2023-11-04 15:49:41
– “Road trip” on the trail of confiscated childhoods
Nicolas Verdan returns with the continuation of the adventures of agent Evangelos, now retired, in an abundant noir novel.
Published today at 4:49 p.m.
The writer and journalist Nicolas Verdan reunites with his agent Evangelos, who, now retired, returns to service to find his missing granddaughter.
YVES LERESCHE
In “The Greek Wall”, Nicolas Verdan launched a disillusioned Athenian policeman on the border between Greece and Turkey on the trail of a severed head, found in the middle of a prohibited military zone, where an anti-immigration shield was going to be built. He painted Greece in the crisis of 2010, and explored this dividing line in the north-east, a gray zone where migrants, Frontex agents and prostitutes crossed paths.
Published in 2015 by Bernard Campiche then reissued last year in the black collection of the French house L’Atalante, this first adventure by agent Evangelos was a great success, which earned him a fresh paperback release by J’ I read. At the same time, the policeman makes his return in large format in “The Harvest of Children”.
Still straddling his two countries of origin, the writer from Vaud by his father and Greek by his mother this time moves the cursor a little further west, with an intrigue that extends from Switzerland to Greece via the Balkans. Now retired for thirteen years, Evangelos must transport the car of his daughter, an expatriate in Switzerland, from Zurich to Athens.
So here he is behind the wheel of a Tesla, a pretext to highlight the contrast between the easy life in Switzerland and a Greece which continues to emerge from the crisis. Instead of running as quickly as possible, the ex-cop in search of adventure takes a detour by the heel of the boot, boarding an old ferry in Brindisi, to disembark in Vlora, in Albania.
This route that he invites us to repeat with him through evocative details, the Vaudois sometimes took to go to his second homeland. He saw these numerous families of Turkish and Albanian emigrants who are returning to the country at the end of the year, but also these people leaving for Daesh whom his main character encounters.
Barely arriving on the other side of the Adriatic, he is summoned back to Zurich, where Zoi, his 15-year-old granddaughter, has disappeared, but he is delayed in the Gramos mountains, on the border between Albania and Greece, trying to convince a mother not to drag her son into his quest for jihad. Which won’t stop him from following in Zoi’s footsteps, from a distance then closer and closer to the goal.
Always the first victims
Less dark at first glance than the first opus, “The Harvest of Children” is more of a road trip thriller than police investigation. But above all, once more and once more for Nicolas Verdan, who is also a journalist, it is regarding discussing societal problems that haunt our contemporary world. This time, it follows the common thread of children, echoing those torn away in the past from the Christian populations of the Balkans by the Ottoman Empire.
Greece has not escaped this practice called “pedomazoma” (literally, “the roundup of children”), and the term resurfaced to designate, during the civil war which followed the Second World War, the children sent to the Eastern bloc by their communist parents, resisting the power in place. But the word also points to the offspring taken from these same communists to be installed in Queen Frédérique’s orphanages.
The author compares these fates to that of people forcibly placed in Switzerland. “Children are the first victims in the event of war, but also the victims of people who supposedly want their good and in reality do their harm,” observes the author on the telephone.
Online Baits
And then there are these daughters and sons of the current era who find themselves caught in online bait, sometimes simple victims of a fashion, sometimes seduced by calls for jihad. Not to mention these children forced to follow radicalized parents. “In our globalized world, some people today live in a mental tribe before belonging to the place where they live. It is easy to create a family above ground, to spend hours on the networks, at the risk of being recruited into something that is beyond us,” explains the author.
Evangelos, whose journey connects all the ramifications of this abundant intrigue, also seeks answers: “My character is not Islamophobic, he reads the Koran because he would like to understand.” By following this figure who is reminiscent of the old Levantine sage, but who also advances with his ghosts – he notably served in Greece under the dictatorship of the colonels – the author constructs a plot full of nuances, without sordid details or haemoglobin. A humanist noir novel that is both gripping and complex, which summons the past to better encourage us to look at the future of today’s children.
Nicolas Verdan, “The harvest of children”, ed. Atalanta, 345 p.
Read alsoCaroline Rieder has been a journalist in the culture-society section since 2013. She deals in particular with French-speaking literature, but also looks with interest at children’s literature, and various cultural and societal subjects. More informations@caroline_rieder
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