Philippe Djian: “A Hot Year”: A novel with political aspirations

This year was the hottest on record. Nevertheless, the participants at the World Climate Conference in Dubai were ultimately unable to agree on the absolutely necessary 1.5 degree limit. In this context, Philippe Djian’s new novel “A Hot Year” seems frighteningly prophetic. The author of the cult novel “Betty Blue – 37.2 degrees in the morning,” which was made into a film by Jean-Jacques Beineix, sets his novel in the year 2030. This is also the name of his work, which was published in France in 2020, in the original French.

In the near future he designed, the 1.5 degree climate target has long since been broken: “Chardonnay is grown just a stone’s throw from the Arctic Circle,” the wealthy go on “nudist vacations in Iceland,” while “the general public flees into the virtual world.”

Djian, who has always propagated that form is everything and content is negligible, has now published a book with a political claim for the first time after more than 30 novels. The reason was the hatred of French intellectuals for Greta Thunberg, whom the author admires and even features in his novel.

The girl who used to wear pigtails in “A Hot Year” is now 30 and still active in the environmental movement. But they and their comrades-in-arms have failed, “the other, more powerful, more cunning, money-minded people” have made the world a very inhospitable place: periods of extreme heat are followed by periods of torrential rain, the storms are becoming increasingly violent, entire forests have burned down and floods on the agenda.

But Djian wouldn’t be Djian if he didn’t incorporate a dysfunctional family and a complicated love affair into this scenario. His protagonist Greg lost his wife and son in a traffic accident in which he was not entirely innocent. His sister Sylvia and his brother-in-law Anton supported him as best they could after this stroke of fate. Anton is now even close friends with Greg, although, unlike his brother-in-law, who is still mentally unstable, he is unscrupulously only interested in his own benefit. Greg works at Anton’s company, which produces a highly toxic pesticide. Occasionally he has to falsify laboratory results for Anton, which is “the price for his apartment, his Porsche, his well-upholstered everyday comfort,” and he knows it too.

But his conscience timidly begins to make itself known when he meets the publisher and bookseller Véra through his 14-year-old niece Lucie, who is involved in the climate movement. Véra, in her mid-40s and divorced, has been an environmentalist for a long time and publishes books on ecology. Greg falls head over heels for her. But Véra is afraid of committing again and convinces Greg to curb their desire for each other, “since sex only attracts with false promises.” They decide to just be friends instead, which doesn’t necessarily make things any easier.

When a man dies as a result of the pesticide Montrazol sold by Anton’s company, the authorities investigate, and Greg’s life, which he has been trying to keep together, begins to fall apart. One thinks that the scenario of our future, sketched out in a few apt sentences, in which “things did not go well have”, can be felt on the skin after just a few pages. The sky is “uncanny depth” and “the moon can barely be seen through the smog.” Just as skillfully, Djian draws you into the inner lives of his complex characters. As always with this author, these are people who have been shaken by life and whose situation is getting dramatically worse.

The omniscient narrator virtuously changes the inside view of his entangled ensemble of characters without having to specify who is speaking, because Djian’s storytelling is so masterful that it becomes clear by itself. He also doesn’t divide the story into individual chapters, but instead lets it hurtle towards the abyss like a derailed express train.

There are increasingly violent confrontations between environmental activists and climate skeptics. Things come to a head in Sylvia’s blended family, which has a dark family secret, and Greg becomes completely unhinged because he feels betrayed by Véra.

Disillusioned, Djian talks about people who are just as broken as their planet. “Basically, we’re all monsters,” Véra once states when she becomes weak and asks Greg to take the Porsche for a quick spin.

Philippe Djian: A hot year. A.d. Francis v. Norma Cassau. Diogenes, 240 p., born €24