Mouchette

'Mouchette' (literally 'little fly') is the story of a fourteen-year old girl living in impoverished circumstances in rural France. Her father is an alcoholic, everyone drinks gin, she is mistreated and taunted by the school mistress - in short, she is an outsider, both tragic and wild. It is a book you can read in an afternoon. The prose is haunting and illuminated with a sympathetic, gentle wisdom. Georges Bernanos was a Catholic writer. He survived the ravages of the First World War to become highly critical of the post-war middle class society. He embraced both the extreme right and left throughout his life. The book feels as if it was wrapped up in rain and twilight. I'm not sure how else to put it. One must read the scene with the poacher during a rain storm. It is poignant, lovely, earthy in its clarity but also disconcerting. Mouchette is drawn to the poacher, drawn to his pain and his brief show of kindness as well as his wild behavior. The man is an epileptic. He suffers from an inner torment, he imagines he has done the worst. There is an element of mirroring here as the two are both outsiders in a society of sadness, where, as Fanny Howe writes in the introduction 'the town drinks gin.' I am reminded of Victor Hugo and Emile Zola - the compassion inherit in Bernanos's writing is immense. The narrator's presence is so strong and loving in that he views young Mouchette not with disdain but with benediction. If it had been written differently, I doubt it would be memorable. A beautiful, touching book, especially when you consider how we live in a world of abject poverty, there are most likely many Mouchettes out there like this, searching for hope and a way of life.

Many years ago it was required of English Liturature students to study "the stream of consciousness" method in writing, and Virginia Woolfe's To the Lighthouse was the set text. Perhaps that method of writing has now slid into the far recesses of memory and popularity which might help those reading Georges Bernanos to remember. It seems to me that unless one gets back into this mode Mouchette - and Monsieur Ouine Monsieur Ouine - will puzzle many readers. We are asked to live in Mouchette's mind as it looks out on a short sequence of time. It is easy to get lost, no less than Mouchette is lost and confused. And it is hard anyway as there seems to be "hole" in the sequence between the events of that night and when Mouchette sets off for the village in the morning. Again, the last paragraph of the book seems to betray the promise of the book; it seems to leave too much to the imagination of the reader and too little to the consciousness of Mouchette: flat like the pond into which she sinks. Never-the-less, a beautiful story well, and chillingly, told.