Pharricide by Vincent De Swarte

French fiction

Original title – Pharricide

Translator – Nicholas Royle

Source- Personal copy

I was recently in Scotland for my aunt’s funeral, and we had a couple of hours free over the time we were there and we visited St Andrews, where I called in  Toppings, but it also has a couple of good charity shops that sell books as well this is where I found this book. Vincent De Swarte was a writer for children and Adults. He won a prize for this book, and in one of his other books, his life was cut short due to Cancer he died in his mid-forties. This is the first book by him to be translated into English. The book follows the six months a man spends on a lighthouse in what he thinks is initially solitude isn’t for long as his mind and the world encroach on the time he is spending there.

3 October

My mother called me Geoffroy, like my elder brother, stillborn a year before me. (My father entered a monastery a month before I was born and has not been heard from since.) I’ve always been frightened of my Christian name, the very sound of it, and have never liked to hear it combined with my surname, Lefayen.

At school, people called me His Lordship, despite the fact my mother kept chickens on the wasteland surrounding our dilapidated 1960s house on the outskirts of Saint-Brieuc. Later, when I was working, I became known as the Egyptian (a reference to my being disinclined to conversation, a trait not particularly unusual, however, among deep-sea fishermen).With hindsight, the nickname was appropriate. Itwas an omen

Even early on there is a sense of something Dark about Geoffroy

The story is formed from the diary of the man who has decided to take six months in the oldest Lighthouse in France, The Coudouan at the mouth of the Gironde estuary is going be Geoffroy Lefayen home for the next six months. We are introduced to this man. He seems a loveable oddball, a significant oaf of a man that had been bullied as a young man and like many people that are bullied, he has a hobby that, in a way, is suited to being alone he is a taxidermist. We look back on his early years but then, like in the Studio Ghibli film, we have darkness lurking in the corner of the world he recalls. But this tale of a lighthouse keeper shows that, it shines light around, but often they are dark inside, and as time goes by, we see a man starting to go mad. So what happens when he has already stated he has brought his knives out of retirement as they saved him, and an Engineer is sent to fix something? What will Geoffroy do to him? Then when a woman turns up at the door, a stunning red-haired woman called Lise, a fan of his taxidermist art, it all goes downhill and the dark of the inside of the lighthouse and the madness of being alone and the repressed nature of this man that we initially see as a sort of clumsy large dog isn’t what we thought he was !!

28 November
I had a nice surprise when welcoming the engineer this morning. It’s not the bloke I spoke to on the radio, but a woman. A beautiful woman of about forty, red-head, like Steeven but more so.
For the twenty-five metres that separated the launch from the beach, one of the men carried her in his arms.
On the beach, she removed her heels and put on a pair of boots. She looked at her watch and the launch moved away.
Once at the lighthouse she took off her boots and put her heels back on. She has lovely legs and fine ankles, almost too fine. I noticed a little plaster above the heel, under her tights.

Lise appears just after the engineer does

This book sends shivers down you as you read it, the world you are flung into as we see Geoffroy’s world. But a man with a dark shadow, a man that has cut up animals and carefully removed the hides that take time, and a man that has been bullied and has a lot of darkness locked up in him. I thought of the recent film The Lighthouse, which showed the film’s case of two men descending a dark hole that was alone even when. There are two of you for an extended period of time madness is there and paranoia.  This book captures what happens when a man with Pandora’s box at his heart is left alone long enough for that box to open. We see the macabre outcome of that happening when he finally meets people again, from murder to a bizarre marriage, as he said Cordouan saved my knives from retirement. This is a gem of a book I’m so pleased I found.

Winstons score – A  One man descends into a dark place and madness takes over