In just over twenty years, Tanguy Viel has created a fine oeuvre that ships the reader into the heart of darkness with each new novel (yes, a skipper is also a lot). It’s just not in some distant, exotic jungle, as Joseph Conrad or Francis Ford Coppola suspected, but in rather fresh Brittany. A multi-faceted region, which, in addition to picturesque elements, Much – trained on Claude Chabrol’s cinema – gains above all from a layered social world: traditional codes, late-feudal, upper-class behavior. His latest novel, The Girl Who Calls, demonstrates this through an earlier title the author had considered: Ancien Régime. One also senses Saint-Malo as a setting behind the fortified city by the sea. Despite the provincial framework, Viel’s novel ties in with MeToo current affairs – of course it turns the black-and-white tendency of the debate into a subtle examination of gray areas.
The title of the novel is the translation of the English technical term “call girl”. That’s how 20-year-old Laura Le Corre describes herself ironically when she appears at the police station and files a complaint against the town’s most well-known son: Quentin Le Bars, previously mayor and now Minister for Maritime Affairs. A good part of the novel is told in retrospect of the police interrogation, an approach that the reader is familiar with from Viel’s predecessor, “Vigilante Justice”; however, the path of a murderer to his crime was traced there in an interrogation.