Book Review: "The Mahé Circle" by Georges Simenon

The Mahé Circle is one of the lesser great books by Georges Simenon but still contains slight brilliances that we would commonly associate with him and his works. Long strings of brilliance and vibrance followed by depressing and haunting images, characters with strange pasts and major pieces of dialogue. When it comes to characterisation, Simenon is one of the greats with having the ability to start a story in the middle of a narrative whilst also giving us a whole backstory to a character that is revealed through snippets, bits and pieces and the way in which we are taught about other characters, both relative and irrelevant. It is like learning about secrets we are not supposed to know. However, this book lacks the philosophical depth that I have seen in other Simenon books such as “The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By” and “The Blue Room”. But let us have a look at some of the book’s quotations that I thought were some of the strongest in the whole narrative:

“The weirdest thing was that what had been holding him back was some kind of shyness. He felt awkward, out of place. For a couple of days he had gone round wearing blue trousers, bought at the mayor-grocer’s rope-soled espadrilles and a white shirt with its sleeves rolled up. That was what the locals wore, and quite a few of the holidaymakers who were working hard at playing boules. He had felt, when he was dressed like that, his wife was sneaking glances at him. Sometimes, from a distance, she didn’t recognise him. Was he too fat? There were plenty as fat as him or more so, among the fishermen. His skin was too white certainly. He got sunburnt. His skin turned brick-red and peeled and he pulled off long, transparent strips of it. He had stopped wearing the blue trousers all of a sudden. Sometimes he wore a collar and tie, as he had always been accustomed to…”

A quotation from page fifty-three of the Penguin Modern Classics’ Edition shows us a character in profile. Something incredibly philosophical in recognition and character is going on here. Not only is the character uncomfortable in what they are wearing but then there is the stillness of not being recognised by his own wife. There is that uncomfortable and slightly unsettling stare that he is given by his wife. Let us have a look at another quotation of set and style which also allows us into the psyche of the story:

“The houses were grey, the roofs of black slate, it was impossible to imagine that in another place there were houses painted in pastel shades, pink or light blue, or pale green like women’s dresses. Here in Saint-Hilaire, people would find shocking the idea that men might walk about barefoot in espadrilles, their shirts open-necked to show their sun-burnt chests, while the women, mothers even, paraded in shorts, with their children, heading for Silver Beach where they would spend their day stretched out on the sand…His heart beat fasters as the house came into view, he looked up at all the windows, which were open, but it was the one in the garden that he caught sight of the familiar silhouette, under a large, black straw hat…”

There is definitely something tense and exaggerated here in the way of which the book is describing these houses as looking all exactly the same. If that were actually the case then he would not have known which was his at all. However, we can also be made aware of the fact that there is a sequence of events and thoughts that are relative to the theme of familiarity. People in this book like to be comfortable and see things they have seen before, so to make the circumstances extraordinary and use a character to upset the logic of the comfort - then this would intentionally turn the entire book upside-down. This is a feature of many Georges Simenon novels, but only this one does it in this fashion - through the way in which someone is dressed. It keeps coming back to that, and if you see the way in which it is described throughout the book, each time the situation seems a little bit more unsettling.