‘Empire of the Wolves’ is Jean-Christophe Grangé’s fourth novel. In his first book, ‘Flight of the Storks,’ he took his readers on a breathless journey across Europe and Africa, following the flight path of storks, and the mutilated human bodies littered along the way. It was a novel that some compared to Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ and French director Georges Franju’s horror film, ‘Eyes Without a Face’ (Les Yeux Sans Visage).

In his second book, ‘Blood-red Rivers,’ later filmed as ‘The Crimson Rivers’ with Jean Reno and Vincent Cassel, Grangé gave us a story of murders at an elite French university town in the mountains, a tale where tombs were vandalised, and coffins found empty. Where school records were stolen, identities erased, and bizarrely mutilated bodies turned up one after another.

Grangé’s style is comparable with the likes of Arturo Perez-Reverte. In fact both men have backgrounds in journalism which goes a long way to explain their extremely well-researched and detailed books. Both are also willing to take risks and go beyond the dominant realist form of contemporary crime writing. The Devil features as a character in Perez-Reverte’s ‘The Dumas Club,’ a book that reverses monotheistic cosmology to portray God as a vicious right-wing tyrant and the Devil as one of the defeated angels who tried to rise up against him. But it’s all set within a murder plot that focuses on the more mundane concerns of authenticating rare books and manuscripts. Similarly, Grangé has shown a willingness to tread into the darker realms of the supernatural and horror, most notably in his third and less successful novel, ‘The Stone Council,’ a book that nevertheless has a terrific first half, even if the plot derails later on into the ridiculous.

‘Empire of the Wolves’ sees Grangé back on form, and up to his old tricks. As with his previous three books, he keeps the plot constantly on the boil. The pace is tremendous: this is a page turner of a book. It’s full of Grangé’s trademark research and erudition, delving into Turkish politics, asylum seekers and those who exploit them as cheap labour, the workings of the French police system and its different departments, while also venturing into the fields of plastic surgery, neurology and the possibility of implanting or erasing memories.

The characters of the book have histories that are often steeped in violence. The renegade policeman is a veteran of the Algerian War where he participated in torture. The neurologist works in a military hospital, and his experiments call to mind the kind of brain-washing research done by the CIA and others during the Cold War. But as with his previous novels, Grangé has no compunction about killing major characters off. In that respect he’s less predictable than most thriller and crime writers. In Grangé’s world, anyone can be bumped off, and if romance is found, it’s with someone who can’t be trusted or who is almost certainly going to wind up dead. This aspect of his writing does not fit the conventional mould, and an obvious example is the film ‘The Crimson Rivers’ whose ending is a little different from the novel, ‘Blood-red Rivers.’ ‘Empire of the Wolves’ too is destined for the big screen, and changes to the plot are more or less inevitable.

‘Empire of the Wolves’ does have its faults. There are times when things happen rather too conveniently. Also, characters fall into the crime novel cliché of reprising facts or events either in their own minds or to others. Since Peter Hoeg avoided this tendency in his intellectual thriller ‘Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow’ and Perez-Reverte also avoids it in the likes of ‘The Dumas Club’ it’s obviously not a necessary ingredient of successful thriller writing. But such quibbles aside, ‘Empire of the Wolves’ is a rollicking good read. Published in the original French in early 2003, it’s taken around twenty months to make it into English. For anyone who reads French, his new novel, ‘La Ligne noire,’ which has also been garnering much praise, is out now in France.

Kara Kellar Bell is a film and media graduate from the West of Scotland, with a passion for European novels, French films, silent cinema, and Brazilian music (everything from Daniela Mercury and other pop stars through to bossa nova). As a writer, she likes to have room to move around creatively, so she’s not located in one genre. She writes realism and also stories of a more fantastic nature, usually grounded to some extent in the real world. She also takes delight in writing across the sexual spectrum, and as a bisexual, considers it important to remind people that things are not always black and white, either/or, in sexuality or in gender. For a selection of Kara’s writing on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.