With this first novel, Brigitte Adès offers us a “literature of instant history”. Convinced that fiction says more about reality than long treatises, she staged in this book the tormented friendship between Farhad and Reza, two exiles Iranians who confront each other on the question of faith. They embody, in their own way, the debate on Islam of the enlightenment and the fundamentalist that has been agitating the Arab Muslim world for 40 years. Searching in the past about his family, he finds out about the struggle led by one of his ancestors in the 11th century against the sect of the Assassins, the first terrorist association recruiting by mass murder and blind obedience. The originality of Brigitte Adès is not to proceed by concepts but by situations. Her hero is not an idea whose internal dialogue we follow, but a being of flesh and blood that rejoices, suffers, hopes, loves.
This book is also worthy of the descriptions of Tehran, Isfahan, of the Iranian countryside, and the delicacy of the great families carrying highly refined customs. Brigitte Adès constantly opposes the richness of the Persian civilization to the primitivism of the mullahs. material, poetic that has the concision of a miniature: the multicolored birds, the heady flowers, the insects that participate in the beauty of the world. One learns that the word paradise comes from the ancient Persian "paraidaeza" which means garden. The author discreetly evokes the horror of the 1979 revolution, mass executions, the imposition of a state religion, celebrated in its days by French intellectuals such as Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard.
The urgency of a return to his native land for Farhad allows him to better understand contemporary issues: the struggle is between three actors, the theocracy in power in Tehran, the undecided West but above all the ancient Persia, a magnificent culture. It is with the help of this triangle that Farhad will try to see clearly and to organize his intellectual resistance against obscurantism between London and Paris.
The novel becomes a thriller when Farhad, finding his childhood friend, the elegant Reza learns that he works for a charity funded by the Gulf emirates. Suspecting that it is a cover, he launches with prestigious friends and professors from Oxford, an underground investigation that reveals the extent of the Islamization of Great Britain, impregnated by Sunni and Shiite fanaticism. The narrative, panting, is to prevent a major attack organized to strike London in its heart, is doubled intellectual reflection on the two Corans, that tolerant of Mecca and the warlike and violent of Medina. As the foundation of Islamic benevolence is obviously a cover for terrorist groups. The friendship between Reza and Farhad is subjected to a severe test when it is accompanied by an intellectual opposition on the necessity or not to abandon its roots and to yield to an education The occult presence of the British agents of the MI5 complicates the situation and increases the suspicion of double game. Brigitte Adès knows how to give a major philosophical problem, the difficulty, even the impossibility, of contemporary Islam to reform- a fascinating romantic dimension. And if the hero Farhad finally chooses to settle in Paris, it is because this "holy city of secularism" (Saul Bellow) makes it easier to live together without slaughtering each others in the name of God.
Pascal Bruckner
Translated from french
In Le Magazine Littéraire, June 2017
par
Pascal Bruckner
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