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JL Rosewarne
posted 9 March 2007

This is a tale of dictators, doubles, doppelgangers, deception, delusion and a good deal of fun. Pennac's dictator, a man with the two commonest surnames in his country, has two desires at once: the desire for power and the desire to be elsewhere. It is in order to achieve both that he appoints a double to stay in his place whilst he tours Europe indulging himself and avoiding the fate revealed by a soothsayer, that he will be torn to pieces in front of his own palace. 'All that is needed is for the people to believe in the resemblance.'

The semi-fictional Brazilian state, whose capital is Teresina, is ruled by the front-man double who deceives everyone around him whilst Pereira pulls the strings from the playgrounds of Europe. The double is left with speeches for every occasion, arranged by date, and stern warnings against any notions of really taking Pereira's place. He will perish as surely as if he had taken a cyanide pill. In time, the substitute Pereira tires of his role and, believing himself destined for greater things, having shown himself an actor of brilliance in his role as president, replaces himself with another double. Departing to realise his dreams, he leaves the same dire warnings that all must continue as before. The passage of time sees a succession of doubles, and by the time the real dictator returns (incognito of course) the double in his place is not a double at all. He sees a dwarfish caricature who resembles him not at all but who is accepted as the genuine article even by those closest to him, including his parents.

Deprived of their real selves, the assorted doubles' fantasies are comprehensively smashed. In the eyes of the people a double of a double is as good as the real president and in one of Pennac's paradoxes of politics, it turns out that nobody has really been fooled at all. Indeed Pereira was manipulated into replacing himself in the first place.

The adventures of the president and his seeming clones are only part, perhaps the lesser part, of a rich tapestry. It is made pretty clear that the essentials of this dimension of the book have been mapped out by page 38: 'That's it. That's the story that should have been told', but there is so much more to come.

Pennac weaves in and out of the events in and around Teresina with effortless and startling rapidity, so much so that at times it is not clear which tale is being told. It is a setting of which the author has direct experience, and he populates the landscape with characters drawn from his friends and real life encounters, grafting them affectionately on to his story, acknowledging that each one is worth a novel in itself. He takes us to the Brazil of his memories with all its apparent absurdities such as the woman sheltering in his house from non-existent rain - perhaps it is raining elsewhere?

Pennac indulges in his obvious enthusiasm and affection for the work of Charlie Chaplin. Perhaps the significance of Chaplin, whom Pennac clearly loves and admires, lies in the ordinariness of his characters. The simple Tramp is possibly the most easily recognised character in the world. Chaplin's tramp, the last glimpse of whom is seen in The Great Dictator, is a simple, human and unpretentious character. The archetypal little man struggling to get by in a hostile world. Pennac includes in the novel a thoroughly impressive critique of that film, in which, of course, the Chaplin-barber-tramp character really does replace the dictator who is his double and, unlike Pereira's replacements, tries to make a difference and tell it how it is. The point that Chaplin was pilloried for trying to tell the truth as he saw it is well made in the context of a book in which, everywhere, there is delusion and self deception. Perhaps Chaplin is the only real character in the book?

Always in the background there is 'the interior'. This is the real world surrounding Teresina, which exists beyond the coastal strip of Brazil, where, 'they turn their backs on the land, gazing out to the empty sea'. Perhaps with more than a nod at Conrad, Pennac observes that the building of Brasilia was driven by the necessity of, 'a capital in the middle of nowhere to ward off the demons of the interior'. This includes a vast open-air opera venue devoid of people and inhabited by wild dogs. Brasilia, he tells us, boasted six psychoanalysts before it had even been built. It is also from the interior that Pennac describes an encounter with a European traveller who later writes up his experiences, including a detailed conversation which Pennac knows he slept through and describing a setting which bore no resemblance to the reality.

So is it a picture of a deluded and deluding world that Pennac paints, where politicians deceive us, where 'communications people' would have 'Every one of us as endless mirror images of each other', and where we deceive ourselves? Drunks have the advantage over ideologues because, periodically, the drunk sobers up. There is more than a hint of ambiguity from Pennac on this one. After all, 'The people pretend to believe what we want them to believe, to the point where they sometimes talk themselves into believing that they believe it'.

Pennac is 'compelled' to give the story a proper 'focused' ending. Writing under fictional duress, Pennac breaks the cycle of dictatorship and deception with the people poised, possibly to come in to their own. However, he makes it clear that this is not really the end of the story. After all, the purpose of 'an ending' is only to bring the writer back down to Earth. So, after the demise of the dictators and the end of the deception which (maybe) the people never believed anyway, what next? Is this tale ending with a reassuring triumph of the real people, genuine and cast in the mould of Chaplin's Everyman? One is tempted to ask if Teresina really will be a land 'safe for democracy', once the new rulers have indulged themselves 'one last time' in the way all addicts do. I suspect that if the author knows he isn't telling. Anyway, not yet.

In any case, the book is compulsive and pleasantly challenging. Pennac's writing, translated from the French by Patricia Clancy, is intelligent, clever and witty. It is undeniably funny, if darkly so at times. There are times when trying to establish where Pennac is going feels like an attempt to follow a physicist explaining current theories about the nature of time. Perhaps that is part of the book's attraction? Above all, perhaps, this is a story about stories. What is the difference between fact and fiction and in the end, does it really matter? The joy of spinning the tale for its own sake comes through very strongly. In conclusion, read and then re-read this book.