the town from above.

The narrator is watched by two corrupt ex-cops, Perez and Marietti. He describes their stakeout, their banal activities – reading the paper, polishing their car – as they hang around outside his apartment block. Similarly to Jealousy, where the jealous narrator husband can no longer meet his wife’s gaze, here, any time one of his observers raises their head toward his floor, the narrator’s view immediately switches focus as he retreats from their sight: “slowly he lifts his head toward the top floors…Below, the old section of the city looks shrunken”.

Of their surveillance we are certain (unlike much that takes place – or maybe doesn’t – in The Mise-en-Scene), but of the chronology of events we are not. A series of violent events has rocked the town – shootings, a bomb, fraud and corruption – but it is never entirely clear if the stakeout precedes the narrator’s discovery of Perez and Marietti’s activities, or follows it. Events that happen may only be being remembered (as with Robbe-Grillet, events in memory take as much precedence – they are as objectively real – as those happening “now”), giving the story a vaguely circular shape. Time is fluid, or ambiguous: “Six o’clock…Always, everywhere. Every day… Yesterday. Today…”. As a result there is no climax to the story; or rather, almost any chapter may be the climax.

Although it doesn’t reach the heights of Robbe-Grillet’s best work, Law and Order is, like The Mise-en-Scene, in many ways more accessible and worth tracking down.